THE RIGHT STUFF (Phillip Kaufman, USA, 1983) 10 R
I watched this with Ben Domenech at AFI Silver and later wrote this lengthy essay for his site The Federalist about how THE RIGHT STUFF united the two American cinemas, post-Vietnam, in the way that Ronald Reagan did for the country at large. (Another film like it would be most welcome in 2021.) This is the most representative excerpt and a link to the whole essay comes afterward ...
"Writer-director Philip Kaufman, following Tom Wolfe’s book, then focuses on the production of a new generation of masculine heroes — successors to the classical Man of the West as Yeager was portrayed. Here in 'The Right Stuff,' to paraphrase Kael, is an image of what a contemporary hero should be. An unsentimental one, but a true one that (and this is...