REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (2012): Dir. Wes Anderson. Written by: Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola. Starring: Kara Hayward, Jared Gilman, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Bob Balaban. Rated PG-13 (Nothing you didn't know about when you were a kid). Running time: 94 minutes.

4 stars (out of four)

Wes Anderson seems to have learned a few things from his previous movie, the stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr. Fox. In the past, some of his films have run dangerously close to being too Wes Anderson – too quirky-cute, too self-consciously hip – and when that happens, his characters feel less like people than they do the tongue-in-cheek creations of a clever filmmaker. The solution to that problem was not, as it turns out, reeling it in or toning down his style, but going all the way with it. Animation offered him a newfound freedom that allowed him to be unapologetically Wes Anderson and the result was one of his best movies.

Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature overall, is not animated but it feels like it is. The camera pans from side to side as though Mr. Anderson were shooting on a two-dimensional backdrop. His shots are filled with embellishing details and visual gags, and his characters – a colorful and endearing group of caricatures – bound about these finely detailed sets with a ceaseless energy not often found in live-action people.

The story concerns two children who, on the cusp of adolescence and feeling the potent sting of young love, decide to run off together one summer in 1965. They live on a sparsely populated island in New England where the residents receive their mail by plane and rely on a ferry that runs twice daily for transportation to the mainland.

Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is plagued with a restless angst she will probably grow out of one day but for the time being her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and her three younger brothers must deal with. She has been labeled “emotionally disturbed” by some out-of-touch physician, a diagnosis that is supposed to help her family cope with her issues and properly treat them, but only compounds her isolation and loneliness.

So she reaches out to Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a fellow outsider, and the two form an intimate friendship. Sam, an orphan who has been passed around foster families his whole life, is a Khaki Scout at Camp Ivanhoe, a summer camp for boys on the island run by Scout Master Randy Ward (a hilarious Edward Norton). Scout Master Ward is a boy at heart with a deeply held devotion to the Khaki Scout program. When his campers ask what his real job is, he replies that he is a math teacher. No, wait. He changes his answer. His real job is being Scout Master. He’s a math teacher on the side.

We learn through flashbacks how Suzy and Sam met the previous summer and spent the proceeding year as pen pals, keeping one another company through letters and confiding in each other the difficult emotions they can only just barely express in words. They agree they are the only ones who truly understand each other and must run away together.

Naturally, this causes some distress for the adults. Not just Suzy’s parents and the Scout Master but also Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), the lone police officer on the island. He sets out to find the kids with the help of Scout Master Ward’s Khaki Scouts, a motley crew who don’t see the point in bringing Sam back anyway because they hated his guts and are all the happier with him gone.

Moonrise Kingdom is a sweet and very funny movie. Wes Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola write some of their best one-liners and they revel in the idiosyncrasies of their characters. Mr. Anderson has assembled a sprightly cast that is light on their feet and they slip easily into their roles. They help to take what are essentially cartoon characters and give them depth. We get a few brief glimpses into the troubled marriage between Mr. Bishop, a wonderful new variant on Bill Murray’s sad sack persona, and Mrs. Bishop, a chipper but lonely woman who finds companionship in the dopey Captain Sharp.

Bob Balaban has an almost ethereal presence in the film as the island’s resident meteorologist, drifting in and out to narrate portions of the story. Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman and Harvey Keitel also appear in some fine bit parts, getting a chance for some comedic riffing alongside the main cast.

This story does not however belong to the adults, though their myriad issues and quirks could provide Mr. Anderson with material for a dozen more films. Moonrise Kingdom is about the kids and its young stars are wonderful. Suzy and Sam are confronting miniature-sized versions of the problems their grown-up counterparts face and Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman convey this with a subtlety that suggests much life experience.

I hesitate to call the film great and suspect it could fade away with time. It is a breezy film and I can’t quite say how much of it will leave an impression on repeat viewings. Still, the first time around, Moonrise Kingdom wraps you up its dizzy charm and smoothes over its own imperfections. The more time that passes after watching it, the more I think of reasons why this might not be one of Wes Anderson’s best. But his movies have always been more about feeling than thinking and the tone of Moonrise Kingdom is pitch perfect.

The movie is so heartbreakingly small it feels as though you could put it in your pocket. The tone is light and would have you believe that all of this is trivial. But it’s not. At least it’s not to these characters. And that’s something Mr. Anderson misses in some of his films. Occasionally he gets so caught up in the rhythms of his dialogue and the beats of his scenes that he neglects to give his characters real heart. Moonrise Kingdom somehow avoids this. There are moments here of startling honesty that resonate deeply, all the more so because they come by surprise in the midst of this airy comedy.

The soundtrack has its share of typical Wes Anderson tunes – dusty pop songs that capture emotions in flux – but the film’s real treasure is Alexandre Desplat’s score. Mr. Desplat keeps things pitched at “delicate whimsy” for most of the film but he also has a way of making grand the quiet emotions of children.

From our comfortable adult vantage points, we can see these kids’ adventure is minor, even inconsequential. From inside the bubble of childhood (and segregated geographically on their little island), however, it is as huge as life. They are running away from home, eloping in the name of true love and leaving behind their childhoods, ready (they believe) to take on whatever the future holds. The film never condescends to its characters or reveals their naiveté. That much, Wes Anderson assumes we in the audience will supply. Moonrise Kingdom is instead a movie you can escape into; watching it, you can perhaps even recapture a glimpse of what it felt like to run barefoot through the dirt, convinced the world is as big as you are.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/28/12

REVIEW: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011): Dir. Michael Bay. Written by: Ehren Kruger. Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Josh Duhamel, John Turturro, Tyrese Gibson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Patrick Dempsey, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. Rated PG-13 (Robots smash each other up real good and some humans get vaporized). Running time: 157 minutes.

1 ½ stars (out of four)

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a colossal mess of a movie. As the third in the series, this much should come as no surprise. Each Transformers movie seeks to be the Biggest and Loudest Thing you have ever seen. This is their primary goal; narrative cohesion is secondary if it factors in at all. The second Transformers feature, Revenge of the Fallen, may still have the honor of being the Biggest and Loudest Thing, though Dark of the Moon sure does make a convincing case for the title.

Dark of the Moon is hardly the incomprehensible behemoth Revenge of the Fallen was but the plot still defies summarization. There are good robots called Autobots who work with the U.S. government on covert missions and there are bad robots called Decepticons. You can usually tell them apart because the Autobots are colorful and the Decepticons are steely gray and black, but there are times when even these simple distinguishing characteristics fail the vigilant viewer.

The two robo-factions were once at war for their mechanized home world of Cybertron and for a third time, they have brought their battle to Earth. The Decepticons’ plan gets awfully complicated and I respect anyone who can successfully navigate the many intricacies of this convoluted plot which essentially boils down to this: the Decepticons want to take over the world and the Autobots want to save humanity if possible. Although the same has happened twice before, I am again astonished by how thoroughly director Michael Bay and Dark of the Moon’s screenwriter Ehren Kruger can obscure such a simple premise.

As baffling as this nearly $200 million train wreck gets, one has to sit back and appreciate the hugeness of it. No one can spend a budget that big quite like Michael Bay does. There are scenes when Decepticons flip cars and smash the sidewalk with the purposelessness of drunken teenagers who will break anything and everything in sight just for the fun of it. The action is so pervasive, so gratuitous, what else can one do but succumb to the film’s hedonistic love of destruction?

But the Transformers movies just don’t know when to end. Like each of its predecessors, Dark of the Moon overstays its welcome with a running time of 157 minutes that will test the patience of even the most devout fans of Michael Bay’s brand of sensory bombardment. I enjoyed the movie’s defiant recklessness to a point, but the last leg of the movie drags on so long that it numbs us to the action. Like a prolonged finale in a summer fireworks display there comes a point when enough is enough and we check our watches, wondering how much longer it could possibly go on for.

There are humans in Dark of the Moon too; did I forget to mention them? Shia LaBeouf continues to carry the burden of playing the franchise’s only interesting character, the young protagonist Sam Witwicky. LeBeouf is comfortable in this sort of mammoth-sized entertainment and he is oddly convincing when he shouts out, “OPTIMUS!” from a skyscraper rooftop. Also returning are the one-dimensional super soldiers played by Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson, as well as John Turturro’s batty Agent Seymour Simmons. Apparently these guys are contractually obligated to show their faces whenever the Decepticons do.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, a Victoria’s Secret model, steps in for Megan Fox as Carly, the babe LaBeouf gets to alternately save and smooch. Her ability to look as calm and seductive as a Vogue cover model in the midst of Earth’s darkest hour is more impressive than any of Optimus Prime’s powers.

Making surprise appearances are John Malkovich as Witwicky’s eccentric new boss and Frances McDormand as the calculating, all-business National Intelligence Director. The largest contribution from this pair of Oscar-caliber actors, however, is their unexpected presence and once the initial shock of their being in the film wears off, they disappear into the sea of ultimately useless side characters. Patrick Dempsey plays Carly's deviously good-looking boss and talented comedic actors, Ken Jeong and Alan Tudyk, show up too but their comic relief mostly fails to do anything but add worthless scenes to an already long movie.

The first Transformers movie was fun because it never took itself too seriously. By comparison, Revenge of the Fallen was unbearably solemn even in its most absurd moments. Dark of the Moon has the opposite problem. If anything, the film doesn’t take itself seriously enough. Characters are prone to wild fits of screaming and flailing that are intended to be funny but just take the wind out of a scene. And while a part of me respects the audacity of including impersonations of no less than three Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon and Obama) plus a cameo from the real-life Buzz Aldrin, the gimmicks don’t add up to anything. The movie is a barrage of explosions occasionally interrupted by strange, fleeting gags.

Will you enjoy this film? That is hard to say. If you were entertained by either of the previous movies, this one should be equally satisfying. It is big, loud, dumb and utterly absurd, a formula that worked best the first time around. (For what it’s worth though, Dark of the Moon is not as ungodly terrible as the second film.)

The Transformers franchise continues to epitomize the twenty-first century blockbuster and in a weird way, I have to respect the films’ unflagging commitment to all things Big and Loud. Whether or not the movies are any good is beside the point. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is indeed the Biggest and Loudest Thing you’ll find in theatres this summer. Depending on your personal taste, let that statement serve as a recommendation or a warning.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/1/11