13 Moons

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.

13 Moons, surprisingly, is one of the most lucid and hopeful flicks to emerge from the muddled dreams and frequently vengeful psyches of Los Angeles in years. A quest film every bit as compelling and complex-- and considerably less tricked out-- than Lord of the Rings, it's Alexandre Rockwell's valedictory to a city which may have little use for the independent filmmaker, but which offered him a way back to his own larger, more magnanimous instincts as an artist. An ever greater number of characters, from a clown Steve Buscemi to a bail bondsman and dead beat dad (David Proval) to a remarkably bad and self aware rapper/singer/ho (the extraordinary Rose Rollins), find themselves inhabiting, momentarily, a similar platform, a little piece of Los Angeles in the dead of the night. Like most of us, their dreams only bubble rarely to the surface of their lives, jostling there with their disappointments until they're submerged again under the monotony of their day jobs. But unlike most of us, these 7 people, in spite of themselves, find purpose in their movement. They go from a downtown bar to a bail bureau, from a cop station to a memorable moment in the zoo; and in their sojourn, they intersect with real need…an 8 year old, whose kidney is failing, whom dialysis only momentarily helps, who's thrown on the mercy of a city whose larger, social impulses seem deadened…and yet. A strong ensemble cast, energetically directed and brilliantly shot by Phil Parmet, makes 13 Moons that rare independent LA flick: one whose ambitions are so much greater than an audition for a studio picture. 13 Moons wants to give us a different way of imagining ourselves and the city we inhabit but so little know.

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

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

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.

I don't want to waste too much more of my time regarding this movie so I'll keep this short. I haven't finished the movie yet (it's playing as I type this) but I had high expectations for this film and they weren't met. A great cast working with one of the worst scripts in recent history. Basically, just a boring movie with little to like. I 'm curious if the cast found the script promising or if they worked on the movie as a kind gesture to someone; not sure what there could have been in the script that they would think was worth it. I hope there are better movies to come from all who were involved. Disappointing.