DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Duncan Jones can hardly be accused on trading on the name of a famous parent. After all, he could still be going by the moniker Zowie Bowie that his father David stuck him with as a child, deciding instead to return to his rather less ostentatious original name. But he seems to be daring journalists to use “Space Oddity” in titles of pieces about his debut feature, which is about, well, odd events in space. Sam Rockwell stars (and is largely the only actor on screen) in a role written specifically for him, as a blue-collar space worker, the sole occupant of a mining operation on the Moon which is digging up Helium-3 from beneath the Moon’s surface for delivery as a fusion fuel back on Earth. But after an excursion out of his bunker ends in an accident, it seems he’s no longer alone up there. Only his new companion appears to be him, and it’s unclear if he’s just gone batty only weeks shy of the end of his three-year stint up there, or if there’s something stranger going on.
While the setting is space, and the story is technically sci-fi, this isn’t a big-budget, effects-laden film. Jones made Moon for a mere $5 million, and favored models and practical effects over CGI. That, combined with its solitary and contemplative tone, makes it much more a companion to the more spartan sci-fi pieces of the 1970s — such as Silent Running, which Jones cites as an influence, and from which he even hired some of his special effects team — than Star Trek or Terminator. And since space is going to be a place where mankind first has to deal with crushing loneliness and empty desolation long before we ever fight epic laser battles, films like Moon have the potential to feel far more relevant, despite their unfamiliar settings.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of theaters around the area.
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Made in Hong Kong Film Festival
The tenth 14th iteration of the Freer’s celebration of Hong Kong cinema presents nine titles over the next couple of months, mixing contemporary with classic and favorites with lesser-known titles. Every weekend for the rest of July and August will feature a different film, including Stephen Chow’s massive hit Kung Fu Hustle, and the classic 1960s precursor to the beautifully choreographed martial arts fight scenes of Hero and Crouching Tiger, King Hu’s gorgeous Come Drink With Me. The festival opens this week with a screening of Hong Kong master Johnnie To’s 2004 Kurosawa tribute, Throw Down, which manages to combine judo, alcoholism, and the seedy neon underbelly of Hong Kong into a straight-faced comedy. Mea culpa everyone, we referenced an archived schedule from a previous year of the festival. The 2009 festival schedule is here, and features titles like Yau Na-hoi’s Eye in the Sky and Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time Redux.
View the trailer for Throw Down.
Various Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays beginning this weekend until the end of August at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium. See the schedule for upcoming programming.
