Posts Tagged ‘Moon’
News of the week
(500) Days of Summer
Widely celebrated in the US (ovations at Sundance; an opening weekend netting over 24 times its budget), this emocore indie monolith will soon reach these shores. I actually quite look forward to it – it has a guilty appeal, and for all its affected eccentricity (come on, just look at the title), derivativeness and nauseating too-cool-for-schoolery, it looks to be incredibly well written. Reviews so far have been mixed: see here and there.
News of the week
The Lovely Bones
Aww. Sweet thin Peter Jackson has directed The Lovely Bones, adapted for the screen by his usual team of Walsh and Boyens. Gladly, they have brought the magical tapestry of their visual imaginations to bear on the work, but the material does come across quite sickly. Little miss Salmon’s in-between is an extraordinary creation, evoking various works of Dali-esque surrealism. Unfortunately, the trailer sandwiches this between the deeply moving opening act, in which every reaction shot acts as a signpost, a bleary-eyed upward glance or a grieving burial in hands, and the third act’s hackneyed murder-mystery cliché. The actors are also distractingly starry, but on the whole it looks to be promisingly well-directed. Will its strength prove to lie behind the camera (“in my own perfect world”)?
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.
