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"The Dish"
(Reviewed March 10, 2001)
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This is a gently inoffensive little movie that claims to be based on a true story, but is mostly a great big pack of flat-out fictions. (Too much of the plot and way too many of the characters are so phony-baloney that they seem to be straight out of an episode of "The Wonderful World of Disney.")
The dish of the title is an Australian dish antenna employed by NASA to transmit pictures from the Apollo 11 moon landing to TV sets worldwide. An amiable bunch of earnest but occasionally hapless Aussies (along with Patrick Warburton--Puddy of TV's "Seinfeld"--as a NASA adjunct) overcome computer problems and natural calamities to keep the feed online, so everyone can witness the most colossal waste of US taxpayer money in history. Sorry to get political, but the American space program always has struck me as a thoroughly egregious waste of gigantic mountains worth of cash, the biggest money sinkhole of any US government program (and that's saying a lot). These days, every time the shuttle takes off is like setting fire to about 20 billion dollars, all for the sake of providing "welfare for engineers." Vote Libertarian, folks. Vote Libertarian.
And now, back to the review in progress...
Being rather shallow, my favorite parts of the movie were those too-brief interludes involving the pert blonde local girl Janine, on whom one of the dish technicians has a quite understandable crush. Pleated miniskirts and kneesocks get me every time. Yum. Yum.
Back Row Grade: B-
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