I watched two movies in the past few days: Astronaut and Driveways. I had not heard of either. I found them surfing around the movies on the channel guide and reading about them.
Driveways was the first I watched. The Xfinity channel guide blurb was terse and not entirely compelling: “(2021) A lonely boy goes with his mother to help clean out his aunt’s house.” It had ratings of 99 and 86 percent. It was early in the morning, there was nothing else on, the ratings were high, so I gave it a shot. It starred Brian Dennehy (1938-2020). This was his last movie.
The next morning. I repeated the channel surfing exercise with the same aim of finding a suitable movie to pass the time (dare I reveal while I was preparing a blog post). I found Astronaut. The title of this movie was more promising as was the channel guide blurb: “(2019) A widower wins a once in a lifetime change to travel on the first commercial flight to outer space.” It only had a rating of 66% but the title and channel guide blurb hinted that there might be more action and thrills. This movie starred Richard Dreyfuss (1947) and this is not his last movie as he has made five since.
In both movies the main characters, Angus Stewart (Dreyfuss) and Del (Dennehy) are retirees, basically near the end of their lives. Both of them were widowers that missed their wives and were dealing with regret for maybe not appreciating them enough and not spending enough time with them. They both also have to deal with their daughters putting them in assisted living/nursing homes. Neither of them is happy about it.
Angus, a retired civil engineer, encouraged by his grandson applies to a lottery to be an astronaut on the first commercial space flight. He lies about his age to qualify and gets selected as a finalist. He is not chosen in the television interview of each finalist, he had a senior, cognitive meltdown, moment that easily disqualified him. But, while on sight of where the liquid hydrogen powered space plane was to take off on a really long runway, he had plenty of cognition to realize there was an O-Ring like flaw not in the vehicle but the aging runaway (he was a civil engineer that worked on road and runways), that would have catastrophic effects during the vehicle launch. Of course, he was not initially believed because he was old and had that senior moment on national television. He perseveres, convinces everyone, saves the day, and gets to fly the mission… his last hurrah before passing.
In Driveways, the lonely boy, Cody, did accompany his mom to empty out the house of his aunt, his mother’s sister, who was an epic hoarder. While his mother was dealing with that, Cody and the gruff old, retired cop next door, Del, became friends. They became really good friends. They were just what the other needed. When his mother told him she had decided to move them into his aunt’s house, Cody was excited to move next to Del. It was the same day, sadly, that Del’s daughter told him she was moving him to Seattle from Poughkeepsie and had arranged a facility for him to move into. At this point, the movie gently drifted into an ending that implied Del passed and that Cody would OK for the experience of having Del as his friend.
Driveways was a more of an art film than Astronaut. I did enjoy them both. I was just a wee bit unsettled as I was able to relate to both Del and Angus in a way. I was glad that my channel surfing today did serve up another of these old geezer last hurrah movies.
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