Wednesday

Now that it's fall, it is not altogether gratifying that the weather has become very hot again. Today was sun-blasted and completely without any kind of breeze. That's not to say that I did not have a pretty cool day: I returned to Silver Spring for a couple movies. It's not impossible that today was the last time I'll do that for a long time. I hold modest hope of seeing Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2006)¹ between its October twelfth opening and my departure on the plus-or-minus seventeenth, but I'm not sure where I'll see it. Or if. I tried not to be too maudlin at Starbucks. I bid adieu to the oddly triangular Asian Bistro. Then, possibly, my final movie of 2007 was the Ron Howard-produced documentary In the Shadow of the Moon,² an extravaganza of NASA stock footage highlights and famous Apollo astronaut heads. I'm not certain that I'm comfortable with the word documentary here, though I can't think of a better one. The movie supports the first person anecdotes of the moon shot participants with a medley of the best-looking space program footage you've ever already seen before; doing so in a way that subverts classroom accuracy in favor of emotional or visual impact. This isn't necessary a complaint. It creates a dynamic illustration of the astronaut's recollections rather than a document in its own right. Fair enough: spacemen are a super cool bunch, especially General Mike Collins, as erudite and entertaining as any wide-eyed boyhood aficionado could possibly dream. I place value in primary sources, and I could listen to astronauts talk all day long. The photo montage, just icing on the cake really, culminated in the coolest disclaimer: this film was shot entirely on location on the earth, the moon, and in space. [Cavin]