These three films will keep you thoughtfully entertained during your vacation travels
Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo
In Mission Control, director David Fairhead, an experienced hand at space-race documentaries, focuses on the men who manned the consoles in Houston during the Apollo program. In addition to interviews with surviving controllers (and a couple of astronauts), the movie taps a tremendous collection of rare footage—I’ve seen a lot of Apollo footage over the years, and there is a good amount of material here that was unfamiliar to me.
Denial: The First Step to Acceptance
Derek Hallquist set out to make a personal movie about the electrical grid—and then it became far more personal than he expected. Hallquist began by filming his father, Dave Hallquist, the CEO of the Vermont Electric Cooperative, proselytizing for smart-grid technology. Hallquist junior was then completely freaked out when Hallquist senior came out to him as a transgender woman. Denial follows the threads of Hallquist senior and junior’s personal struggles interwoven with the elder Hallquist’s attempts to strike a balance between promoting renewables and keeping Vermont’s lights on. In one scene, Hallquist senior faces down protesters to install wind turbines, while in another she lobbies politicians to abolish a renewable mandate for fear of destabilizing the grid.
Viva Amiga: The Story of a Beautiful Machine
We have a lot of love for the Amiga line of computers here at Spectrum, and how they’ve hung on, despite the odds. In fact, Adam P. Spring favorably commented on Viva Amiga in 2015 when he was covering the Amiga’s 30th birthday celebration for us. But the movie has only recently become available to download.