THE FAST AND THE FRENCH

French people are fucking awesome. That's totally an uninterrupted 8 minute and 40 second take of a French person driving dick-swingingly fast at dawn in Paris with a fucking camera mounted on the bumper. Could there be anything better for my 200th post? No. Not in this universe.

And, it also serves as a preview of my Fast and the Furious post, which you can expect sometime in the next couple days after I see Fast Five. Until then, bask in the existentialist glory that is this clip. Check the director credit at the end, by the way. If you say "holy shit!" we're totally best friends.

INFERRED BIOGRAPHY

Sometimes, no summary can do a career justice. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the imdb page of one Paul Thomas (no Anderson involved, except indirectly).

Let me direct your attention to three areas of this cornucopia of goodness:

1) The trivia page. It's short (the only thing about him that is, apparently), but very evocative.
2) Read every entry in his filmography, as actor, director, AND designer. It's long (LIKE HIS COCK HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA), and similarly evocative.
3) His earliest credit as actor, right before the "Actor - video" section starts. If that don't beat all, nothing does.

And, as per 3), Happy Easter!

(h/t Tom Berger for suggesting that his Facebook friends look this guy up. I hope you're happy with yourself, Tom).

I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU BE SAYIN': A LOOK AT THE CAREER OF CHRIS TUCKER

Why Chris Tucker, you might ask? Well, I might answer: why not? Not only, thanks to Rebecca Black, is Chris Tucker's now the good Friday (Ed. Note: fuck you, that was funny) he's responsible for one of my all-time favorite one-scene performances (in Jackie Brown), maybe two-thirds of the dumb shit I used to say when I was stoned (Friday), and one of the single most gloriously strange, gender-ambiguous pieces of magnificently irritating performance art ever filmed (The Fifth Element). My fandom goes back even further than that, though.

I first heard of Chris Tucker back when my dad and I would watch hours and hours of stand-up comedy on TV every weekend, that being one of the only compromises we could strike because he hated movies with explosions and I hated 18-hour PBS documentaries about soybean farming. It was the middle of the early 90s stand-up comedy boom, when you could catch stand-up on TV just about any hour of the day and night. We caught a lot of great comics and had many mutual favorites (Bill Hicks, Robin Harris, Richard Pryor, Marc Maron, Richard Belzer, and early Bill Maher, the one who was funny, not the one who became convinced he was the weed-smoking Walter Cronkite). I was more partial to women comedians than he was—Laura Kightlinger and Janeane Garofalo will always have special places in my heart—and he was more partial to middle-aged guys from Boston, because he was a middle-aged guy from Boston. But for the most part, we liked the same stuff, especially if Dad had had a bit to smoke.

One show we never missed, in its first couple seasons, was HBO's Def Comedy Jam. This was back in my Dad's hilariously disingenuous period where he'd retire to the other room and come back all giggly and think he was hiding the fact that he was high. Timing was such that he'd usually do this right around the time Def Comedy Jam was about to come on TV, which worked out nicely, as the general tenor of the show was perfect for a dorky 13 year old or a bombed-out-of-his-nards 43 year old. And so we discovered a great many mediocre comics, but just as many if not more who were really fucking funny. We had formed a secular religion based around Bernie Mac in about 1993. My dad came dangerously close to comparing Martin Lawrence to Steve Allen one night before I caught him in time. And, of course, with the subject of this post being what it is, there was Chris Tucker.



He was neither the best stand-up to appear on that show, nor the most original, but he made my dad and me laugh our asses off to the point where it took us two hours to find them again afterwards. One man's mile-a-minute non-sequitur shrieking is another man's hilarity, what can I say. I dislike analyzing comedy, because analyzing comedy isn't funny, so I'll keep this brief: there are many different types of comedians, from the great sage preacher types like Bill Hicks, the raw nerves like Pryor where you're like “holy fuck, did he just say that?”, the observational types, the quipsters, so forth. There is a shortage of straight up wiseasses who are actually funny, and I'd put Chris Tucker in that category. He's no beacon of enlightenment, doesn't mine any apparent demons for cathartic laughs, doesn't do a whole lot of “ya ever notice” and his jokes can be kinda corny. What sold it for me, with him when he was young, was his “I'm just that little wiseass motormouth hyperactive skinny dude”—ness. Sometimes it could be a bit much, but sometimes it really hit the spot.

Like a lot of comedians, when Chris Tucker started doing movies, he'd basically be doing his bits instead of playing a character, but for Friday, that was what was necessary. Ice Cube—no slouch in his ability to read the public's pop cultural appetite—wrote himself a more light-hearted “hood” movie than the ones with which he'd made his initial foray into movies, which were, while groundbreaking at the time of their release, a bit grim for widespread commercial appeal. While Cube could be quite funny at times, he'd yet to attempt outright comedy, and made the wise decision to cast himself as the straight man and Chris Tucker as the funny one. The result, one of the better weed-smoking movies ever made, more consistently funny than most, with great chemistry between Chris and Cube.

As an actor, with one notable exception which we'll get to in a bit, Friday established the template Chris Tucker performance, with slight variations: the endlessly talkative goofball, frequently either high or talking about Michael Jackson, never terrribly intelligent, but never so stupid that he can't pull it together to save the day, although ultimately very very silly. Some killjoys might extrapolate this lack of variation in his screen persona to imply that Chris Tucker is a shitty actor, to which I would say: whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the fuck up. First of all, the guy isn't playing fucking Hamlet. Second of all, lest we infer from that “first of all” that comedy is somehow easy, let's just remember that dude who played Hamlet who, overhearing on his deathbed someone talking about how hard it must be to be shufflin' off the ol' mortal coil, riposted “Dying? That's easy. Comedy? That's hard.” Sure that story's apocryphal, but the reason no one gives a shit that it's apocryphal is that it's fucking true. Maybe Chris Tucker isn't the guy you turn to when you're casting a John Osborne play, but Chris Tucker can do a bit about Michael Jackson as a pimp with Tito as his assistant pimp, and he can be really fucking funny in so doing. Call Nicol Williamson for the Osborne play, I'll stick with Chris for the MJ.

After establishing what would be an ongoing relationship with director Brett Ratner on Money Talks, a commercially successful if unmemorable thing co-starring Emilio Estevez's brother, Chris Tucker broke into movie megastardom with Rush Hour, which was heralded as Jackie Chan's breakthrough role with American audiences, but I noticed a couple things in the theater waiting for it to start: one, as was not unusual in my moviegoing history, me and my mom were the only two white people in the packed theater, and two, everyone in earshot was excitedly talking about the new Chris Tucker movie. Jackie Chan was a fun but secondary element.

But since then, able to command a $20 milion fee—which he's good for, if he ever came out with a new movie that looked even remotely un-fucktarded, it'd make back that $20 mil and more the first weekend—Chris Tucker has only appeared in the Rush Hour sequels, which are what they are, even though Rush Hour 3 is only a movie if you really give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, he made $45 million in salary from those two sequels, plus he had points, and as unmemorable as they were those pictures made a lot of fucking money, so you gotta figure those points made him even richer, so it's not like Chris Tucker has to work or anything. If he's happy, that's all that really matters.

The details of his personal life are, besides being none of our business, not terribly interesting in any tabloid-y kind of way. He's a big God guy and managed to turn his lifelong massive Michael Jackson fandom into a genuine friendship; that in itself is an interesting narrative to chart, watching Chris go from gently but respectfully poking fun at MJ to actually becoming friends with him, to the point where Chris was called, deeply upset, to testify in the last kid-fucking lawsuit. That might make an interesting movie: the dialogue scenes alone between Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson would be some shit out of David Lynch.

As for Chris Tucker's movies that actually do exist, here goes (Ed. Note: this is an incomplete list):


Friday/Money Talks/Rush Hour series



You can kind of lump these all in together and have it only be a slight oversimplification, as pretty much what Chris does in all these is a variation on his stand-up riffs, playing the annoying-yet-somewhat-charming wiseass fuckup. Friday doesn't require any kind of deep analysis; it's a movie you smoke a joint to, with a handful of classic lines, to wit “You get killed with somebody else,” in re: not passing a joint fast enough, and “You just got knocked the FUCK out!” to fallen villain Tiny Lister. Money Talks is dumb but I didn't change the channel that time I caught it on cable.

The Rush Hour series, though, I rather enjoy in spite of its escalating stupidity and the uncanny ability of director Brett Ratner's to make every picture he directs feel physically small (pardon the critical synesthesia, I don't know how else to describe it, his movies feel like crowded studio apartments). My favorite line in the whole series is not, surprisingly, one of Chris' or Jackie's, it's Philip Baker Hall talking to Chris after a horrendous Chris fuckup—casting Chris as a fuckup cop with Walter Mitty Harry Callahan fantasies is pretty much perfect, by the way—but Chris' response is what sells the line:

Philip Baker Hall (a police captain, nota bene): Every now and then we have to let the general public know we still know how to blow shit up.
Chris Tucker (a cop, nota bene praeter): You're goddamn right!

This has always been my philosophy toward cinéma policiers: I don't necessarily want my movie cops to resemble real cops—cuz who the fuck wants to sit through two hours of civil servants struggling to pay their bills and drinking beer watching Yankee games, really—and I certainly like movie cops to know how to blow shit up. Rush Hour, the first one anyway, is a terrifically enjoyable action comedy—easily the best thing Brett Ratner's ever done—and is so largely because of the terrific chemistry between Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. It's also nice to have cats like Philip Baker Hall, Tzi Ma, and Ken Leung show up, and Ken Leung is quite good as the villain. The sequels exist, I've seen them, they're fine, whatever. As cable movies, time-fillers/background noise/what have you, the Rush Hour series has few peers. They're dumb, sure, but they're entertaining, even the third one in Paris.

Taking a step back chronologically, 1997 ultimately was a bit of a turning point for Chris Tucker's career. His three releases each represented a possible career trajectory: there was Money Talks, Chris' first team-up with the above-mentioned Brett Ratner, which could have lead to a sequel called Bullshit Walks (not a bad alternate title for Rush Hour 3, come to think of it), and represented the safe, unambitious, commercial route. This, of course, is the one Chris ultimately took.

What could be called “the middle road” was represented by Jackie Brown. A really good movie, by an actual director, with Chris giving something recognizable as an actual performance, as the doomed underling whom Samuel L. Jackson verbally manipulates into the trunk of his car with an empty shotgun only to be cranially ventilated by bullets from Samuel L.'s gun. It's basically Chris Tucker's standard boilerplate Chris Tucker performance—a weedtarded high-pitched voice wisecracking dude who talks really fast and loud when he gets pissed off—but with good dialogue and actual beats to hit, proving that when called on, Chris actually could thesp respectably. Only problem with this path is that it would have required, simultaneously, the ambition necessary to carve out a career as an actor in good movies and the attendant patience to content one's self with playing supporting roles for a few years. And it also presupposes that that's something Chris himself gave a fuck about, which certainly doesn't appear so from his subsequent career choices.

Last, and certainly not least, is The Fifth Element.



Oh, where do we begin with this one . . . The production design and special effects are seamlessly gorgeous. Speaking of which there's also Milla Jovovich, who makes quite an impression. Bruce Willis Bruce Willises his way through the whole thing without batting an eyelash, which sucks in bad movies but is awesome in good ones, Tiny Lister is the President of the Galaxy (as he motherfucking well should be), Gary Oldman gives what would be the strangest performance in any other actor's career but for him it's merely in a ten-way deathmatch with nine other duckfuckingly insane roles . . . and then there's Chris Tucker.

Chris Tucker's performance in The Fifth Element is like if you gave a drag queen LSD and, knowing exactly when she was going to peak, had her huff a balloon of nitrous oxide. It says something that in a movie where everyone's wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier, Chris Tucker's the one who looks weird, and this is in a movie with a whole marauding army of ass-faced aliens and Milla Jovovich running around wearing gaff tape.

There's no diplomatic way to say this, so I'll say it in the least-diplomatic way possible: you could be on first name basis with the staff at Marie's Crisis, have a dick in your ass and your mouth and one in each hand and be a Republican Congressman and not be as gay as Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element. He's not just gay in this, he's Little Richard Gay. This is kind of like the difference between being a pop singer and being Michael Jackson, for an analogy in Chris Tucker-ese.

Now, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing at all. Chris Tucker flies the freak flag like it's fuckin Fort McHenry up in this joint. At his most sedate, Chris has a tendency to talk a little fast and chirp a bit, but in The Fifth Element—fittingly for a movie with lots of aliens in it—he talks so fast and in so high a pitch it's like he's speaking an alien language. If you ever want to make a civilian cry, watch The Fifth Element with the sound way up: Chris' voice fucking tortures civilians in this movie. Every thirtieth word or so is intelligible. It's fucking awesome.

Bruce Willis is supposed to find Chris Tucker irritating, and since Bruce Willis is the hero, he's kind of the audience's eyes and ears, but as an actor, the cat isn't exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in terms of staying in character. At several points over the course of the movie you can see Bruce Willis start to crack because Chris Tucker's balls-out batshit insanity is so funny at times that he can't help but struggle a bit.

It has been said that a few of Chris Tucker's lines in The Fifth Element are audible only to dogs. Anyone who's able to interview a dog to find out, let me know, but in the meantime let us be content with the extant evidence, which is that this is one of the truly strange performances ever in cinema. While I love it, I'm a little strange myself and understand it not being people's cup of tea. But oh fuck is it ever mine.

Knowing that he's capable of such off-the-map bizarre brilliance, though, makes it a little disappointing that Chris Tucker is content to restrict his acting to Rush Hour sequels once every five or six years. But hey, it's his career. It'd just be nice if he really tried to be Michael Jackson; while he's not exactly Tito, he's in danger of becoming Jermaine. In so doing, he's in danger of no longer being germane.

For that last joke, you are quite welcome.

LE 20 AVRIL EST TOUJOURS VENDREDI

A longer post on Chris Tucker is in the works, but here's a preview. This, after all, is where it all started.

ARNOLD RETURNS TO ENTERTAINMENT BIZ, SKYNET BECOMES SELF-AWARE....COINCIDENCE? HELL, NO.

Well, we're pretty much fucked. Skynet's self-aware. All those namby-pamby motherfuckers who say "oh, maybe AI isn't inherently hostile, maybe it could lead to all kinds of good things" are advised to go suck a lollipop and fap to pictures of unicorns. I'm acquiring arms and canned goods and small, insane muscular women and going to California to find Arnold and I am fucking digging in. Because the War Against The Machines is coming, y'all. Believe.

Revisit last summer's warning, on these very pages, here.

"WHO'S THE BEST PILOT I EVER SAW? WELL, YOU'RE LOOKIN AT 'IM": YURI GAGARIN AND THE RIGHT STUFF

“It's Gagarin!”
“We know. Sit down.”

—The Right Stuff

50 years ago today, one of the greatest feats in the history of balls was achieved by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Even if one discounts this entire Cracked article (which is unwise), which speculates that the Soviets fired a number of unlucky and soon extremely dead people into space and only publicized Gagarin's voyage because he actually survived, you're left with this scenario: a guy sitting on top of a fucking rocket about to be shot into fucking space, which no one's ever done before. That, my friends, takes yarbles. Enormous ones.

Due to the stupid Cold War, you got called a Commie if you properly appreciated how fuckin duro Yuri Gagarin was. This, of course, is unfair. It'd be nice if there was a well-written Yuri Gagarin biopic by a real director and a good actor playing Yuri here in Western media, but there isn't. The movies we made about astronauts were all about our own dudes, and while it's perfectly reasonable to roll your eyes and go “fucking Americans” (if you're not American) or “yeah man that's totally fuckin typical of mass media man trying to control the fuckin narrative and hide us from the fuckin truth man” (if you're American and smoke weed), why shouldn't we make movies about our own dudes? While it's certainly true that Yuri Gagarin made it up there first, the Americans who followed shortly thereafter only faced a marginally safer trip, and should be recognized for their membership in the same testicular weight class.



Now, lest you think that I'm only using Yuri Gagarin as an excuse to go rhapsodize about The Right Stuff for a few thousand words, there is a connection. Gagarin and the Soviet space program, while only referred to on a handful of occasions in the movie, nonetheless provide the impetus for the movie's story. Also, the fact that the protagonists in The Right Stuff aren't ever going to get there first humanizes them in a way. The rest of the movie goes to great lengths—and I do mean great lengths, it's over three hours long—to continue humanizing the astronauts, who in the popular media of their era were made out to be heroes.. And here's my Gagarin link: he is the movie's mythic hero.

The Right Stuff is not overly concerned with historical accuracy. It's a bit notorious for this, actually; even Tom Wolfe, from whose book the movie was adapted, who favored literary technique over straight reportage in his journalistic work, looked at the movie and went “Holy fuck, dude, this shit is made up.” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) Some of the factual changes in the movie did some historical figures a disservice: the scientists who built the shit that put the astronauts in space and got 'em back deserved a little better than to be portrayed as bumbling cartoon characters who needed design tips from the astronauts to even make the fuckin spaceships. Yeah, a lot of those guys who built the rockets worked for Germany in World War II and were only able to duck war crimes indictments because we needed them to compete with the Commies (who pulled the same thing so they could compete with us). They maybe weren't necessarily the best guys in the world, and a few of them probably had a bit of blood on their hands (or white lab coats), but good guy or no good guy: launching people into space and having them come back alive without tentacles is fucking impressive.

There are a ton of other things in The Right Stuff that are total horseshit, played for laughs, or heightened for the sake of drama. It would be one thing if it was purporting to be a just-the-facts-ma'am account of the space race, but that's not what this movie is about. Check the title, this movie is about The Right Stuff. The reason why it's called The Right Stuff is because societal mores wouldn't let it be called Men With Gigantic Testicles or Balls That Clank: The Story of How Seven Dudes With Dorky Haircuts Got Shot Into Fucking Space. The latter, anyway, is too long; you need to keep that shit snappy, especially back then when the paperback editions were so tiny. But the point is, that's what this movie is about: a bunch of guys who had unfathomably massive balls.

The alpha of the bunch, one of the coolest motherfuckers ever captured on celluloid, was one Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager, portrayed in the movie by Sam Fucking Shepard. Chuck Yeager is a very important figure in the history of masculinity, because he got into airplanes and flew those sons of bitches so goddamn fast even the sound of how awesome he was couldn't keep up. Since none of these goddamn kids these days has any sense of history, let me remind you little fuckers: breaking the sound barrier—long enough ago that Babe Ruth was alive, no less—is automatic win in any “can you top this” testosterone competition, unless somebody who can wrestle alligators with his dick without spilling his drink shows up.

Now, the real-life Chuck Yeager, on the merits of his accomplishments, may be more awesome than just about any other guy who ever lived, but he was this nice, humble guy who wasn't self-aggrandizing or anything, he just liked to go up in airplanes and fucking warp space-time for fun. But, you know, for the movie, you need to make sure the awesomeness reads. So writer-director Philip Kaufman, being a very thoughtful man and skilled filmmaker, decided not to take any fucking chances and cast Sam Shepard. Sure, some of Sam Shepard's plays are pretentious horseshit, but holy fucking fuck that guy looks cool, and that Midwestern drawl on top of it . . . look, just get the motherfucker a horse, light him with a sunset, and point the fucking camera at him, okay? There's your movie, cut, printed, wrapped.

The movie starts with Yeager breaking the sound barrier, and the resultant increased interest in test pilots, which brings most of the rest of our protagonists to the Air Force base that basically belonged to Yeager. The inner circle at the bar is Yeager and his wife, and a bunch of guys who do their best to play it cool but secretly are all like “Dude I get to fucking drink with Chuck fucking Yeager,” among whom is narrator Levon Helm (drummer/vocalist of The Band), a man whose voice basically is America. The new guys settle in awkwardly, with charmer Gordo Cooper (Dennis Quaid) having a particularly rough time of it with his wife, and Gordo's awkward, shy BFF Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) having no easier time of it.

And then there was Sputnik. The scope broadens as America launches the space program, and a number of test pilots volunteer, including Gordo and Gus, but Yeager is like, “They're just shootin the sumbitches up in the air and having them fall back down; the danger is disproportionate to the level of control the pilot can exert, so fuck that shit sideways, I'm staying right here flying planes, riding horses, and nailing Barbra Hershey.” Being enough of a mensch to willingly sacrifice fame and fortune because to do so would compromise one's own principles, well, that's the province of the truly exalted. I cannot say this enough: all fucking praise is due to Chuck fucking Yeager.

Gordo, Gus, and their little buddy Deke all get into astronaut training with goofball wildman Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) and Mr. Clean The Marine, John Glenn (Ed Harris), who's just a little too goody-good to be true, at least according to horndog Gordo, gruff hard-drinking Gus, and Martian immigrant Shepard, and they think he thinks he's better than them, when really, he's just a really wholesome dude who loves the crap out of his wife, who only gives off an aloof air because she stutters really badly and is too shy to talk most times.

Once everyone gets to know everyone else, and some highly entertaining hijinks take place in training, the astronauts all get to the point where they absolutely, unequivocally have each other's backs. And this is the point where they all start getting shot up into fucking space, without even the glory of being first, because Yuri Gagarin got there first. They never speak Gagarin's name, but without the pioneer thing of planting their flag in space, they're a little deflated, and it's only their camaraderie and own mindbogglingly enormous balls that get them through the ensuing travails.

There's no small amount of disdain for the astronauts back on the ground. At the Air Force base bar, the grumpy (and now older) dudes sitting around the bar are all like, “fuck it, a chimp could do this shit, fuck an astronaut” before Yeager—who, if we need a reminder from a couple paragraphs ago, is an authority on balls—quietly kicks some fucking knowledge: “It takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially when it's on national TV.” And because he's both Chuck Yeager and absolutely right, everybody shuts the fuck up and starts throwing some love behind the astronauts.

The recreations of the space flights are all meticulously done and as thrilling as just about anything ever put on a movie screen. You've got Alan Shepard going up, practically sleeping through it, and then pissing in his space suit because he forgot to before getting strapped in (and oh yeah, even though The Right Stuff cuts off before this, it bears mentioning, this is the fucking guy who brought his golf clubs to the Moon with him in the early 70s, which is so staggeringly badass it remains so even though golf sucks). You've got Gus Grissom having a technical malfunction and not getting to get any of the glory because NASA doesn't want to publicize a fuckup (and then the poor guy fucking died when his spaceship blew up on the launching pad a couple years later). And then there's the long, lyrical, magic journey of John Glenn (symbolically, he later spent a quarter century in the US Senate as one of those rock-solid “one of the good guys” politicians that seemed to good to be true but actually was one of the good guys; he didn't think it would be right to capitalize on the publicity he got from being portrayed as a really good guy by Ed Harris in The Right Stuff, thus lending greater weight to said characterization, and subsequently lost the '84 Democratic presidential nomination to Walter Mondale, who as we all know got skullfucked by Reagan).

All the while, cool as Chuck Yeager is, and as willingly as he foreswore the glory of participating in the space program, part of him (and almost certainly a part in the ball region) is going, “It'd be really cool to go to space.” A really bitchin' new plane gets dropped off at the base, that's so cool it looks like the MiG Clint steals in Firefox (the high water mark, at that point, of cool planes in cinema), and because he's Chuck fucking Yeager, he swaggers on up and takes 'er for a spin and nobody says shit (“Flight plan? He's Chuck fucking Yeager, it should be around here somewhere . . . wait, shit . . . uh oh . . .”)

And so, Chuck Yeager flies an airplane right up to the point where he's basically in space. He has just long enough to go “Holy shit, this is awesome” before the canopy starts to crack and the whole shithouse goes up in flames. His plane freaks out way worse than Maverick and Goose's in Top Gun, and Yeager proves both that he's cooler than they are and that he's in a better movie than them by surviving the crash with nothing more than a couple black eyes from depressurization and some burns from when the fucking thing caught on fire. He fucking walks away from the crash.

For the denouement, Gordo Cooper, that loveable lug, gets to go to space, and as Levon Helm narrates: “[on] that glorious day in May 1963, Gordo Cooper went higher, farther, and faster than any other American - 22 complete orbits around the world; he was the last American ever to go into space alone. And for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen.” And that, in a nutshell, is what this movie is about: getting excited about how fucking cool it is that these guys went to space.

The factual inaccuracies, like LBJ being Foghorn Leghorn and all that shit, and the fact that everyone's a cartoon character except Yeager and the astronauts (and all their wives), are all attributable to the fact that the movie is about how cool Yeager and the astronauts (and all their wives) are, and how anyone outside their orbit (Ed. Note: you're welcome) just isn't where it's at. What you might call a stylistic choice manifested through content.

You could, if you wanted to be a gigantic penisface, complain that Philip Kaufman's cavalier attitude toward the facts, glib tone, and priority toward making a movie that was cool rather than truthful make The Right Stuff somewhat less than a great movie. Maybe you have a point, but you also have cooties. The Right Stuff is such a fantastically entertaining movie—and, at three hours long, it never flags or is anything less than compelling—that it being great art or even factually accurate don't matter at all. One fact the movie does not get wrong is that these guys this movie is about did something normal people could not do. They swaggered forth with such boldness, such disregard for fear, such ability to deal with their genitals' gravitational fields, as to render all other facts essentially irrelevant.

It still takes a lot of fucking fortitude to go to space now, with modern technology and safe(r) rockets. But in the early 60s? Fucking forget about it. The protagonists of The Right Stuff, and their silent, massively awesome predecessor Yuri Gagarin, these were fucking men. In the very best sense of the term.

R.I.P. SIDNEY LUMET

For your humility, your compassion, for the practical approach you took to directing pictures, for the list of classics so numerous people are always like "whoa, the same dude directed all these movies???" For all of these, and for all that you were as a man, we bid you farewell and give solemn thanks, Mr. Lumet.