Moonrise Kingdom

(Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie

          My friend the Cinephile recommended this movie highly, and invited me over to watch it. Although since I generally like Wes Anderson, I probably would have gotten around to watching this movie on my own sooner or later.

The Review

            People seem to love or hate Wes Anderson, but I’m a fan. Generally speaking about his movies, I love his quirky sense of humor, and his deadpan directing.  However I often don’t like the sentimentality and pacing of his movies (again, speaking generally).

            This movie, however, was just about perfect.  It had sentimentality without dragging the movie down, decent pacing, and tons of that classic Wes Anderson quirky deadpan humor.

Rating :

8 out of 10

Other Things I Would Talk About if I Wasn’t Limiting Myself to 100 Words

* As we watched this film, my Cinephile friend pointed out to me numerous subtle points about the craft of the film.

Links

My previous reviews of Wes Anderson films: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Fantastic Mr. Fox.  (Also, since my Cinephile friend claims that much of Moonrise Kingdom is a tribute to Badlands, here is a link to my review of Badlands.)

Link(s) of the Day
Noam Chomsky - The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Also, from Tom Tomorrow: Divine Intervention 

And for another useless wikipedia fact, here's a rather strange Wikipedia article one of my students alerted me to recently: Mike the Headless Chicken

And from the Sydney Herald, a very interesting article on the NGO sector in Phnom Penh:
The backdrop is Phnom Penh, a wild-west town that's home to about 3000 NGOs; a steamy, rumour-mongering municipality of girlie bars, orange-robed monks, begging rings, aid workers, expat do-gooders, rogues, outcasts, bums and people on the make, where tuk-tuks and motos fight for an edge with the Range Rovers favoured by Khmer generals and the city's new rich. 
...Not a bad description of the place actually.

And on a completely different note entirely, from Yahoo movies, this description of the upcoming Noah movie had me shaking my head: "For people who are very literal-minded, it would be great to communicate that the themes of the film are very much in line with the themes of the Bible — ideas about hope, second chances and family."
How does a story about God wiping out all of humanity become a story about hope and second chances?