13 Moons

It's anybody's guess how ones like 13 Moons slip through the cracks, but in this case it was probably a case of nonexistent marketing and no effort put into a proper release. Despite having a cast that's speckled with all kinds of big names, character actors and cameos, it has the appearance of barest of bones indie digs, and looks suspiciously like it was filmed bootleg/guerrilla style. I've not a clue what the story behind it's conception is, but it's a brilliant little flick that you won't find anywhere these days, but deserves a look. It's one of those moody, nocturnal L.A. set ensemble pieces in which a group of eclectic characters wander about, intersecting in various subplots until it finally comes together in the third act. This motif is overdone these days, and I just have to throw a jab at Paul Haggis's Crash, which has aged like Kraft Dinner left for a week in the Florida sun, but my point is that they either work or topple over like a jenga tower buckling under the weight of each character and scenario. This one is so low budget it looks like it was shot on an etch a sketch, but thankfully the story is powerful, emotional, hilarious and strange enough to make a lasting impression. Steve Buscemi and Peter Dinklage are two sad-sack clowns who wander the nightscape, and in fact the image of absurdly out of place clowns roaming the lonely streets of NYC, getting caught up in a raucous night out involving a man (David Proval, an underused talent in the industry) and his young son who is dying of cancer and desperately seeks an organ donor, while his mom (Jennifer Beals) looks for them. Meanwhile there's an insane clown played by Peter Stormare who's running about, and when I say insane I do mean it. Stormare is always a little zany and flamboyant, but his work here takes the cake and whips it at the wall. It's easy for actors to be uninhibited in indie fare like this, free from the prudence of studio chaperones, and he knows this, his character eventually playing a key role but most of the time careening around like a bat out of hell set loose in New York. The cameos are fleeting and fascinating, and one wonders who was buddies with who and pulled what favours to swing their appearances, but it's nice to see them irregardless. Sam Rockwell and Michael Parks are fun as two bartenders, real life ex-hoodlums Danny Trejo and Edward Bunker show up briefly as.. hoodlums, and watch for quick turns from Pruitt Taylor Vince, Michael Badalucco and others. The film is thoroughly indie that no one has, or probably will ever see it, and my review probably adds to the scant half dozen or so write ups that are out there. Sadly many little treasures like this exist, unbeknownst to most. 13 Moons is a sweet, scrappy, somewhat star studded little piece that is well worth anyone's time, if they love a good story in an oddball of a package.

I knew every character in this movie as a real person. I knew the depressive clown and the hard-boiled midget and the drug addicted drag queen and even the self-doubting priests. While "13 Moons" was not set in New York City in the seventies, it might as well have been. Granted, I've been out of that crazy, all-night life for a long time, but I'm sure it hasn't gone away. People don't change, and the same kinds of tormented souls have to be there, pursuing their crazy odysseys, all night long. Perhaps you've missed them if you've been cocooned in the enclaves of the middle class, but if you're brave enough to go out and find them, you can.

I was totally engaged by "13 Moons." The ensemble acting was first-rate, so the characterizations were virtually perfect. The plot may be slightly less than believable, but if you tossed that particular batch of odd characters together under the right circumstances, something like it just MIGHT have happened.

Many reviewers refer to this film as "quirky." Well, LIFE is quirky, children -- and if you don't think Bananas and Binky and Lenny and Slovo and Mo and Lily and Suzi are real enough, you haven't been drinking in the right bars.

See "13 Moons." Believe in it. It's a close approximation of a world you may not have encountered, but which certainly is real.

TV clown Bananas (Steve Buscemi) has problems everywhere. His show hasn't got the same success it once had, his wife is discovered with another woman and tried to run him over, and with his partner Binky (Peter Dinklage) they have to help a sickly young boy left in care of a bail bondsman. Along the way they will meet drug addict Slovo (Peter Stormare) who after accidentally saving the kid wants to get rid of his habit of wandering the streets, two priests that got into a fight with the owner of a strip club (Sam Rockwell, the brother of the movie's director) and a few others.

Despite 13 MOONS is quite forgotten today, has a direct to video look and according to NateWatchesCoolMovies it wasn't even marketed properly back then, I found it unique. Now this doesn't mean it's a bad movie, but that you have to follow the movie really carefully for understanding the all point of the situations. At times I could relate for the characters because they were played by actors that are used to play normal guys and this was probably the most important thing in the movie for me.

Not an outstanding movie by all means, but if you are in the right mindset for it, you might probably understand the hidden meanings.

What we have here is an attempt to shape a movie by simply defining interesting characters. These aren't radical characters like, say you would get with "Hitchhiker's Guide" inspired projects.

You have a few choices when sitting down to write a story. One of these is to decide what sort of agency your characters have. To my mind, the best storytellers start with a world, a notion of sweeps within that world that creates situations or drives or needs. Within all those gusts you place characters, or perhaps (depending on the world) your characters are secreted by other forces.

Noir, the great invention of cinematic storytelling has this character. Cinematic storytelling is different than writing because you see the world with the people. With the written world you can separate them and the world always comes through some voice.

This is to say that starting with characters is risky in film. I think it never works, ever, by itself. These aren't particularly interesting characters. But if they were, you would need something else to season them: some dialog or situations.

It didn't work here.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

To me it's pretty obvious what this movie tries to attempt. It tries to put together many different story lines, featuring different characters, that all come together pretty fast into the movie. A storytelling technique that later got much better used and done by for instance director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

The movie is basically being presented as one big adventure movie, in which a whole bunch of characters go on a quest to safe a little boy's life. Only thing is, this 'adventure' is done as a drama. It has a s serious story, which just doesn't connect to well with the movie its quirky characters and all of the unlikely events happening in this movie.

The way all of these characters get thrown together in this movie is pretty weak. Basically they have absolutely nothing to do with each other but still for some odd reason they all stay together throughout the entire movie. At times the movie desperately tries to connect all of their stories together and weave them in with each other but it's all really thin. Everything that seems to happen in this movie seems as a coincidence and the movie is really hanging together from its coincidences.

And the characters aren't much good either really, despite the fact that they are being played by some well known actors. So they basically all have their issues but you just never get to care enough about any of the characters to to care or to feel attached to any of them. Their problems also aren't too 'deep' and the way everything gets resolved is again also hanging together from its coincidences and comes across as some lazy writing. It's almost as if its writing and its directing don't connect at all with each other, as if the director had a totally different movie in mind than the writer had, which is strange, considering that both were the same person.

For most part I still liked watching this movie but toward the end things really got worse, when the movie seemed to run out of ideas and everything just became less and less interesting and more and more of a pointless dragging movie that was heading towards an ending that wasn't much satisfying either. Once you start thinking about this movie, nothing gets really explained or resolved, so watching this movie is a very unsatisfying experience.

Still the entire idea behind this movie must have been good, not in the least because all of these great actors seemingly showed up for free to appear in this movie. Because it just didn't seemed as if this movie had an actual budget to work with. It's also a really cheap looking movie, that has a sort of TV look, or as if it got done by a couple of friends shooting a movie in their weekends.

You could say that the movie still have plenty of redeeming qualities, that still keep the movie somewhat watchable, such as its acting for instance but overall, in the end this is a very unrewarding movie, that is literally hanging together from its coincidences and some highly unlikely events, which all comes across as some weak and lazy writing.

5/10

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