Word: moons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Just from this synopsis of Moon, a searching and worthy first feature by Brit fashion maven Duncan Jones, you'll glean that the writer-director has maybe watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey once or twice, and is familiar with the stories of SF master Philip K. Dick, who wrote frequently about guys who don't realize they're robots. But Jones, 38, isn't just riffling these oeuvres in order to riff on them. He's long been fascinated by the evolving identity of man in the cyber-era. In 1995, as a philosophy major...
...Earth scientists have discovered a way to solve the planet's energy crisis: harvest an element called helium-3 from the Moon. Apparently this vast effort requires only one human: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who's nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone in a station on the lunar surface. All that time alone, with only a talking computer and some old TV shows as company, has made Sam edgy; he can't wait to be picked up and taken back to Earth, to his loving wife and child. His anxiety escalates to horror when he discovers...
...child was called Zowie Bowie - but only because there is an tantalizing connection between a song of the father and the film of the son. Bowie's Space Oddity, from 1969, takes its punning title from the Kubrick movie the year before. Released nine days before the Apollo 11 moon landing, and played by the BBC in its coverage of the event, it describes the communication of a lonely astronaut: "This is Major Tom to Ground Control... / Here am I sitting in a tin can / Far above the world./ Planet Earth is blue,/ And there's nothing...
...Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Rockwell has honed his specialty of runty ranters. His standard character is the kind of highly caffeinated punk who, in any group, would be voted most likely to screw up the mission. He brings some of that chip-on-shoulder orneriness to Moon - at times you wonder how Sam aced the screening process and got the job - and to the second Sam, a Top Gun-type who fulminates while the first one mewls. But there's a tenderness, too, in Rockwell's depiction, from the inside, of a man out of his shallows...
...what does Somalia receive? Around 4,800 African Union troops from Burundi and Uganda. Last month, the British ambassador to the U.N. assured reporters in the capital of neighboring Ethiopia that although U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has so far demurred on Somalia, "the question of a United Nations peacekeeping mission remains on the table...