Review of Moonlight (2016) by Niknacks — 24 Jan 2017
I'm pretty surprised by how positive this movie has been reviewed. Many of the character relationships make little to no sense based on what is occurring in the movie. This is a dark coming of age tale, but loses much of it's believability early on in the movie.
To start, the bullies of the movie recognize the main character as gay long before he himself does, almost making it seem as though because they call him gay he then turns gay. It is hard to care overmuch about the main character as he has maybe 25 lines in the entire movie, and anytime he does talk it's 4-5 word sentences followed by long stretches of silence.
I guess this was supposed to be an interesting character trait, but when the movie contains nothing but dialog and the main character doesn't talk it seems like a bit of a problem. It's exacerbated by the fact that every other character in the movie constantly points it out.
The best friend/lover is equally confusing throughout the movie. His sexuality is seemingly fluid ranging from dude bro misogyny to handjibbers at the beach. At least the friend/lover was charismatic and for me the only redeeming actor in the movie.
Every other character could have been played by anyone, the mom especially lacked presence in the film with the exception of the scene in which she forcibly takes money from her son. Not a bad movie, but it left much to be desired.
The music and cinematography were strong, but total lack of likeable characters, and odd character choices felt like it detracted from the any real entertainment value that could have been found here.
The biggest problem was the main characters arc, troubled gay kid in broken home beats the **** out of bully, disappears, comes back as a drug peddler. In the interim has not touched another person man or women, comes back and I guess gets back with his childhood hand jibber giver for love ever after? This is a story that takes place over a 20+ years of a persons life, but quite literally goes nowhere in all that time.
This review of Moonlight (2016) was written by Niknacks on 24 Jan 2017.
Moonlight has generally received very positive reviews.
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