A Walk on the Moon (1999)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

This movie was not for me. There were some good things but for every thing that I like there was something I didn't like at all. This movie glorifies a cheating wife at times and other times redeems itself with her showing remorse or other characters stepping in to tell her that she is not doing something that is okay. By the end there is a touching scene between Diane Lane and Liev Schreiber. He is great in this movie. There was also a pretty good to running joke about Chuck that struck a chord with me. That's a cute thing that gives the characters an inside joke throughout the film. Unfortunately, the payoff at the end has a child dropping the F bomb. Again, not something that is my cup of tea. I think Diane Lane is excellent but this just didn't have legs and wasn't my cup of tea. Better luck next time!

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.

"A Walk on the Moon" has a teen in it, but it's definitely a grown-up movie. It helps to remember 1969 though one does wince at some of the inaccuracies as too much cultural symbolism is thrown into that summer. Hey, where's the rain at Woodstock? - it was only nice weather on the Friday. Some of the music was inaccurate - what were the odds of turning on the radio in 1969 and hearing "Sally Go Round the Roses" from 1962? Why would someone from NYC claim they couldn't afford college and not consider what's now CUNY?This is Liev Schreiber's first grown-up movie I think; he was quite good in Shakespeare in the Park last summer. Some reviewers bashed the movie because Schreiber is so good (especially as he discovers the power of Dylan and Jimi Hendrix) that one sympathizes with both the adulterer and the cuckold - gee but ain't life complicated, as what comes across is the importance of family. Too bad the Blouse Man (very appealing Viggo Mortensen) is just basically a hippie and he's not a real person, but everyone else is. Anna Paquin as a teen discovering that her parents are people too was wonderful. Diane Lane's NY accent does waver quite a bit.I lost my objectivity whenever Tovah Feldshuh spoke. As the grandmother she sounded so much like my grandma, who of course was alive in 1969, that I practically cried every time she was on the screen, though mine had a thicker Yiddish accent. All in all, a very touching movie.(Originally written 4/11/1999)

I have to admit, I've seen much of this movie several times on digital cable but haven't quite made it to the end (for reasons explained later). Diane and family vacation at Catskills resort in the late 60's, Lane the satisfied wife and mother -- until she runs into free-spirit blouse salesman Mortensen. Schreiber is fine as the lovable but dufus husband, as is Feldshuh as his mom (in real life only 13 years older than Lane!), and Paquin as the blooming daughter. It's always fun to watch a beautiful Lane agonize over these life issues and a pre-Lords Viggo is a treat. The Airplane's "Today" gets as good a musical placement in this movie as you'll ever see. The set up is really superb (although a little more graphic than I needed). But But But But But. But the Woodstock sequence seems unnecessary and contrived, blowing a beautiful slice o' life movie to smithereens. Wrong turn. I can't bear to watch it after that, maybe I'll make it through sometime and things will be okay after all.