My stupidity continues and FOR ALL MANKIND (54)

Hah, being dumb, as I can say from experience, is a difficult thing. Not only are you burdened with the constant embarrassment of acting like a complete and total moron (you know hitting on your friend's mom, drinking motor oil, falling through someone's roof, etc.) but you are at most times completely unaware of your stupidity. You just blunder through life beer bonging gallons of milk without nary a clue that you've entered in to The Stupid Zone.

For the last week or so, I've been receiving comments from concerned friends about the "title" of my blog. Being addled in the grey matter, I just assumed my occasionally over-zealous readers were commenting on the title of an individual post. You know instead of writing "Fighting monsters and Sanjuro (53)" I'd written "Fighting monsters and Sanjesus (53)" or something of the like. The comments continued though and finally I looked in to what these loyal readers had been discussing.

Turns out for the last 53 posts the actual title of my blog had an error in it. Instead of "Criterion Quest: my lifelong quest to watch every Criterion film ever made", it read "Criterion Quest: my lifelong quest to watch every Criterion film every made." Yup, I've been living in the shadow of stupidity for the last three months and only now can I shake my head at myself. Just realizing this, plagues me with insecurities about what other tiny errors are riddling the last fifty-three posts. Well, at least it riddles me with insecurities momentarily until I forget what I was talking about or writing about and I blithely stumble in to the next great disaster of my life.

You know how you're pretty sure you've seen each and every film clip of the Apollo missions? You've seen the rocket fire, you've seen the Earth spinning lazily from space, you've seen sweet Mother Moon floatin' like a big old hunk a cheese in the sky - you really feel like you've seen them all. Turns out, you, and I, have been completely wrong as Al Reinert, a director-journalist from the 1960s, compiled seemingly the greatest collection of clips about the Apollo missions you've never seen in to a film entitled For All Mankind (54). I'm only halfway through this film right now, but as someone who dedicated four months of my life in high school to scouring books and films for clips of Apollo missions, almost all of these jump out as completely new ... and absolutely brilliant. There is an image of an astronaut playfully releasing his rope and floating out and above the spaceship whic colored the idea of the space missions with a kind of, well, fun that I've never known before. Toss in the actual quotes and spoken pieces about the Apollo missions by those who actually lived through them and this is a truly amazing piece of filmmaking. I, exhausted from lack of sleep, managed to power through forty-five minutes of it last night, regardless of my near comatose state.

It's good to be back.

Tomorrow: For All Mankind (54)