In The Shadow Of The Moon

I bought this purely on spec as it was a Ron Howard documentary about the Apollo project.

It's really good.

It contains interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts as well as re-mastered footage from the moon landings.

I'm a bit of a moon buff. I really enjoyed the From The Earth To The Moon series that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks produced, and this film was again full of trivia and little stories about the astronauts. For example, I knew that the navigation computer on the LEM effectively crashed twice on the decent. What I didn't know was that it was Buzz Aldrin's fault. Buzz is of course a nickname, but he has another nickname; "Doctor Rendezvous", because of his work on orbital rendezvous. Because he was concerned that the landing would be aborted, he left the rendezvous radar on so he could find the command module quickly. This radar continued feeding data to the computer, while it was simultaneously receiving data from the landing radar. The computer couldn't cope with this and spat out error message 12 02 (buffer over-run).

Also in the film are the usual shots of the spacecraft that we are familiar with, but the re-mastering really brings them to life and a lot of footage will be new to most folk.

Score: 7/10 Good documentary, and quite funny in places.

OQ: Neil had been two seconds from death that morning but afterwards he'd got up and just gone back to his office to do paperwork.

Leatherheads

I'm not certain why this film is getting the pasting it is, because it certainly doesn't deserve it.

It's a, by all accounts, fairly accurate if somewhat embellished story of how football (or American football to us limeys) became the nation's favourite sport. It starts in 1925 and immediately highlights the difference between college football with their young stars and thousands of spectators and "professional" football where the players travel the country, trying to make enough money to buy food, board and train fair to their next game.

Dodge Connolly (George Clooney) has a plan to get the game into the big time, by borrowing an up and coming war hero turned college football star Carter Rutherford, who has his face advertising everything from shaving razors to gasoline. However Rutherford is hiding a secret and reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellwegger) is out to bust him.

Where the film does drag is the whole war hero part, which seems to be included only to alternate between it and the football story. I think it works though, because the only other reasonable story that could be focussed on is the romance between Dodge and Lexie, which I think would have been distracting rather than diverting.

Is this film trying to be "Welcome to Colinwood"? Well, I don't know, I've never seen it. But it's very well shot, the sets are very impressive and the story's quite good. The problem seems to be that it's a historical film about a sport that few in the UK care about. As such, its main hook for the audience doesn't work well. Take a look at the UK trailer. There's not one mention of football at all, and it appears to be marketed as a romantic comedy, which it certainly isn't. It is funny, and it does have romance, but it's mainly about a handful of players and the birth of a national game.

Oh, and in case you were wondering where the film's name comes from, it's because in the 1920s all players wore leather helmets during the game.

Score: C
It's not a great film by any standards, but I found it enjoyable and worth a look. This commentary may be marred by the fact that because of my Cineworld pass, I didn't pay £6 to see it.

OQ: There has to be a better way to advertise starch...

Bender's Big Score

It's a worrying time when the first sign of senile dementia sets in. Especially if this occurs before your thirtieth birthday.

I of course, being a big Futurama fan, ordered the direct to DVD feature length episode "Bender's Big Score" as soon as it became available, as well as preordering Stargate's "The Ark of Truth". Arriving home last night I found two packages from Play.com. My initial excitement that perhaps the Stargate release date had slipped forward was dismissed when it turned out that at some point in the past I had preordered Bender's Big Score, and promptly forgotten about it. Or perhaps one of these is a temporal copy of the other one?

Thus, I am now the proud owner of two copies of this DVD.

I've always preferred Futurama to The Simpsons.I've just found the humour better, more surreal and quite often very cerebral. I could make a joke that this is why Americans didn't like it, but the main reason it was cancelled was because studio executives fully understand what the show was about.

There's a great opening where Professor Farnsworth is explaining that the idiots who cancelled them were in fact themselves fired for incompetence. The Box Network visual gag is very good. Then Leela asks "What does this mean for us and our many fans?" while standing in front of a rack full of desk fans. As soon as I saw that, I knew they were back on form.

The pace is maintained throughout, not even slowing down for the musical number. There were a couple of unnecessary cameos but on the whole, it was well written and very funny.

Score: A

OQ: Well....we're boned.