SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

muons The movie tells the story of ordinary people living ordinary lives with nothing spectacular about them with a simple plot pretty much free of twists and surprises. However, it's amazing to see with all these mundane ingredients, how a perfect cast, superb acting and masterful directing can make a very good movie. That doesn't however, mean the movie is flawless. While the effect of Pearl's infidelity is well probed on her daughter's behavior, the reaction of the community is surprisingly muted. There's little doubt she and her family would be immediately shunned in the closed and conservative Jewish society. In the movie, however, we observe she and other family members normally interact with other people while she keeps seeing Mr. Blouse with little reticence. Glossing over this fact is perhaps the biggest plot hole in the movie. There are also some other incredulous moments, albeit not as much egregiously. In the end, however, the narrative makes you see past beyond them. As for the ending, it isn't what I expected and probably wouldn't happen in real life but still saves the movie from an all out depressing story and delivers some hope. A movie of this genre cannot be expected to flow with a fast rhythm, which risks boredom but all leading characters performed very well keeping the audience engaged. Among them, Diane Lane particularly shines and it's a shame she wasn't even nominated for the best actor award for her performance.

TheUnknown837-1 The posters for "A Walk on the Moon" show Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, two attractively talented people working in the movies today, lying in a grassy field, arms around each other, hinting at a deep romance and longing for each other. That is something we get next to nothing of in the movie. But false advertising and misleading setups are a common thing in Hollywood and the media today, and always have been. The largest problem of this picture is the level of its tedious schmaltz. It is trying to paint a story that talks about marital (and extra-marital) relationships and how they can affect the lives of others, but it nevertheless comes across as absolutely insincere. That is whenever it's not just simply boring.Lane is an unhappy mother of two. Unhappy because she essentially threw away her young adult life becoming pregnant at age seventeen, only three years older than her eldest daughter, and unhappy because her husband is seldom around to spend time with them. His excuse is that he has to work to pay for all of them, for their becoming pregnant early on ruined his chances at a better education and profession. So even when they visit a summer camp for families, he continually has to return home to fix TVs; there is a high demand for them because Neil Armstrong will soon walk on the moon. Lane is going through the motions of her up-down life, when she starts an affair with a local blouse salesman (Mortensen) and, as you would expect, things start to come crashing down.The movie has good intentions; to deny that would be foolish. For the picture tries to touch on how extra-martial relationships can cripple family dynamics. For instance, Lane's daughter (well-played by Anna Paquin) learns of her mother's affairs at the same time she is becoming intimately involved with one of the local boys. It's a little refreshing to see the teenage girl, not boy, be the lascivious one for a change. It's also nice to see the unmarried individual in the affair (the blouse man) not become a sexual predator, stalking and hunting down Lane and her family. We've seen "Fatal Attraction." What kills the picture is the screenplay by Pamela Gray. Her background lies in the realm of television, and unfortunately it does show. For "A Walk on the Moon" does not make any motions toward an emotional or dynamic climax; it just drones on and on like a really long pilot episode to a television series best not picked up by a network. Scenes that are meant to deliver an impact cut off before they can register any emotion. So a scene where Lane and Mortensen visit the 1969 Woodstock event, and go nuts, comes across as just disturbingly out-of-place, not disturbing in the context of what they are doing. And although Lane and Paquin pour their hearts and souls into their performances, a key moment where they have a mother-daughter discussion about sex seems forced, not passionate. Again, like a television movie.The same can be said of the directing by Tony Goldwyn, but only to an extent. Goldwyn has a good sense of montage. He's a good director. But before he can become a great director, he needs to learn to do two things: have the confidence to order a rewrite, and pull back on his camera lenses. Almost every shot in the picture is nauseating claustrophobic, like it was meant for a screen shaped like a square instead of a rectangle. The only time he uses his wide-angle lenses effectively is in a not-romantic scene where Lane and Mortensen go swimming in the nude (what else do movie-couples do these days?) and they jump off a cliff to get into the water. Lane and Mortensen have no special chemistry together; it also seems forced and insincere. And talented and good-looking as both of them are, they do fail to steam up the screen because the screenplay is so limp and the characters so dull. They have two sex scenes together, the second one more ludicrous than the first, and just as lacking in eroticism.The best performance in the movie is by the underrated Liev Schreiber, as Lane's husband. But he is given nothing to do but stand around and look morose. And as I was watching him act in this picture, I wasn't thinking about his character or what he must have been thinking during the inevitable discovery-of-betrayal scene (I don't think anybody walking in will not see this from a mile away) but instead of what a great actor like him was doing in a picture this limp. The rest of the cast is very good as well. Paquin, in particular, is also very good. But the story surrounding them, and the material they are given to work with, is so dull and contrived that it really boggles me how this picture managed to get placed on a big screen. It looks like something HBO would put on during a random weekend.

Denisee Marty, in my opinion, is one of the cutest characters I've EVER seen ...and I create them for a living! Although Liev Schreiver is approximately eight years younger, to me, he hasn't changed a bit ! Liev's voice remains the same, with an accent that not only some can relate, but fall in love with. His voice is sexy regardless of the character he plays ! Well...excuse me, I haven't seem him play Chris the transvestite yet in Janek: The Silent Betrayal. Regardless, to me, he "makes" the entire movie! You go on a journey following this dedicated working television repairman, providing father, and loving husband. The film takes place in 1969, a time where many, including his character wife, Pearl, played by Diane Lane, had a child at a young age. She decides to have an affair with a loathly hippie creating devastating effects on their family. Upon admittance of the affair, Marty "goes through the motions" of any hurt and honest man. Leaving his home enraged, sitting alone with sadness shown through his eyes, and the irrational behavior of unsuccessfully trying to take his son. However, once his son becomes sick, he rushes home (over an hour away) to care for his "cowboy." That night was the fastest time that he had clocked, due to the fact that he traveled a long way in order to work each week. Despite Marty's wife's behavior, he also decides to forgive, forget, and "loosen up". No, Marty does not light a joint or play Jimmy Hendrix to appease Pearl ! He simply realizes that he needs to recognize his wife's needs. Rewind the final scene over and over again! He dances with her on their porch. So romantic.If I were Pearl, my needs would have fulfilled after the scene of the two lying in bed together !

tedg This is a huge failure as a movie, but an interesting one in a way. At least for someone my age who lived through the period appropriated here.Here's the basic challenge in showing a love story: how do you cinematically show the pulls on the heart? The usual solution is to fold it into larger events that CAN be cinematically and richly shown. Then as one shines, the other is illuminated.Here we have two metaphors. One sorta works: hippies, sexual release from unfair constraints, idealism, rebellion. With this comes a bonus, period music that has more cinematic hooks than any other. (I hope Richie Havens does well from what he gave us.)The second metaphor is a bit forced, mapping the moonwalk as the voyage from the known to the unknown and risky. The mapping here is reinforced by having our tested family actually travel to their resort. (This resort is similar in tone to the one in "Dirty Dancing," Jewish, constrained.) We have our first forbidden sex as the moonwalk appears on the TeeVee. And the cuckolded husband is a TeeVee repairman. Whew!Things like this do work. They can work.But I think this one didn't because it had no phrasing. Phrasing is something more than rhythm and forward movement; it is the music of the thing. In the written word, you have granularities of syllable, word, phrase, thought (often a paragraph or more if dialog is involved), scenarios and then something larger which are often called acts.Film has a different set of objects at the fine granularity but the same ones starting with "scenario." Each of these levels has its own breath and the levels of granularity interact. Often what we think of as clever writing is just one level pushing the pace of another which might resist a bit. That's the secret behind "Pulp Fiction."In most cases, a movie just takes the cadences from prior entries in the genre so we don't even notice it. When those cadences are engineered deftly and uniquely, they can be supremely effective. Its why the masters are masters. Tarkovsky. Greenaway. Look at "Seven Samurai" to see how the small measures move slower than they should and the larger ones rush with less regularity, press in on the zen.The opposite is true also. When a writer, director, editor have no sense or tense of these matters, the project collapses. When you encounter one, it is worth paying attention to because these failures will tell you more about contrapuntal narrative rhythms than the successes will. In this case the writer seems to have written things down as if they were a memoir, notes, and not something with machinery designed to affect us.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.