Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic?

This week we get love in the age of the Apollo missions. Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star in the romantic comedy drama Fly Me To The Moon. Directed by Greg Berlanti (who I think most of you know from the Arrowverse shows on the CW), the movie follows a relationship between a marketing specialist and a NASA director in the 1960’s.

The 60’s remains a popular era in which to set movies. There’s the soundtracks of course —- I’m assuming the title of the aforementioned film is a reference to the Frank Sinatra version that became a hit during the Apollo missions. The 60’s is also when rock and roll really took hold in the mainstream. When people think the 60’s, they think Elvis and the Beatles and perhaps made up band that remind them of both.

There are the crisp fashions which both remind one of an earlier era but also don’t look all that different from the crisp fits of the modern day. The style lives on through movie and television reruns and through remakes to remind you what a well-dressed celebrity looks like.

This is the era that gave us Audrey Hepburn and Robert Redford, after all.

Were people in real life ever that well dressed? This is why I appreciate the films to Ray
Dennis Steckler. Sure, they’re bad movies. But if The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies shows us anything, a lot of people in the 60’s were slobs like in every era.

While most of us on this site never lived through the 60’s, so much of that era still echoes through time. It’s signage erected during that time. It’s old traditions like summer camp we were made to live through that meant a lot to our parents and were passed down to us because that’s how a childhood should be properly spent.

For many, it was the last time the world felt truly hopeful before it all came crashing down with the Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King assassination, the escalating Cold War, Watergate, and the Vietnam War all came crashing down to remind us of how broken the world really was.

But there could be a simpler reason. It could because the 60’s were all about innovation. As Simon Reynolds puts it (Retromania), “It’s the absence of revivalism and nostalgia during the sixties itself that partially accounts for why there have been endless sixties revivals ever since.”

Today’s bonus prompt: what is the best period piece set in the 1960’s?