The Right Stuff
Bekkah:
This movie was so long. It was SO LONG. It was over three hours, so I am not exaggerating here!! I love the space race and I love Jeff but I do not love movies with a million stories all about men and toxic masculinity, which this mostly was. Except for lil cinnamon roll John Glenn. I would have watched a three hour movie about John Glenn played by Ed Harris in space and also defending his wife. Great stuff there! Anyway, Jeff was underutilized as a… government recruiter for the space program (???), but this was really early days for his career. He had some great lines (“it’s called Sputnik!” and “Gagarin is in space!” or something like that) and this is the third movie we’ve seen him running around in this weekend. More Jeff, more space, less antagonizing the nurses, less joking about cheating on your wives.
Danya:
So this is the last “real” well-known Jeff movie that we haven’t seen. Mostly because it is 3 hours long! It is a white guy slog, with so many clean cut white dudes that I cannot tell them apart except for a young Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris. Jeff is an energetic force of nature, bursting into rooms with important info, but then gone way too quickly. The space race is really cool, and I definitely googled a lot of things (#justiceforgus) because history is compelling! I would like to go to space, but also it seems very uncomfortable.
6/10 The Jeff Stuff
The U.S. space program's development from the breaking of the sound barrier to selection of the Mercury 7 astronauts, from a group of test pilots with a more seat-of-the-pants approach than the program's more cautious engineers preferred.
Director
Philip Kaufman
Writers
Philip Kaufman (written for the screen by) Tom Wolfe (based on the book by)
Stars
Sam Shepard Scott GlennE d Harris