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Fresh and Exciting

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Mulligan's ultimate film is just good : straight to the point and no emotional overdose. Modern dramas are overplayed and too indiscreet in terms of nudity and, you know what I mean… The choice of the time period for the film is quite pertinent : the Elvis era, the discovery of the change in your body and your thoughts. I don't know much about the rural area of the film, nor about the film analysis in social or gender terms and, frankly, I do not care. What's important is the universality of the feelings depicted. The emotional effect is a success : wounds of love are hard to bear, time is the healer. The metaphor of the "man in the moon", the title's lullaby sort of thing you've been told as a kid, always wear out when you grow up, this doesn't mean you can't overcome the wounds on your sentimental way. Along with Summer for 42, I very much approve of this film in the "classical" way of sentimental movies.

It's summer of 1957 rural Louisiana. Dani Trant (Reese Witherspoon) is a 14 year old Elvis fan. She's close to her older sister Maureen who is going to Duke in the fall. She has a younger sister Missy and her mother Abigail (Tess Harper) is pregnant with the fourth. Her father Matthew (Sam Waterston) is eager for a son. While skinny dipping at the Foster's place, Dani encounters 17 year old Court Foster (Jason London) whose family just returned to their property.Reese Witherspoon delivers quite a precocious performance. Her star power is evident even at such a young age. She plays off of Jason London very well who is fully into his boyish charms. The drawback is Emily Warfield who plays Maureen. She doesn't have the same star power and it shows. This coming-of-age story is touching bittersweet like a sunny summer day followed by a stormy night. I love all the conflicted teen girl thought process and first love struggles. It could have gone soft at the end but instead it takes an even darker turn. I do wish that Maureen is played by a more powerful actress. In the end, the sisters' relationship is the center of the movie.

No need to recap the plot. Hard to believe Witherspoon started out as a walk-on in a demanding movie like this (IMDB Trivia). Somehow, she got what amounts to the lead and does beautifully. I guess the proverbial lightning struck in her favor. Anyway, it's a sensitively told story benefiting greatly from Louisiana settings and rural hardship. I love Dad's dirty old truck and those Elvis sounds of my youth. The pace may be slow, but it's poetically crafted, along with an excellent musical score. The slow pans are also well chosen and underscore that prevailing interior mood. Note, for example, how the pool's texture is used to reflect those moods. As I see it, Dani's coming of age means breaking down the barrier between her and older sister Maureen. The breakthrough hinges on learning the value of empathy. The latter's a typically adult emotion and requires seeing beyond oneself into the greater world of maybe the man in the moon, as the movie might have it. Expressing this amounts to Dani's passage into budding adulthood. True, Maureen's been pretty unfeeling toward Dani as they compete for the same boy. As a result, they both have to discover what they share, instead of how they compete. What a fine slice of cinematic art the movie is, as it merges visuals with storyline. All in all, the results are a tribute to everyone involved, and should not be passed up.

I like romances. Here's what I liked: the scenery (I got the "feel" of living in rural Louisiana, and that was great); and Matt's good, fatherly words to Dani on the boat were worth the movie. Here's where the movie failed me. Though I love Sam Waterston, I'm a northerner who's now lived in the South for 14 years, and see here and elsewhere that when northerners (Sam's from Boston) try to play Southerners, they get so much wrong, which Sam does. I like his fatherly role, but his style, mannerisms, and accent are just out of place as a Louisiana dad. If I were a Southerner, I'd feel very poorly represented. Sometimes the writing was just bad, with characters saying things way too "philosophy of life-ish." They were little monologues that were out of place. Lastly, with the writing, characters are sometimes having all this emotion one way or the other when "all that" wouldn't be possible to have built up in the character in the short time frame that the storyline proposes. There's betrayal in the movie that is simply accepted by all the characters (but one), so the person wronged is never given any sense of consolation or true apology. That left me wanting. Maureen's character was flat--in the end, I needed some kind of character growth (realizations) in her that the writer(s) never delivered. That was disappointing.