The "First Man" dilemma
When writing about director Damien Chazelle's "La La Land " back in 2016, I said, " Too often the homages seemed too calculated to generate real feelings, the lush settings overdone to the point that the eyes wandered away from the character." There's something of the same problem in "First Man," Chazelle's chronicle of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Although it has some breathtaking visuals, it never gets an emotional grip on Armstrong, or a way to his interior life. For some, that is not the only problem. Articles such as this one have pondered why "First Man" has not done as well at the box office as some expected. (Theories include conservatives' ire over the omission of a flag-planting scene, a comment by Ryan Gosling, strong competition from more obvious crowd-pleasers, and more.) None of those issues factored into my thinking. As the son of a NASA engineer*and a pre-NASA NACA mathemati...