Fly Me to the Moon is exactly the kind of glossy high-concept hokum Hollywood used to excel at. Scarlett Johansson plays Kelly Jones, a wily Madison Avenue advertising executive recruited by Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a honcho from Nixon’s White House, to help to sell America’s moon mission. Funding from Congress is faltering as Vietnam dominates the evening news. Who cares about the moon when the nation’s young men are mired in the mud outside Saigon?
In the earlier part of her career, Johansson gave the impression of being something of a one-woman throwback to the era of va-va-voom and Vargas girls, but there’s a fast-talking craftiness to her role as the cynical, hard-bitten advertising hack that puts you more in mind of Rosalind Russell or Barbara Stanwyck; you can see the cogs whirring away in her brain as she formulates her next scam. If a single performance could power an entire movie, Fly Me To the Moon would be home and dry. Her cynicism gives the movie its buzz. Wily and mendacious, a little like Johansson’s cub reporter in Woody Allen’s Scoop, Kelly walks into a Nasa hangar with a little swivel of her hips, spies some vast tubular rockets and purrs, “This I can sell.”
The only problem is Nasa’s launch manager, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), who is gaga for the new recruit until he finds out what she is planning to do. This includes recruiting actors to play scientists for the TV cameras and making lucrative sponsorship deals with Omega watches and Rice Krispies. “I’m not turning this ship into a flying billboard,” he fumes. Kelly is even planning — horror of horrors — to put a camera onboard the lunar module so that millions of people round the world can watch the moon landing live on TV. I mean, who has ever heard of such a thing? A live telecast of the moon landing?
There are two ways you could play this tale. The first is to stick to the facts, which in this case are interesting enough. As part of a civilian, rather than military, agency, Nasa’s savvy PR team really did recruit PR professionals to organise ties-ins with watches and Stouffer’s frozen dinners, commemorative stamps and replica sculptures to help to massage the mission into a televisable narrative in half a billion homes — a viral news event before the term “viral” existed.
Or you could do as the screenwriter Rose Gilroy has done: embellish like crazy, polish to a high gleam and gussy the whole thing up as a rom-com as light and insubstantial as candyfloss. There’s nothing wrong with that — Hollywood’s fidelity to history has always been roughly approximate to the relationship of a magician to the balloon he bends — and it stands to reason that a movie about a woman who tells whoppers would tell a few itself. You want to suggest that the rumours about a faked moon landing really are true, part of Nasa’s back-up plan to keep the waiting millions entertained if something went wrong with Apollo 11? Knock yourself out.
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But the movie itself has to be a knockout: a tennis match between two pros who can return each other’s serve. Johansson fires ace after ace; Tatum stands there like a tree, watching them sail past. Casting him as a Nasa launch manager is a little unfair to begin with — like asking Rudolph Valentino to play a nuclear physicist. With his athletic physique, tan and crooning bedside manner, Tatum seems deeply uncomfortable in the role, a jock squeezed into a lab coat. You half expect him to rip off the figure-hugging sweaters they have stuffed him in to show off his physique, the same way he ripped off that cop uniform in Magic Mike, so that he can give a lap dance to the nearest technician.
Fly Me To the Moon is not bad, but it’s unlikely to send you into orbit either,and with much better star vehicles like The Fall Guy failing to make their revenue targetsyou have to wonder if some cosmic realignment isn’t underway in Hollywood at the moment. Forget about getting to the moon. How many brave souls still make the long journey to the cinema at night just to see stars?
★★★☆☆
Greg Berlanti, 12A, 132m
From the outside, Oz Perkins’s Longlegs looks like just another serial killer flick — the murderer-craftsman bent to his fiendish work, the female FBI agent trying to decipher a series of cryptic notes — but it’s that rarity: a horror film that gives you a bona fide case of the heeby-jeebies. In the 1990s, a new FBI agent, Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), is assigned to an unsolved case involving a Satanic serial killer known as Longlegs. There’s no sign of forced entry or, indeed, of any outside involvement, but for a series of encrypted notes signed “Longlegs”. “He tells them what to do to themselves, to each other, and they do it,” Harker’s boss, Agent Carter, (Blair Underwood) says of the various slain families they find slumped in pools of blood in their living rooms.
It’s a terrifying idea, one shared by only the very best horror films — that true horror does not reside in something outside menacing us, but the thoughts we can’t control bubbling up inside of us. All the familiar tropes of serial killer movies are glimpsed through the feverish intuitions of Harker, who is described by her boss as “half psychic” and perceives the world in liminal flashes of terrifying revelation. “I know you’re not afraid of a little bit of dark because you are the dark,” whispers the killer, played with ferocity by Nicolas Cage. Like Kubrick’s The Shining, Perkins’s movie seems at times to be taking place entirely inside its characters heads. The message? It’s a dangerous neighbourhood in there.
★★★★☆
Oz Perkins, 15, 101m
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