Moon (2009)
EDIT: It is August 4th, 2009. I apologize for the late post, but better late than never...
While this entry will mostly be devoted to reviewing Duncan Jones' Moon, I will also be talking about the many, many deaths that have occurred over the past week-and-a-half (this also hasn't been a good week for me either, hence the lateness of this entry).
Last week saw the death of Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's sidekick throughout the 1970's and 1980's, a staple of late-night television and a personality that juxtaposed and counterpointed exceedingly well with the affable and lively Carson. Mr. McMahon's deep voice is almost instantly recognizable with TV fans, and while I cannot vouch for his career (being only 22 and too young to remember his work), he was truly great, an icon of television.
Thursday, June 25 was also the date that Farrah Fawcett, iconic actress from the 1970's and 1980's, succumbed to cancer at the age of 62. While Ms. Fawcett was featured in roles in films such as Logan's Run, Saturn 3, and episodes of S.W.A.T. and The Six Million Dollar Man, she achieved true star status as Jill Munroe in Charlie's Angels, and met critical acclaim in the drama The Burning Bed some years later. A poster featuring Ms. Fawcett in a red swimsuit defined the 1970's woman, and that image alone has sold over 11 million copies since its release in the late 1970's. Ms. Fawcett had been receiving treatment for cancer for nearly six years before finally succumbing on Thursday morning in Santa Monica.
Thursday finally also brought about the shocker of the decade as Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed (and rightfully so) King of Pop, died of cardiac arrest at the age of 50 (in case you've been living under a rock in a cave at the bottom of a mountain for the past 2 weeks and just now found out). With all the tributes and specials that have aired about him in the past week, anything I add here will seem somewhat anticlimactic. However, I will say that whatever your predisposition about him (based largely on the legal troubles and eccentric behaviors he'd exhibited for the past few years), he truly did redefine pop music and influenced our entire generation of entertainers. And while his music and performances are reminiscent of James Brown and Little Richard and, to an extent, Elvis Prestley, he redefined everything they did, made it his own, and pushed it beyond anything they could have dared. Few seemed able to separate Michael Jackson the man from Michael Jackson the entertainer. And he did everything he could to entertain. For me, Michael Jackson will always exist as he did from 1980 to 1993, where everything he did was new (seriously, what other artist or band would premiere a music video that could be considered an event?). I was waiting to see what the tabloids would do: knowing they'd spent the past decade making money smearing him, I just wanted to laugh at their attempts to pretend to care that he'd died (just today I read an article in the Post once again referring to him as "Jacko", fucking vultures.) It was just a surreally sad day, watching all of his music videos (it took Michael Jackson dying for MTV to actually play music videos again). His appearance on The Simpsons was sublime (I tried finding good quality snippets of his "Happy Birthday Lisa", but no avail), and I still think "A-B-C' and "I Want You Back" by the Jackson 5 is the very defenition of pure, unadulterated happiness, the aural version of candy. You did a lot, Mr. Jackson, and influenced a lot of people. There won't be another like you.
EDIT: This is a late post, and this is all I will say about the above celebrities. Too much of a deal has been made of Michael Jackson, I've probably matched the coverage of Farrah Fawcett, and, surprisingly, I'm pretty sure I've surpassed every network in their mention of Mr. McMahon. And with that...I'm done.
Now, on to the film.
Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, a man atthe end of his three-year contract as the sole mechanic on a moon-based station. Bell acts primarily as a mechanic and technician, not at all the know-how guys how sent him there, nor a scientist researching anything of interest. The company in question (Lunar Industries) is the equivalent of an energy conglomerate today (Lunar Industries harvests solar energy (helium-3) trapped in the moon's soil, and Sam's mission is to send shipments of the fuel back). The year? Unspecified and unimportant, all that is important is that it is sometime after next year, a future that looks plausible and feels just as plausible.
Sam, as we learn early on, is desperately lonely. The real-time communications with Earth is disrupted, so all he can rely on are prerecorded messages sent from his wife, Tess, and daughter, Eve. In charge of most of the technical aspects, keeping him on schedule, and providing a sort of friendship is the clunky, moderately mobile robot, GERTY (voiced perfectly by Kevin Spacey). While out investigating a fault in one of tehe harvesters, Sam crashes his rover and blacks out, only to wake up again in his base with no memory of how he'd gotten there. An investigation into the station's logs hint that something a bit sinister is actually occurring, and Sam returns to the site of the crash only to literally find himself lying injured in the rover he'd wrecked. Now with what apepars to be his clone in tow, Sam must find out what happened that he has a clone, how long he's been on the base, and how to escape the lunar base before a Lunar Industries rescue team arrives in a matter of days.
That might seem a cut-and-dry look at the film, but there truly is something more going on in the story. Duncan Jones' minimalist direction makes great use of the practical effects he utilizes for the exterior scenes, and showcases Sam Rockwell's ability to command the scene (or, in this case, the entire film) merely with a look of his eye. The editing likewise worked exceedingly well not just in keeping the pace of the film comfortable (especially when Rockwell's barely interacting with anyone else), but also in effectively convincing the viewer that Rockwell is actually interacting with his clone (the repartee he has with himself is particularly witty and flows naturally).
The production design by Tony Noble is reminiscent of 2001, but unlike that film, the whites and greys of the space station are soiled with dirt and oil and grime, or populated with posters, pictures, calendars, dirty dishes and clothes, and even a ping-pong table to provide a more lived-in, less antiseptic look of the future. And while GERTY sounds a lot like HAL, GERTY's use of emoticons is endearing (and funny) and actually makes him resonate as a character. The practical effects (again) were extremely convincing and I'm happy to see that they're not entirely obsolete. Even the fact the Bell's EVA suit is grimey and dirty, and that BEll himself wears a baseball cap while in his rover creates a real-world, lived-in sensation to the film).
Clint Mansell's score, as always, impresses. He provides a moody theme that opens and closes the film which is at once isolating and empowering (perhaps his best score since The Fountain, which is still my all-time favorite of his). Gary Shaw's minimalist cinematography highlights the starkness of Bell's world, as well as the foreboding sense of his predicament (lots of frames-within-the-frame; claustrophobic close-ups; lighting that hightlights the stark whites and greys of the interiors).
Moon, to me, is less about what it means to be alive, and more to do with how, to most of the world (which here is portrayed as distant, unreachable, and difficult to relate with), we are expendable: here to do our job and disappear. Our aspirations--- whether they be to escape, be happy, or even just find meaning in what would appear to the everyman to be our common, meaningless lives--- mean little. Just get the job and move on. That doesn't do for Sam Bell. And it shouldn't do for us.
If you want a great film with a great performance, a slick, stylized look, and well-paced direction by a new director (who happens to be David Bowie's son!), I highly recommend Moon as the antidote to what is looking to be a rather dour summer.
Below are trailers to the few films I'm actually interested in seeing later this summer:
P.S. --- I shall be attending the Toronto Film Festival this year as well; sadly, not for something on which I'd worked, but hopefully I shall be seeing Ong Bak 2.
