Movie Review: Moon

Space Oddity

“Moon” shows signs of filmmaking in a vacuum.

by Wayne Melton

Ground control to Major Tom: Your movie is awfully reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Stanley Kubrick’s highly regarded science-fiction film from the ’60s. So while the lunar suspense of the new film, “Moon,” explores the creepiness of extended living outside Earth’s gravity, its reverence for well-known works that were obvious influences detracts rather than enhances the story.

The most interesting aspect turns out to be whether it would have made it out of orbit were its writer and director, Duncan Jones, not the progeny of Ziggy Stardust himself, rock star David Bowie, also a sci-fi veteran (see “The Man Who Fell to Earth”).

Snow Angels

This review first appeared on StyleWeekly.com

“Snow Angels” lets nothing thaw the icy sadness of its small-town drama.
by Wayne Melton

An exhausting bleakness pervades the work of David Gordon Green, the filmmaker behind a string of modest movies he’s written and directed featuring lonely small-town landscapes populated by anxious lives.

So it seems natural that for an adaptation Green would pick a work like the popular coming-of-age novel by Stewart O’Nan, set in a town terminally snowed in. A less-earnest filmmaker might have inserted an unruly patch of vitality in such a landscape, some greenery or sunshine, but here the emotional and physical iciness are entirely reflected in each other. No one would accuse Green of being wishy-washy or subtle. Depression is his agenda, and in “Snow Angels” no amount of humor or irony is allowed to get in the way.