The Dish

Four scientists, one enormous satellite dish, and the flight of Apollo 11 may not sound like the ingredients of a crowd-pleasing comedy, but that's just what this improbable charmer from Down Under amounts to. Loosely based on actual events, it's set in the small, eastern Australian burg of Parkes, home to a 300-ton radio telescope that was used during that historic July 1969 week to help NASA maintain continuous radio contact with Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew. Standing alone in the middle of a sheep paddock, the Parkes dish was the only telescope in the southern hemisphere powerful enough to receive what at the time surely sounded like some sci-fi fantasy: ...