rebloga recommends.

looking to escape whatever terrible weather climate change has decided to bestow upon you (perhaps it's extreme heat, wildfires or sudden chill)? here's a suggestion - go to the movies! maybe you haven't been all summer in an effort to be outdoors as much as possible? i understand. but allow me to recommend two movies that we've seen recently that were quite, quite good.

1. Moon
I can't say too much about the plot in this one. To say more than a few sentences would give it all away. But here's the premise: It's sometime in the future, when we have figured out how to harness energy from the moon. So now all the energy we use on Earth is harvested from the moon. Sam Bell is an astronaut at the tail-end of a 3-year stint as the lone energy harvester on the moon. We see him interacting with GERTY (voiced by the awesome Kevin Spacey), a computery robot that is his sole interaction (other than viewing video uplinks from his wife). Basically, things get kind of crazy for Sam as loneliness sets in, and he mentally prepares to finally go home. Hopefully that set-up interests you enough to check out the movie. And if none of that got you, does it help that the director is David Bowie's son (Duncan Jones)?

2. District 9
So, you've seen the previews, right? At first, it seems like it will be an interesting documentary about South Africa. It will have cool footage and you'll hear about humanitarian aid efforts and firsthand accounts, and what the government is/is not doing right, etc. And then you see the space ship that is hanging over the city like an ominous gray storm cloud and you think to yourself, "...this is not a documentary."

Well, if you haven't seen the preview, that's what you would have thought. (And if you haven't even seen a preview yet... I anticipate that this is not your genre of movie.) That being said, the preview does not even touch the surface of the awesomeness of this movie.

Anyhow, the movie starts out similar to the trailer - interview footage, documentary-style footage. It sets up the scene for you, which is: 20-some years ago, this huge spaceship just sputtered out over Johannesburg. A review I read said that unlike the classic alien movie that explores "what would they do to us" this movie shows "what would we do to them." And we see that what we did was put the aliens in a camp (District 9), take away their rights and basically otherwise bully them around and ruin their lives. Our story starts when they decide that the camps have gotten so overrun, they are going to relocate 1.2 million aliens to a camp outside of the city. To do so, they need to get every alien's signature on the eviction notices (I know, it sounds ridiculous, but just hang on). Our hero is Wikus Van De Merwe (yea, I'm not sure how to pronounce that either) who heads up the committee to go into District 9 to get these signatures. After he has a run-in with a particular alien (Christopher Johnson - of course we'd dole out stupid generic names to the aliens), who seems to be suspiciously less drone-ish than the others, his life is never the same, as they say... There's really something for everyone in this - biology, science, aliens, family, betrayal, heart, and explodey bits (i.e., the alien guns don't just kill you, they explode you and everything around you).

Let me know if you go see/have seen either of these, and what you thought. Any others that I should make it my business to see?