Moonrise Kingdom Movie Review

The whimsical world of Wes Anderson has returned in Moonrise Kingdom, his seventh feature film and just the latest to be populated by characters from a fantasy vision of the world that lies just beyond anyone’s actual experience of it. Anderson likes to set his films in veritable islands unto themselves: a Manhattan mansion that seems part of a fictionalized New York I’ve never seen; a private school that offers a most ambitious student a lot of leeway; a train across the Indian subcontinent; a submarine (that one offered up his most capricious film to date); and now a literal island that looks (on the map presented by Bob Balaban’s on camera narrator) a little like Fisher’s Island, NY.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon Movie Review

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is one of the great movie mysteries. It poses seemingly impossible conundrums and then refuses to solve them. Some of them include such questions as: Why is it called “Dark of the Moon?” What happened to the word “side?” Was it too long for the movie posters? Other riddles to behold are whether or not action screenwriters actually know what the word “triangulate” means and how can a screenplay so irreparably dumb know how to use “whom” correctly? Also, is there a book of action movie dialogue clichés from which Ehren Kruger took about 33 percent of the lines? Is it possible to release a Hollywood mega-budget film that isn’t overflowing with expository dialogue? Did director Michael Bay and his visual effects teams understand the action sequences? Did they actually try to make them coherent and fail miserably or is it just pure laziness. This movie is wondrous to behold. I’ve never seen its equal.