Richard Linklater’s ‘Apollo 10½’ a SXSW highlight
AUSTIN — Anyone who was a child in the late ’60s — or, more specifically, anyone who was a child in the late ’60s in Houston, Texas — is going to fall head-overAstrodome in love with director/ writer Richard Linklater’s newest film, “Apollo 10½: A Childhood Odyssey,” which had its global premiere March 13 at the Paramount Theatre as part of South by Southwest.
It premieres nationally April 1 on Netflix.
A mix of kid-inspired, feverdream fantasy (a fourth-grader named Stan from El Lago is chosen by NASA to be the first child in space) and half-centuryold humdrum reality (the Sunday night dread that accompanied watching “Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” because that meant the weekend was over), the animated “Apollo 10½” is a love letter to Space City, space travel and childhood. It’s “Boyhood” with neither the growing up nor the near-threehour running time.
And the packed crowd at the Paramount seemed to embrace it, even if many were non-Texans who wouldn’t even know the word “AstroWorld” without the name of Travis Scott attached to it. It’s that Houston specificity that makes “Apollo 10½” unique while the film is also general enough to appeal to those too young or too geographically distant to have any recollection of, for example, the second-run and run-down Majestic Theatre, which is the setting of a scene in the movie. Every city had one.
Viewers can thank Linklater for the movie’s deep reservoir of Houston knowledge. The director with a special knack for shaping the contours of adolescence for the big screen (“Dazed and Confused,” “Suburbia,” the aforementioned “Boyhood”) lives in Austin but hails from Houston, attending Bellaire High School. While Stan may not be Richard’s exact doppelgänger — in the film, Stan’s dad worked at NASA while Richard’s father did not — Stan couldn’t exist without Richard. “It’s embarrassingly personal,” Linklater said of the film onstage after the screening.
The one downside for Houstonians is that, while the movie’s soul may be made in Houston, its body was fashioned in Austin at Richard Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios because Linklater needed the technology there for his animation-live-action fusion.
Beyond that, Linklater said he wanted to create a cinematic shout-out to NASA, “by far my favorite government agency,” he joked at the Paramount. And NASA apparently loves him back.
“They showed (the film) on the (International) Space Station a few days ago,” he said. “It was a dream come true. It was just amazing to talk to these guys. They’re not normal people. They’re amazing.”
This is Linklater’s third animated film — following “Waking Life” (2001) and “A Scanner Darkly” (2006) — but it ranks with his best live-action work. In fact, the movie was shot with actors and then handed off for the animators to do their thing. It’s also often truly funny, and not just because much of it derives its humor from the shock of recognition or distant echoes from the viewer’s own childhood.
Yet as much as Linklater likes to roll around in the nostalgia of his youth, he said the point isn’t to remain stuck in the past, no matter how fondly remembered. “It was a different culture,” he said. “So many things are better now. I wouldn’t want to go back culturally.”
“Apollo 10½” touches on that with its depictions of racial unrest, anti-war protests, routine corporal punishment, Stan’s brother asking their father if it’s true that there are few Black employees at NASA and a Black man being interviewed on the news saying the space program is a waste of money.
Mostly though, Linklater wants to remember the good times. And the Chick-O-Sticks.
‘Facing Nolan’
“Watching that makes me tired,” said Texas baseball legend Nolan Ryan onstage after the March 12 world premiere at
SXSW of “Facing Nolan,” Houstonian director Bradley Jackson’s cinematic mash note to one of the best pitchers to ever put on a mitt.
Well, if Ryan — as well as much of the audience at the Zach Theatre — got tired just looking at his long life, just imagine living it. Ryan, now 75, enjoyed a 27-year career spanning four teams (the New York Mets, the California Angels, the Astros and the Texas Rangers), thousands of strikeouts and seven no-hitters, more than any other player. And then, at age 46, he even got the best of the much younger Robin Ventura in an on-the-mound brawl that went viral long before anyone knew what such a thing was.
It’s all captured in intimate detail in “Facing Nolan,” the title of which underscores the dread some hitters felt when faced with either his fastball or his curveball. Jackson juxtaposes archival footage with current interviewers with players who knew Ryan (including Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, Rod Carew and George Brett among many others), his family and one surprisingly funny former president, George W. Bush, who was the managing general partner for the Texas Rangers in the late ’80s/early ’90s when Ryan was there. “Interviewing Bush was wild,” says Jackson, who goes on to refer to a comedian known for imitating Bush, “especially when you hear Will Ferrell in your head.”
While “Facing Nolan,” with all of its baseball inside moves, is a field of dreams for baseball diehards, it’s also of interest for those who wouldn’t know Nolan Ryan from the old soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” (on which Nolan Ryan made a guest appearance) because it’s a compelling character sketch of a kid from Alvin who really wanted to be a veterinarian — but who also just happened to have an amazing arm. “I was born to be a pitcher,”
Ryan says at one point.
After the film, director Jackson said he was inspired by the Netflix documentary “The Last Dance,” a chronicle of the life of basketball great Michael Jordan. But he wanted to make a movie about someone with local roots, and who better than Ryan? (Accordingly, don’t expect anything negative about Ryan in Jackson’s approach.) Ryan was born in Refugio and grew up in Alvin.
“I think they did a great job,” Ryan said from the stage. “It brought back a lot of memories that I hadn’t thought about.”
When asked who was the most competitive player, Ryan didn’t skip a beat: Pete Rose. Ryan summed him up this way: “Pete would run over his mother at home plate to score.”
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
Much like the martial-arts mom in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the time-tripping action-fantasy film starring Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis that had its world premiere at the 2022 edition of SXSW March 11, the festival appears back on its feet after fighting for its life.
It had been three years since Austin has reverberated with the loud SXSW buzz and, earlier on Friday, things had seemed a bit subdued at the Austin Convention Center — the registration site and the spot for many presentations and panels — in comparison to opening days in the past. But, by late afternoon — when a long line of filmgoers braved cold, blustery weather for two hours to get into the packed “Everything Everywhere All at Once” screening at the 1300-capacity Paramount Theatre — the crowd was ready to party like it was 1999, or at least 2019.
While SXSW opening-night audiences are almost always deliriously enthusiastic — even when the films aren’t particularly good — there was an extra spark of electricity here, like everyone was both relieved to be enjoying a film together again and determined to get back to the way things were through sheer force of fandom and will.
Janet Pierson, SXSW’s vice president and director of film, and the movie’s main cast were greeted with loud, sustained applause when they came onstage and there was a standing ovation for Yeoh after the movie. Both Pierson and Yeoh echoed that feeling in their opening remarks before “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” “I’m so excited to be here,” Yeoh said. “Movies are shared experiences.”
As for the film itself, directed by the duo that works under the name of the Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the guys behind the flatulent-heavy “Swiss Army Man”) critics seemed to be as jazzed as the audience.
“Here is an orgiastic work of slaphappy genius that doesn’t operate like a narrative film so much as a particle accelerator — or maybe a cosmic washing machine — that two psychotic 12-year-olds designed in the hopes of reconciling the anxiety of what our lives could be with the beauty of what they are,” crowed David Ehrlich in his grade-A review in Indie Wire, while Variety’s Peter Debruge was only slightly less wowed when he said, “There are enough ideas in ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ to fuel a dozen movies, or else a fullblown TV series, but the Daniels have shoehorned it all into a bombastic, emotionally draining 139 minutes.”