I didn’t have to travel all the way to New York to see “Moon” (now playing at the Ritz Bourse), but I was in town and it was playing on the Upper West Side so there I was. “Moon” is Duncan Jones’ directorial debut, and the fact that he is David Bowie’s son (originally named Zowie) made me think about Major Tom more than once as I was watching it. Both song and film depict a spaceman’s loneliness and isolation in a way that’s haunting and memorable. Sam Bell (in a tour de force performance by Sam Rockwell) is alone in space except for his robot companion Gerty (voice of Kevin Spacey–annoying until I got into the story) and occasional video transmissions from earth. Gerty isn’t as evil as Hal in “2001: a Space Odyssey”, in fact his mechanical neutrality displayed in a smiley or sad face shows more compassion than the corporate fuel company Sam works for (it’s sometime in the future and the moon supplies clean helium fuel for the earth). Sam is finishing up a three year contract as the sole worker at the station. He’s lonely, he’s scruffy, he misses his wife and young daughter whom he has had to watch grow up via botched video transmissions, but he’s heading home soon and he’s happy about it…then things begin to get weird. To say you’re in for a ride at this point would be an overstatement because “Moon”, to its credit, is much too restrained a movie for that. Rockwell emotes, in a convincing and at times humorous fashion, but Jones holds back, building to a heart beating climax that relies solely on the fact that we identify with Sam’s humanity, even if he is less than human or at least a different type of human. I don’t want to give too much away here, because “Moon”–like its stark minimalistic style–is best served cold. Jones’ references to great sci-fi classics from the past never seem cheap or ripped-off. He doesn’t break any new ground in the genre, but he tells a good and intelligent story, which is something the genre has been lacking in recent years. The effects are, well, effective, serving the story and never upstaging it. The overall production is neither “2001″ formalism nor “Alien” realism, but somewhere in between, which seems just right. Overall, “Moon” deserves the positive reviews it’s garnered. It may not blow you away (sorry no big explosions), but it doesn’t have to. This sci-fi geek gives “Moon” a strong antenna up. It deserves to be seen, thought about and discussed, the way movies intended for thinking adults used to be.
The next movie I caught down at the Film Forum, the documentary “Food, Inc.”(also currently playing at the Ritz Bourse and Bryn Mawr Film Institute) is similar to “Moon” in its theme of what happens when the corporation’s profit margin is confronted with fragile human needs. The bottom line: it doesn’t give a shit. I emerged from “Food, Inc.” shaky and glad to be a vegetarian, but also very distressed about the future of our children’s health. This is a very serious subject and I encourage everyone to see this film even if it scares you to death. You can watch the first few minutes of it here. From the fast food drive-thru to the slaughterhouses owned by a few corporations, “Food, Inc.” removes the veil of what we think we’re eating when we buy a “farm fresh” product in the grocery store (the illusion of myriad choices turns out to be mostly a poisonous concoction of high fructose corn syrup) and reveals the ugly truth that there is a world food shortage of healthy, real food, and the crap that we’re eating is making us fat, sick and sometimes even killing us and our children–the statistics on childhood obesity and diseases like diabetes are staggering. That knowledge, combined with the American health insurance crisis, is a wake-up call indeed. Our food supply may be sugar-coated, but the film’s message is not. As distressing as it is, it does offer hope. The power is in the hands of the consumer to demand quality food (even if your local grocer is Walmart) and to boycott fast food, junk food and horrendous and dangerously processed meat products. Definitely something to chew on.
Gina Andreoli is a Bucks County filmmaker (geminirising.tv)
