‘People didn’t like women in space’: how Sally Ride made history and paid the price

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Ride was the first US woman in space – but a National Geographic documentary looks at how she was forced to hide her queerness to succeed A week before Sally – a documentary about the first American woman to fly into space – landed at the Sundance film festival in January, Nasa employees received emails informing them how Donald Trump’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rollbacks would take effect. Contracts and offices associated with DEI programs were to be terminated. Staff were given Orwellian instruction to inform the government of any attempt to disguise inclusion efforts in “coded or imprecise language”. In the weeks to follow, Nasa would take back its promise to send the first woman and person of color to the moon’s surface. Meanwhile, employees are reported to be hiding their rainbow flags and any other expressions of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community, allegedly because they were instructed to do so though Nasa denies those claims. Continue reading... from Film |...
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Haunted Mansion review – Disney theme-park chiller is joyless Halloween merch

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Lakeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot save this laborious story of a creepy old dwelling and the awful Hatbox Ghost

There’s scope for a genuinely disturbing and subversive horror set in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the attraction which first opened at the original theme park in Anaheim in California in 1969, with cloned versions appearing at the Magic Kingdom in Florida in 1971 and Tokyo Disneyland in 1983. There’s also scope for a properly funny, amiably creepy Goosebumps-type family comedy based on it. But this tiresome, convoluted piece of corporate IP product isn’t it; like the 2003 film version with Eddie Murphy, it feels cynical – though I must admit I have never seen the Muppets Haunted Mansion special.

This new attempt to cross-monetise the tourist walkthrough is laborious and joyless while the throwaway funny lines, which do exist, only serve in the end to remind you how clunky it really is overall. Writer Katie Dippold has worked on funny movies and TV shows such as Parks and Recreation and Ghostbusters, but this isn’t her A-game.

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