The Man in the Moon is like a great short story, one of those masterpieces of language and mood where not one word is wrong, or unnecessary. It flows so smoothly from start to finish that it hardly even seems like an ordinary film. Usually I am aware of the screenwriter putting in obligatory scenes. I can hear the machinery grinding. Not this time. Although, in retrospect, I can see how carefully the plot was put together, how meticulously each event was prepared for, as I watched the film I was only aware of life passing by.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

Look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated. How could we?

For man has invented his doom; first step was touching the moon.

Apparently this is true, according to one The_Mad_Revisionist, who is incidentally the aforementioned one man who believes fervently that (a) the moon does not exist, and (b) there's a huge worldwide conspiracy covering this up. Amazing how times change; as little as a hundred years ago we used to keep loonies like this in big sanitariums where they get poked with sticks and hosed down with cold water every night. Nowadays, we just give them websites. Heh. I just realised you could make a half-decent Matrix parody out of this guy. There Is No Moon. (Meet the crazy moon man)

I stared at the water and saw the clouds reflected in it, saw them break to reveal the moon. It was the same moon I had known as John Daker. The same bland face could be made out staring down in contentment at the antics of the creatures of the planet it circled. How many disasters had that moon witnessed? How many foolish crusades? How many wars and battles and murders?

What’s the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?

the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples.

We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth.

Dr. Ginochio Gyves would have been the first man on the moon except for a trifling error of navigation. He lands. He sees a wild landscape, small pseudo-horses, and little brown people. But they are little Mexican people and little Mexican donkeys or burros, and he is in Mexico rather than on the moon. I always get those two places confused myself.

Never does the soul feel so far from human life as when a man finds himself alone in the vistas of the moon, either in the streets of a sleeping city, the avenues of the woods, or by the border of the sea. Earth, swayed perhaps by her powerful satellite, withdraws her sympathy from him and he wanders in a white void, wondering if he was born to be thus annulled.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. I am the first man to piss his pants on the moon.