Moonrise Kingdom is shameless, non-stop kitschy nostalgia, and it is a weird nostalgia, because it is aimed at an audience that does not remember the stuff it is nostaligic about. It is a movie for the Etsy generation. An Instagram movie. It may be the Wes Andersonest of all the Wes Anderson movies, but I would not know, because I have only seen The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic all the way through, and neither of them left much of an impression, to be perfectly honest. To be perfectly honest, I may have avoided the more beloved of his movies (Rushmore) because I fear the uncomfortable conversations in which I say horrible insincere-sounding things like, "Yeah, a lot of people like that movie" or "I really liked the shoes in that movie." (I'm terrified of hurting people's feelings, I'm terrified of being judged for my taste. Why am I writing stuff here on a blog about movies...?)
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| Wes Anderson: I put a bird on it. |
So I had no plans to like Moonrise Kingdom. I thought I would damage my eye-sockets with all the eye-rolling Moonrise Kingdom would require. However. I was totally charmed by it. I thought Ed Norton's Khaki Scouts troupe leader was funny and sincere and believable. Frances McDormand was great. The sweet naive sexuality and romance were flat and unrealistic in the way a good picture book is.
What does this mean?
Do I have to turn in my dried-up humorless cynic card?
4 comments:
Quick! Watch The Notebook and see if it makes you want to claw your eyes out while vomiting. If not we'll talk.
Also: the "put a bird" on it comment made me want to create an elaborate .gif of people applauding or perhaps a person shouting "OH SNAP!" I am on tumblr too much.
I should write up a defense of The Notebook, and we can fight about it. I don't love that movie, but I don't see what the big deal is. It's like white bread--it doesn't provide any particular value, but I just can't bring myself to care one way or the other.
The weird thing to me about The Notebook is that before I saw it, I had heard that it was very sad, that it would likely make me cry for days. So as I was watching it (uh...spoiler alert) I was expecting the main characters not to end up together. In fact, it has basically the happiest possible ending for a story about a romantic relationship: they die in each other's arms, after living a long life together.
The fact that people think of The Notebook as a sad movie just proves Louis CK's point about best-case scenarios. (I don't have audio right now, so I can't find the clip, but you probably know the thing I'm talking about.)
That's a much less bleak ending than the one A Walk To Remember had. That was my particular Nicholas Sparks adaptation experience (which I only saw because Mandy Moore is in it) and I must say, the ending left me despairing for the fate of humanity as a whole. Thankfully, I recovered (relatively speaking) after a few days.
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