wmadavis Review of South of the Moon

South of the Moon (2008)

A good coming-of-age film with some hackneyed plot devices

[6/10 · 30 October 2016]

I don't want to fill my review with spoilers, so I'm trying to hold back a little. I am a sucker for coming-of-age movies, so I enjoyed much of this film, but it seems like the script just wasn't ready and it contains some real howlers. There are scenes were people die, and they are so ineptly done they seem comical. There's a scene where two boys might have fooled around, but it's so coyly portrayed you can't tell if anything happened at all. The boy is supposed to be enormously endowed but doesn't know it until he asks. Masturbation scenes look more like torture scenes. The boy is supposed to be an Olympic-level swimmer but he doesn't seem to care at all for swimming. Secrets are kept that can't be believed, and are revealed in a way that also can't be believed. The boy is troubled by dreams -- this whole movie seems like a dream, held together only by dream logic. You enjoy it more for how your can rewrite it in you head than for what's actually on the screen.