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It’s been a while since I wrote a movie review and posted it on this blog. However since this is the time of riots in the streets and COVID-19 plus there’s no place to go, new movies seemed like a pretty safe subject.
Peter Travers, the movie reviewer for Rolling Stone magazine and the host of Popcorn on ABC TV, just presented a list of major motion pictures that were coming out this summer. And of course, most of them were not going to appear in movie theaters so the only place left for them to go were streaming services. And the very first one he mentioned was a very low budget film noir science fiction thriller that takes place in a little bitty town in New Mexico in the late 1950’s or early 1960’s. This movie is called The Vast of Night and it is a wonderful movie by first time feature director, Andrew Patterson. You can find this movie on Amazon Prime since it was produced by Amazon Studios, and it’s truly worth the search.
WOTW Radio Station where the mystery begins.
Basic story is a small town in the 1950s and a couple of teenage science nerds uncover a strange sound on the phone lines and then on the radio air waves. They spend the entire movie trying to track it down only to find it comes from above. In the meantime, during their search they run into interesting characters and scary stories of previous alien visitations and people being taken like in Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Oh, so you’ve all heard this movie plot before, right? Well not exactly, because this is told in a fresh new super interesting way unlike any science fiction movie I have ever seen or heard.
Changing camera styles like people change their socks you go from intense closeups that last for minutes at a time to tracking shots that follow our heroes wandering through their small town. Sometimes the lighting is moody and dark, other times it is bright and cheerful filled with color. How the director Andrew Patterson got this much movie from what is obviously a very limited budget is a work of genius.
Sierra McCormick as Fay as she discovers the sounds from Outer Spaces.
Patterson also allows his actors a lot of room to do their work and in the process gets some amazing performances. Especially an about 10 minutes sequence with no cuts where Sierra McComick from Supernatural, who plays the female lead Fay, sits at an old manual phone switchboard for a small town and connects the different people who call. Yet during this sequence the first hint of what is to come appear through the phone lines and you watch Fay’s growing concern as to is happening. She handles multiple calls and each one is different but also you see her increasing puzzlement and fascination as the mystery begins to unfold. Her performance by such a young actress is astonishing.
However, this not even the most outstanding performance in the movie. That belongs to Gail Cronauer as Mabel. Ms. Cronauer delivers a long, extended monologue that in lesser hands would have bored the short attention span of today’s audiences, but she is riveting. Even more amazing is there are no cutaways during her long scene as she is filmed from only one side of her face, yet she holds the screen totally.
Jack Horowitz as DJ Everett Sloan
Another shout out as well to Cinematographer M.I.Littin- Menz and his film/light crew for some really inventive shooting. There is one extended tracking sequence where the camera goes through the entire town including inside a high school basketball game which most of the small-town citizens are attending that I am not really sure how they accomplished it. At first, I thought is was a drone shot then a steady cam then…. However, they did it – it is a great sequence and the editing by Junius Tully is flawless.
My only complement is it starts extremely slow. It is about 20 minutes before we get to anything that resembles a plot point. And that is the point because Patterson and his screenwriters James Montague and Craig W Sanger are purposely distancing you from the material. This is a movie where you have to come to it, it’s not going to come to you. Patterson is also making you pay attention to the small details that will become very important later on in the movie. Boring small town existence in the middle of nowhere, the 1950 switch board telephone system and reel to reel tape recorders which seem incredibly innocuous at first but later become very important as the movie progresses. But if you’re looking for a movie to jump at you from the 1st frame this is not the movie for you. This one takes some patience, but it’s worth it.
This movie season is going to be very different and most of it will be in your home or a drive-in. The is the first highly recommended movie of the summer and you should try to find in on Amazon Prime.
To say that Van Horn, TX is slow would be an understatement. In the little hamlet of 2000+ people there is truly not much to see or do IN Van Horn. There are a couple of interesting buildings but by and large the town would be considered very sleepy. But outside of Van Horn is another story.
Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin capsule -Photo MATTHEW STAVER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, must think that Van Horn is a special place since he bought over 165,000 acres of land just outside of the small town to build his spaceport where flight tests of the New Shepard are carried out by Blue Origin, his private space company. The ranch is called the Corn Ranch, and it is very hush-hush. Yet, the financial boost that you would expect from all those engineers and science types does not appear to have helped Van Horn much. There are several closed down businesses that had put up Welcome Blue Origin banners up to welcome Bezos and company.
Inside the Time Clock Tunnel – Photo The Long Now Foundation
Bezos is also digging a hole on his ranch to place a 10000 year old clock/time capsule. Actually, it is more complex than that. Bezos is hollowing out a mountain on his ranch to place the clock inside. Installation has already begun on this project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in, along with the hollowed-out mountain, with the goal of building a 500 foot mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia. According to the website for Bezos’ 10,000-year clock, visitors will (in theory) be able to view the finished timepiece, although the site notes that it’ll be a rough trip. “The nearest airport is several hours away by car” and a rugged foot trail that rises almost 2,000 feet above the valley floor. Fortunately, if the clock runs for as long as it claims, you’ll have plenty of time to plan your trip.
First prototype of the 10000 year old clock – Photo The Long View Foundation
Another interesting factoid of Van Horn is that it is the Western most incorporated town in the Central Time zone. Yet, the only other reason that I can think of to recommend stopping off in Van Horn until the spaceport is built is that it is the southern gateway to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns.
Photo – paintyourlandscape.com
The Guadalupe Mountains (Spanish: Sierra de Guadalupe) are a mountain range located in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The range includes the highest summit in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, 8,751 ft, and the “signature peak” of West Texas, El Capitan, both of which are located within Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Photo – NPS.com
You drive north out of Van Horn on Texas Highway 54 for about 45 miles or about an hour until you hook up with US Highway 62 that will lead you up into the mountains toward Guadalupe National Park and further on to the Carlsbad Caverns tourist complex in New Mexico. Along the scenic drive you pass the 12800 acre Sierra Ranch.
After the American Civil War, this area was the site of some savage Indian War battles between the Mescalero Apaches and a cavalry unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers. A main travel passage for settlers, mail, and stage coaches came through the Guadalupe Pass and were often attacked by the Apache tribe. The cavalry unit was ordered to the area to stop Indian raids on settlements and mail stage routes. During the winter of 1869, Lt. H.B. Cushing led his troops into the Guadalupe Mountains and destroyed two Mescalero Apache camps. The Mescalero Apache were eventually driven out of the area and into US Indian reservations.
Guadalupe Mountains – Photo National-parks.com
The national park is beautiful and has many hikes of all levels that lead to wondrous sights including one that leads to an original ranch house located next to a natural spring that was the site of a prolonged fight between a rancher who wanted the land and the Apache tribe. Eventually the rancher won and drove what remained of the tribe out of the area forever. The ranch is beautiful, but the history of it not so much.
Hotel El Capitan Photo James Carey
After taking that long detour to the mountains, it was an hour back to Van Horn and Interstate 20 and east toward Abilene. Right as you drive into Van Horn on Texas 54 you see right in front of you the most interesting building in Van Horn, the El Capitan Hotel. The hotel is a 5-star hotel built in the 1930’s. In the 1973, the hotel was convert to a bank. In 2007, Lanna and Joe Duncan of Fort Davis purchased the building from the bank with the plan to convert it back into a hotel. They rebuilt almost everything including all new bathrooms with all new plumbing. The hotel is one of five identical hotels all built in the West Texas/Carlsbad area.
Hotel Capitan – Photo James Carey
As you drive across the flat West Texas landscape you notice something that is constant and unending. The Wind! It is part of the nature and atmosphere of this environment. The constant blowing wind. And it makes you think why not wind turbines? This is the perfect place for them – however, this is Texas. The land of oil and natural gas. That is the business that drives much of America’s business engine and much of its political machine. As you approach Midland, it is obvious what part of the world you are in. Oil well after oil well, business after business that are connected to the oil business. The chances of a wind turbine out here are nil.
Yet, the wind is persistent and sustained. And as you get closer to Sweetwater you begin to understand that oil and gas maybe king but close behind is Wind Power. Huge wind turbines in all directions by the hundreds. Texas dominates the nation’s wind energy production, adding far more generating capacity than any other state last year and having more installed wind power capacity than all but five countries in the world, the U.S. Energy Department.
Texas has vaulted to the top of wind power by not only exploiting the strong winds of West Texas, but also by building the transmission to move the electricity from remote regions to state population areas. The state’s wind energy production, meanwhile, is only expected to increase and provide a growing share of the state’s electricity as advancing technology allows turbines to generate at lower wind speeds and improved weather forecasting makes it easier to integrate it into the grid. Currently, wind power is estimated to provide 17% of Texas growing power needs.
Texas added more than 2,300 megawatts of wind power last year, nearly three times the amount added by the next closest state, Oklahoma, which increased its wind generating capacity by about 850 megawatts. At the end of 2017, Texas had more than 10,000+ wind turbines producing over 22,000 megawatts of wind power, more than triple Oklahoma’s 7,500 megawatts of wind generating capacity, the second highest in the nation.
Yet, oil and gas is king in West Texas so even as Texas rises to the top of the wind power business, Texas politicians are trying to find ways to undercut the federal subsides for renewable energy which they claim are an unfair advantage. It makes one wonder why can you not have both?
After 33o miles of flat, flat road with the constant whisper of blowing wind in my ear, I pulled into a cheap motel in Abileen. A long tiring day but found out some very interesting about Texas that I did not know.
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