Moon

To have any shot at enjoying the sci-fi mystery "Moon" you have to stop reading about it. There probably isn't one review in 50 that will refrain from spilling the movie's beans, since there is almost no way to examine the movie without doing so. So let us carefully say that "Moon" is a decent example of the kind of space-exploration movie we've seen since the original "Alien. " This type of movie (think "Outland") departs from the classic "Space Odyssey" view of space (antiseptic, mystical)

LOS ANGELES - The New Year's countdown to the moon has begun. NASA said Wednesday that its twin spacecraft were on course to arrive back-to-back at the moon after a 31/2-month journey. "We're on our way there," said project manager David Lehman of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the $496 million mission. The Grail probes - short for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory - won't land on the lunar surface. Instead, they were poised to slip into orbit to study the uneven lunar gravity field.

GAPYEONG, SOUTH KOREA - The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, best known for conducting mass weddings involving thousands of couples, was a self-proclaimed messiah, but he was at least as good at attracting dollars as he was at drawing converts. His Unification Church claims 3 million followers, though ex-members and critics put the number at no more than 100,000. There is no questioning the vastness of the business empire Moon created through his church: ventures in several countries from hospitals and newspapers to cars and sushi, and even professional sports teams and a ballet troupe.

'My mind's been acting kind of weird lately," a worried Sam Bell says to his constant, and only, companion, a robot named Gerty 3000. The sole crew member of a lunar base where helium 3 is being mined for an energy-starved Earth, Sam - a virtuoso turn from Sam Rockwell - is pretty much the only character in Moon , an eerie near-future tale from filmmaker Duncan Jones. In his beard and baseball cap, working the control panels, doing his exercises, watering the plants - and occasionally taking a rover out across the cratered terrain to check a "live one" in the mines - Sam is nearing the end of his three-year tour of duty for Lunar Industries.

A woman, an armchair, a viola: Laurie Anderson's The End of the Moon is a stripped-down, 90-minute performance art piece about time, space, fear, regret and the notion that "life itself is just bad art. " Anderson floated the latter idea - that the real world is full of "jumbled characters, who disappear without warning / And too many writers, working all night" - from the candlelit stage of the Prince Music Theater Thursday, the first of three...

How old were you when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon more than 20 years ago? This weekend, you can reminisce with your children about that historic moment at a performance of Theaterwork/USA's "Footprints on the Moon. " Presented by the Annenberg Center Theater for Children Series, this musical revue salutes the American space program and the challenges and milestones leading up to the first lunar landing. "Footprints on the Moon," a series of musical skits performed by a company of five actors, is directed by Stuart Ross, the co-author of the Broadway musical Starmites.

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon 20 years ago, withstood the pressure of fame. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, the second moon-walker, was not so lucky. After they returned to Earth as heroes in the summer of 1969 - along with pilot Michael Collins, who had stayed in lunar orbit - there were months of public appearances, goodwill visits abroad and seemingly endless interviews and autograph-signings. The three Apollo 11 astronauts remained with NASA for a while. In 1971, Armstrong retreated to the privacy he craved.

It's fitting that Thursday night's moon was full. Hank Williams III - son of Hank Jr., grandson of Hank - was in Philly packing the TLA with rockabilly kids, punks, and honky-tonk elders. No werewolf could hold a candle to him. Not to Hank III's nasal whiskey-drenched growl, primal howl, or the careening country, heaving metal, and guttural "hellbilly" his Damn Band and Assjack brought to this rowdy audience. Besides, what wolf could cover hillbilly classics from David Allen Coe as well as the demonic metal of Pentagram?

Drive out Route 70, past where streets are labeled, past Chatsworth, out where late at night radio stations come in better from Ontario than from Philadelphia, down a road marked only by an aluminum-painted oil drum with a mailbox on top, and you come to the Penn State Forest. "It's not in any town," said Bert Nixdorf of Mount Holly, co-chairman of outings for the Sierra Club of West Jersey Group. Nixdorf leads several hikes a month in southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Tonight, he will lead another seven-mile moonlit hike by Lake Oswego not much different from one he led last Saturday.

Everything in Eugene O'Neill's sprawling, tender A Moon for the Misbegotten leads toward or away from the wrenching third act. Unfolding under a cleansing moon near a large rock on a hardscrabble Connecticut farm, this long duologue is virtually a play in itself - beginning in duplicity and misunderstanding, rising to encompass spiritual regeneration and the recognition of things as they are, then subsiding in a coda of release. It is an Everest of an encounter, this sharing of souls between the hard- drinking James Tyrone, Broadway womanizer and self-styled "third-rate ham," and the awkward farm girl Josie Hogan, whose claims to wantonness disguise her profound need and insecurity.