Posts Tagged ‘Duncan Jones’
EIFF Awards 2009
Today, the award winners of the 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival were announced in a public ceremony at the Filmhouse Cinema, by artistic directors Hannah McGill and Diane Henderson, alongside patrons Sir Sean Connery and Seamus McGarvey.
The big prize, the Michael Powell Award (Best New British Feature Film) was inaugurated in 1993, and is supported by the UK Film Council. It was adjudicated this year by an international jury comprising Joe Wright (director of Atonement), Claudia Puig (film critic), Sacha Horler (actress in My Year Without Sex), Janet Street-Porter (journalist, author) and finally, Frank Langella (most recently starring in Frost/Nixon). Edifyingly, they deigned to select Duncan Jones’s majestic first feature, Moon. The jury citation went as follows: “We award MOON for its singular vision and remarkably assured direction as well as for the inspired manner in which it transcends genre. The central performance by Sam Rockwell embodies the film’s emotional complexity and compelling philosophical perspective”.
Moon ****
Moon, a giant leap for first-time director Duncan Jones, makes intelligent and affectionate use of many ideas from the great science fiction concept films. It is modest and virtuous, but in the best way – whilst reverent and perhaps a little too modest, too conservative in scope, it refuses to exploit its inspiration, and sticks to a moral code that keeps its philosophical investigation beyond most kinds of reproach. It is also a film best seen without reading any previews or analysis: that’s best kept for the post-viewing experience! We follow Sam (a role written for Jones’s buddy, Sam Rockwell), an isolated lunar technician maintaining a Helium-3 harvesting operation on the dark side of the moon. He lives with Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), an apparently benevolent computer and mouth of the base. And soon, he is due to return home, reaching the end of a three year contract.
