Let's get quirky!

Rating: 4/10 (28 November 2012)

So let's get some quirky actors - Bill Murray, Ed Norton, Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, etc. - and put them in a quirky situation with boy scouts on a small island and then have a quirky narrator kind of tell us what's going to happen even though narrators usually tell us what did happen. Wouldn't that be totally quirky! In the quirkly named "Moonrise Kingdom" Wes Anderson tries to pull the "New Girl" television show's audience out of cute apartments and out to the flicks. There they find that the film presents some interesting dialog and plot turns as well as some decent performances particularly by the child actors. However, these charms are wrapped in circumstances somewhat over- engineered to be offbeat. The feeling of being manipulated limits the audience from fully enjoying the film although given the story can't fully sustain interest over its full length limits how much there is to enjoy. Also limiting the enjoyment are some highly uncomfortable scenes involving a twelve year old character being felt up in her underwear. People who find this discomforting (and everyone should feel uncomfortable with it) should avoid the film. In short, if M. Night Shayamalan didn't exist, Anderson would have an argument for being rated modern U.S. cinema's most overrated director.