Sunday, December 18, 2016

Review of 'Moonrise Kingdom'

A really nice, gentle film (albeit with some violence and the odd animal death) about young twelve-year old misfits and the relationship that develops between them. An orphan boy scout resigns from his troop and goes AWOL from an island scout camp to rendezvous with the troubled girl that he met, briefly, at a performance of Benjamin Britten's "Noyle's Floode' in the local church. In fact, there's lots of Britten all the way through, including 'The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra' on a tiny battery-powered record player - how we used to listen to music while out and about in the old days. It seems rather fitting - the upstate New York setting seems to fit with the sort of environment I imagine Britten living in on the English East Coast.

Lots of nice touches, and great to see Bruce Willis in a decent film for once. Nice cinematography and washed-out colours. Particularly liked the way that it's a sort of 'Lord of the Flies' in reverse, in that the young boy's scout troop initially persecute him for being weird and an outsider, but end up rallying round and rescuing him from the malign outside bureaucracy ("Social Services", played by Tilda Swinton) who wants to put him in a juvenile facility.

Watched on TV via HDMI from a PC, earlier obtained by informal distribution network.

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