54 For All Mankind

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Svevan
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54 For All Mankind

#1 Post by Svevan » Sun Jan 02, 2005 4:16 pm

For All Mankind

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In July 1969, the space race ended when Apollo 11 fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's challenge of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." No one who witnessed the lunar landing will ever forget it. Twenty years later, Al Reinert constructed a documentary that imparts the unforgettable story of the twenty-four astronauts who participated in the Apollo mission to land on the moon—told in their words and in their voices, using the images they captured. With its awe-inspiring, otherworldly footage and a haunting atmospheric soundtrack by Brian Eno, For All Mankind stirs us with a profound sense of compassion for the "pale blue dot" that is our home, and it is still the most radical, visually dazzling work of cinema that has been made about this earthshaking event.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• In the 4K UHD edition: New 4K digital restorations of the original 1.33:1 framing and the alternate 1.85:1 theatrical presentation, with 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• In the 4K UHD edition: One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• In the Blu-ray and DVD editions: High-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by producer-director Al Reinert, with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary featuring director Al Reinert and Apollo 17 commander Eugene A. Cernan, the last person to set foot on the moon
An Accidental Gift: The Making of "For All Mankind," a documentary featuring interviews with Reinert, Apollo 12 and Skylab astronaut Alan Bean, and NASA archive specialists
• Selection of excerpted interviews with fifteen of the Apollo astronauts
• Program about Bean's artwork, accompanied by a gallery of his paintings
• NASA audio highlights and liftoff footage
• Optional on-screen identification of astronauts and mission-control specialists
• PLUS: Essays by film critic Terrence Rafferty and Reinert

Original DVD:
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Blu-ray:
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Fletch F. Fletch
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#2 Post by Fletch F. Fletch » Mon Jan 03, 2005 10:15 am

Svevan wrote:I began the year, like I did last year, watching one of the best non-fiction films I know of, and I sure feel like I got off to a good start. Last year I rented "For All Mankind," on a whim, watched it with friends, and we found ourselves starting a new tradition for New Year's.

I gushed on the old board about the quality of this movie, and it hasn't been diminished in a year. The striking quality is its deliberate choice to combine all moon missions into one, so that we see the story of one takeoff, one voyage, one moon. The movie is poetic because the creator found beauty in something deemed a 'scientific' mission, and because those who visited the moon were intelligent and thoughtful, reflecting on the nature of the mission. I particularly valued the comments made by multiple astronauts on not feeling alien on this other world. It may not be a popular thought, but the moon belongs to man; it impacts our world in such a great degree that discovery, exploration, and ownership must be included. But with ownership comes responsibility and care; the story is bittersweet because man will destroy the moon the same way he has destroyed parts of the earth. I don't believe anything can stop that, whether it is an environmental idealogy or an empowerment to mother earth and daughter moon. So it is a sad story as well; the first step in a voyage to the outer realms of a gigantic universe signals our triumph, and also our downfall. Reinert's movie captures this moment so well that we will forever have a document of these four years of voyages to something so seemingly inhuman, but in reality, an object given to all mankind. No movie reminds me of how small I am, but then reassures me of how big humanity is. I'll wait till next year to get another taste.
This disc was a blind buy for me. I was intrigued by the description on the back of the box, it was Criterion so I decided to take a chance.

I really dig this movie as well. It makes me think of the many afternoons I have spent at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City watching the fantastic show they ran about our solar system. This documentary fills me with the same awe and wonder. Fascinating stuff. I haven't watched this film in ages. I really need to check it out again.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#3 Post by kinjitsu » Thu Apr 16, 2009 3:05 pm


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zedz
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#4 Post by zedz » Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:17 pm

This should look fantastic. It's a shame they couldn't add an Eno interview to the extras. He's always interesting and it would have made this a must-buy for a whole new market.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#5 Post by cdnchris » Thu Apr 16, 2009 5:34 pm

That's a great deal for the DVD, considering the original was $40 and had less on it.

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solaris72
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#6 Post by solaris72 » Thu Apr 16, 2009 7:24 pm

I really like at the bottom of the page for the reissue "RELATED FILMS: FIRST MAN INTO SPACE."

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#7 Post by MyNameCriterionForum » Thu Apr 16, 2009 8:18 pm

This movie makes me cry like a baby.

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Fierias
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#8 Post by Fierias » Thu Apr 16, 2009 10:35 pm

From Criterion's initial blu-ray announcement:
These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.
This release seems to contradict this, until they change it.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#9 Post by TomReagan » Thu Apr 16, 2009 11:44 pm

zedz wrote:This should look fantastic. It's a shame they couldn't add an Eno interview to the extras. He's always interesting and it would have made this a must-buy for a whole new market.
Agreed and agreed. I was introduced to this film many moons ago (all apologies) via Eno and Lanois' stellar (oh for fuck's sake) soundtrack, which was also recently remastered. This and The Seventh Seal are two upgrades I'll gladly indulge.

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zedz
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#10 Post by zedz » Fri Apr 17, 2009 12:49 am

TomReagan wrote:Agreed and agreed. I was introduced to this film many moons ago (all apologies) via Eno and Lanois' stellar (oh for fuck's sake) soundtrack, which was also recently remastered.
Apollo was one of the first Eno albums I bought (on cassette with silver-on-silver cover) way, way back, years before the film even existed. It was only in the mid-90s that I discovered that the film from which the soundtrack had come adrift actually had eventually been released, albeit under a different title. (Come to think of it, are there any other instances of a movie's soundtrack being released so many years ahead of the movie?) And then the soundtrack went on to have a third life in plenty of other films (Trainspotting, Traffic etc.), arguably to the point of cliche. The journey of the soundtrack alone would make for a pretty interesting story.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#11 Post by bdsweeney » Fri Apr 17, 2009 4:58 am

Having not seen the movie but always thought it looked interesting, I looked around to find a bit of info. From a 'reliable source' :-k , I was curious to read this:
Reviewer: [url=http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3PIPJ2P8C3Z8H/]Bill Andrews[/url] (N. Ireland) wrote:...read the reviews with interest - but frankly I was gutted to discover that Criterion have 'mutilated' this superb doc by messing with the original score/arrangements.

'Deep blue Day' by Brian Eno and intermittant musical inserts lasting only a view seconds (which previously transported the viewer away from the immediate scene with the Astronauts) have all been removed - the magic has been squeezed out of this classic piece of video/doc architecture by a company who have done the equivalent of a painting a moustache on a classic oil with a black felt tip pin!

Please cure my depression with some info on how I can get my hands on the original classic version on DVD or VHS? (unmutilated)!
Knowing Criterion's policy of releasing films on DVD as close to the director's original intent as possible, I find this hard to believe. Nevertheless, does anyone know if there is any truth to the above quote?

BTW: I agree with the previous posts, Eno's album is superb (regardless of how often Ascent (An ending) has been overused in films ever since it was the end-credit music in Traffic).

To add to this, I've since found:
Like you I also recorded FAM in 1989 when it was broadcast on BBC2 as a Horizon special. I watched in wonder at this incredible film footage, complemented by the haunting sounds of Brian Eno. Its one of those rare films that can be watched over and over again and still hold my attention as if it were the first time. Unfortunately my VHS copy was mislaid and it was time to replace it so I was delighted to see it released in DVD format from Criterion.I was very pleased with the much improved video quality but I was not happy with the re mixed audio tracks, with the removal of tracks such as Matta, Deep blue day, Weightless and Understars 2. In my view (and some others) this is to the detriment of the film, ruining the atmosphere of the BBC original. I recently obtained a VHS version from 1992 (World Island Video) and also imported a 1989 Lasrdisc version (Voyager) but unfortunately they are as the DVD. I am beginning to wonder if their are any official versions of the 1989 BBC showing? If not, I would be interested in obtaining the audio of the original and could at least play that alongside the DVD video footage!

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eljacko
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#12 Post by eljacko » Fri Apr 17, 2009 8:39 am

Fierias wrote:From Criterion's initial blu-ray announcement:
These new editions will feature glorious high-definition picture and sound, all the supplemental content of the DVD releases, and they will be priced to match our standard-def editions.
This release seems to contradict this, until they change it.
The BD disc comes with an extra 5.1 audio track, so maybe that is the cause for the price difference?

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manicsounds
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#13 Post by manicsounds » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:26 am

Reissues don't seem to count that rule.

Seventh Seal originally was $39, but the reissue DVD is $29, the BD is still at $39

Same here.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#14 Post by AlanP » Fri Apr 17, 2009 11:32 am

TomReagan wrote:Agreed and agreed. I was introduced to this film many moons ago (all apologies) via Eno and Lanois' stellar (oh for fuck's sake) soundtrack, which was also recently remastered.
Indeed, it's truly out of this world. :-"

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Svevan
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#15 Post by Svevan » Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:33 pm

Criterion is the reason I found out about this film, and it is a personal treasure. Seems like an odd candidate for a re-release (on top of a port to Blu). I'm so fond of the flick that I'm considering getting a blu-ray player.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#16 Post by Napier » Mon Apr 20, 2009 8:48 am

Svevan wrote:I'm so fond of the flick that I'm considering getting a blu-ray player.
You'll be doing yourself a favor.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#17 Post by MoonlitKnight » Tue Apr 28, 2009 6:48 pm

Svevan wrote:Seems like an odd candidate for a re-release (on top of a port to Blu). I'm so fond of
I was thinking the same thing...but, whatever floats their boat.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#18 Post by dadaistnun » Wed Jun 03, 2009 1:59 pm

For any Londoners...
20 and 21 July (doors open at 19.00pm)
£18 per person*

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing the Science Museum, alongside Sound and Music, present the premiere of a new live arrangement of Brian Eno's 1983 album ‘Apollo’.

The performance by amplified ensemble Icebreaker, with BJ Cole on pedal steel guitar, will be accompanied by original footage of the Moon landings by director Al Reinert (For All Mankind, 1989) projected onto the giant screen of the Science Museum IMAX cinema. Supporting the new arrangement of ‘Apollo’ will be performances of new material based on recordings from space. Taking place in the Science Museum’s iconic ‘Making the Modern World’ gallery, which includes the real Apollo 10 Command Module, these performances will be by experimental artists Douglas Benford and Iris Garrelfs.

The concert will take place in the Science Museum IMAX Cinema and ‘Making the Modern World’ gallery.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#19 Post by cdnchris » Tue Jun 23, 2009 2:13 am

I haven't been through it all but at first glance this new DVD looks to have been cleaned up rather extensively when compared with the original DVD. It's window boxed but it looks good.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#20 Post by cdnchris » Thu Jun 25, 2009 2:04 am

For All Mankind DVD review

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#21 Post by Tribe » Thu Jun 25, 2009 10:46 am

An Astronaut Goes From Walking on the Moon to Painting It
June 25, 2009
An Astronaut Goes From Walking on the Moon to Painting It
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — It has been nearly 40 years since Alan L. Bean walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut, but he still wrestles with the experience every day, trying to recapture what he and other astronauts saw and felt in the medium of paint.

Becoming a painter has been a long slog for Mr. Bean, who describes himself as a slow learner. He has had to give up the hyper-rational way of seeing the world he had learned as a Navy test pilot and engineer. He has trained himself to see things not as they are but as they feel to him, to translate emotions into colors and to resist his scientific urges.

“When I left NASA, I made up my mind I was not going to be an astronaut who painted, but an artist who used to be an astronaut,” he said. “It takes a while to change the heart.”

Critical attention has eluded Mr. Bean, 77, though he has developed, largely through word of mouth, a following among private collectors who pay up to $175,000 for one of his works. In July, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington will mount a show of 45 of his works and will release a book of reproductions of his paintings. He has high hopes that the 40th anniversary of the moon landing may lure critics to take a look at his work.

Most of the 12 astronauts who have trod the moon’s surface later worked in the aerospace industry, trading on their experience at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

But Mr. Bean always stuck out among the other fighter-pilots-turned-spacemen of his era. The Apollo astronauts were known for hobbies like hunting, sports cars, golf and skiing. Mr. Bean was studying art, painting still lifes to unwind between missions.

He picked up painting in 1962 while he was a Navy test pilot. On a whim, he took a watercolor course at night at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, near where he was stationed. “I wasn’t that good,” he said. “But I liked it.”

It was not until the late 1970s — long after visiting the Moon on Apollo 12 — that he realized he had no great feelings about flowers and fruit as a subject.

“My astronaut friends began to say to me, ‘Bean, why do you keep painting the earth?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’re the only artist that’s ever been anywhere else but this earth, and you keep painting the earth.’ ”

“One weekend I didn’t have any flowers to paint, and I said I think I will paint this photo of Pete Conrad on the Moon,” he recalled. “So I just started painting it and after about two hours, I said, you know, I care about all this stuff. I love spacesuits. I like the lunar modules. And I didn’t really like plants that much.”

So he started to paint missions to the Moon, drawing from photographs, videotapes, the stories of other astronauts and his own experience in November 1969, when he and Mr. Conrad spent seven hours and 45 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

Then, in 1981, after 18 years as an astronaut, Mr. Bean resigned to take up painting full time. The decision took some at NASA by surprise. After all, he was a rock star at the space agency, having logged 1,671 hours in space and commanded a Skylab mission. But there were younger pilots who could handle the new space shuttle, he said, and only he could do the paintings he wanted to do.

In the 1980s, he realized he did not want to paint the Moon strictly as it appeared — a monochromatic landscape of gray, black and white, with the earth rising like a blue and white marble. He allowed colors unthinkable on the Moon to creep into his work.

“People talk about nature being beautiful, and it is, but it’s not harmonized like a painting,” he said. “If Monet painted what he saw, we wouldn’t celebrate him today. He painted a little of what he saw but then he painted mostly the way he felt about it.”

Yet Mr. Bean’s methods still reflect his scientific side. He builds a scale model of every scene he paints, and uses a klieg light to simulate the sun and to get the shadows right. He works out the angle of the light and the positions of the people with mathematical precision. He wants the details to be historically correct.

Each painting tells part of a story he believes only he and the other astronauts who walked on the Moon can tell.

“This is what human beings do when they first go to another world,” he said, gesturing at a wall of his paintings in his studio. There is Pete Conrad clicking his heels, and Jack Schmitt trying to ski down a hill in the moon dust.

There is a self-portrait, his arms raised in celebration, sun gleaming off the golden visor. In another self-portrait he strikes a swashbuckling stance. “It shows a cocky attitude,” he explains. “I think you’ve got to be pretty cocky to believe you can go 240,000 miles in these fragile little vehicles and get back alive.”

Mr. Bean works slowly, finishing no more than seven paintings a year. All told, he has completed 168 and hopes to live long enough to make 200. He works in his modest home where the living room would ordinarily be, wearing a denim apron with his Apollo 12 patch sewn on it. He lives with his wife, Leslie, and their aged Lhasa apso, Puff Wuff. He has two grown children from a previous marriage.

He is philosophical about space exploration. He and the other Apollo astronauts assumed the next step would be a station on the Moon, then a mission to Mars, and then farther. But history goes in fits and starts, he points out. “There were 128 years between Columbus’s discovery of America and the Pilgrims’ showing up,” he said. “That’s the way things are done. We are not going back to the Moon anytime soon, in my opinion.”

He worries less these days about the future of the space program than about his legacy as a painter. He longs for a show in New York or another art capital.

“My whole goal was to do these paintings, and I figured my wife, Leslie, and my daughter, Amy, would someday try to make them well known in the art world,” he said. “Then I realized the best chance to get them known is while I’m around and people want to talk to me about it.”

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#22 Post by cdnchris » Fri Jun 26, 2009 4:23 pm

Blu-ray review. I apologize that I unfortunately don't have screen captures for it yet.

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eerik
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#23 Post by eerik » Mon Jun 29, 2009 5:40 pm

DVDBeaver's review of the Blu-ray release.
Blu-ray.com review.

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zedz
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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#24 Post by zedz » Wed Dec 30, 2009 5:22 pm

Watched the Blu of this last night and it looked great. Fans of film grain get to savour all manner of varieties, given the disparate sources of the images. The surround mix seemed very subtle as well, reserved for a few key moments, but I'm new to all this.

I tend to forget what a lovely film this is, and one of its secrets is Reinert's discipline in avoiding the temptation to turn it into a different film. The structure he chooses has an utter simplicity that allows the footage to shine. It must have been extremely tempting to include explanatory asides, or to throw in much more spectacular space footage, or simply to identify people and image sources, but the condensed anonymity of the generalised narrative structure is an appropriate vehicle for the nobler aspirations of the space race that the film is trying to celebrate. The natural bombast and spectacle of the subject matter is tempered by the modesty of its presentation - it's even all over in 80 minutes.

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Re: 54 For All Mankind

#25 Post by kaujot » Tue Jul 20, 2010 3:14 pm

For All Mankind is now on Hulu, in its entirety, here.

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