‘Continental’: Rich in character

A businessman takes a bus to a distant forest and vanishes. A hotel clerk leaves cryptic telephone messages to herself. An insurance salesman fights loneliness and sexual frustration.

Everybody’s lost in Continental, a Film Without Guns, Stéphane Lafleur’s wry drama of alienation and loneliness.

They are caught in the gaps of everyday life, the flat lines between the highs of elation and the lows of depression. The title is a double-barrelled pun: the Continental is a dance where everybody moves in unison but never touches; and a film without guns has no targets or bullets. It recalls the bleak humour often seen in Scandinavian movies.

Future Mars Rover mission Earthbound a little while longer

NASA’s next-gen Mars Rover mission has suffered yet another setback:

Development problems and increasing costs are threatening to delay the landing of a nuclear-powered rover on Mars next year.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee this month that the space agency’s engineers had to redesign a risky heat shield on the Mars Science Laboratory. Tests have shown that the shield could not survive entry to the Martian atmosphere, and designing a new one meant pushing back the mission.

Family counters claim that Vancouver man is son of JFK

The family of a Vancouver man claiming to be the illegitimate son of the late U.S. president John F. Kennedy said on Friday such a claim is “unequivocally false.”

Jack R. Worthington stepped forward earlier after a U.S. newspaper said Kennedy had an illegitimate son living in Canada.