Steve Schreiber 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!

TheUnknown837-1 The posters for "A Walk on the Moon" show Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, two attractively talented people working in the movies today, lying in a grassy field, arms around each other, hinting at a deep romance and longing for each other. That is something we get next to nothing of in the movie. But false advertising and misleading setups are a common thing in Hollywood and the media today, and always have been. The largest problem of this picture is the level of its tedious schmaltz. It is trying to paint a story that talks about marital (and extra-marital) relationships and how they can affect the lives of others, but it nevertheless comes across as absolutely insincere. That is whenever it's not just simply boring.Lane is an unhappy mother of two. Unhappy because she essentially threw away her young adult life becoming pregnant at age seventeen, only three years older than her eldest daughter, and unhappy because her husband is seldom around to spend time with them. His excuse is that he has to work to pay for all of them, for their becoming pregnant early on ruined his chances at a better education and profession. So even when they visit a summer camp for families, he continually has to return home to fix TVs; there is a high demand for them because Neil Armstrong will soon walk on the moon. Lane is going through the motions of her up-down life, when she starts an affair with a local blouse salesman (Mortensen) and, as you would expect, things start to come crashing down.The movie has good intentions; to deny that would be foolish. For the picture tries to touch on how extra-martial relationships can cripple family dynamics. For instance, Lane's daughter (well-played by Anna Paquin) learns of her mother's affairs at the same time she is becoming intimately involved with one of the local boys. It's a little refreshing to see the teenage girl, not boy, be the lascivious one for a change. It's also nice to see the unmarried individual in the affair (the blouse man) not become a sexual predator, stalking and hunting down Lane and her family. We've seen "Fatal Attraction." What kills the picture is the screenplay by Pamela Gray. Her background lies in the realm of television, and unfortunately it does show. For "A Walk on the Moon" does not make any motions toward an emotional or dynamic climax; it just drones on and on like a really long pilot episode to a television series best not picked up by a network. Scenes that are meant to deliver an impact cut off before they can register any emotion. So a scene where Lane and Mortensen visit the 1969 Woodstock event, and go nuts, comes across as just disturbingly out-of-place, not disturbing in the context of what they are doing. And although Lane and Paquin pour their hearts and souls into their performances, a key moment where they have a mother-daughter discussion about sex seems forced, not passionate. Again, like a television movie.The same can be said of the directing by Tony Goldwyn, but only to an extent. Goldwyn has a good sense of montage. He's a good director. But before he can become a great director, he needs to learn to do two things: have the confidence to order a rewrite, and pull back on his camera lenses. Almost every shot in the picture is nauseating claustrophobic, like it was meant for a screen shaped like a square instead of a rectangle. The only time he uses his wide-angle lenses effectively is in a not-romantic scene where Lane and Mortensen go swimming in the nude (what else do movie-couples do these days?) and they jump off a cliff to get into the water. Lane and Mortensen have no special chemistry together; it also seems forced and insincere. And talented and good-looking as both of them are, they do fail to steam up the screen because the screenplay is so limp and the characters so dull. They have two sex scenes together, the second one more ludicrous than the first, and just as lacking in eroticism.The best performance in the movie is by the underrated Liev Schreiber, as Lane's husband. But he is given nothing to do but stand around and look morose. And as I was watching him act in this picture, I wasn't thinking about his character or what he must have been thinking during the inevitable discovery-of-betrayal scene (I don't think anybody walking in will not see this from a mile away) but instead of what a great actor like him was doing in a picture this limp. The rest of the cast is very good as well. Paquin, in particular, is also very good. But the story surrounding them, and the material they are given to work with, is so dull and contrived that it really boggles me how this picture managed to get placed on a big screen. It looks like something HBO would put on during a random weekend.

MBunge This is a movie made in the 1990s about the 1960s with the moral obtuseness of the 1970s and the cookie-cutter, generic storytelling of the 1980s.The Kantrowitzes are a working class Jewish family spending their summer at a Catskills resort during the time of the first Moon landing. They don't have much money, so Marty (Liev Schreiber) has to go back to work during the week while his wife, children and his mother spend their days in a tiny bungalow in a lakeside campsite. His wife Pearl (Diane Lane) is bored, unsatisfied and feels like life has passed her by. We know this because Pearl repeatedly tells people that. Then she meets Walker Jerome (Viggo Mortensen), a handsome man in a bus who stops by the resort to sell blouses to all the Jewish ladies. Pearl begins a torrid affair with the free-spirited Walker, which culminates in some sort of weird emotional breakdown at the Woodstock concert. But when her family discovers Pearl's secret, she is faced with losing a life that Pearl realizes she really loves. There's also some stuff about young Alison Kantrowitz (Anna Paquin) becoming a woman that summer, but it doesn't seem to have much of a point other than giving Anna Paquin something to do.This story isn't exactly original, but the actors all do a good job and there was certainly the potential for something worthwhile here. It never really amounts to anything, though, for two reasons.Firstly, for a story that is fundamentally about betrayal, none of the folks who are betrayed ever get that upset. When Pearl's mother-in-law (Tovah Feldshuh) finds out about the affair, she's angry with Pearl for about 15 seconds. When Alison finds out, she's angry with her mother for almost a minute. When Marty finds outs, he's angry for maybe 5 minutes at most. When the film gets to the part about adultery tearing Kantrowitzes apart, it studiously avoids letting any of the characters feel pained for any significant length of time. Earlier on, when the movie is supposed to be about the illicit romance of the affair, Pearl doesn't seem like a desperately unhappy woman reaching out for something to fill the void in her heart. She seems like an apathetically disinterested woman who gets bored easily. So, we're presented with a woman who doesn't seem to have a good reason to commit adultery and a family that doesn't seem to mind that much when she does.A Walk On The Moon refuses to let any of these characters be the bad guy. Pearl isn't the bad guy, Marty isn't, the mother-in-law isn't, even Walker Jerome isn't allowed to be a bad person. Not making people out to be "the bad guy" might be a wonderful way to go through life, but it's a terrible way to tell a story. When you're watching this film you should either want Pearl to stay with her family or run away with Walker, but the movie refuses to let you feel that strongly either way. I think it's an attempt to reflect the moral and social confusion of the 60s, but an ethically and thematically confusing movie is usually not that entertaining.The other problem with A Walk On The Moon is that it is probably the WASPiest film about Jews you'll ever watch. There's a few scattered moments of ethnic sentiment and culture, but this story could have been about Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Atheists or what have you. These filmmakers may have been trying to say something about the universality of this situation, but why give it a distinctly ethnic background in the first place? It feels a little bit like The Cosby Show, where these characters are Jews but there's nothing particularly Jewish about them.If you rent this film, you will get some brief glimpses at Diane Lane's rack and Viggo Mortensen's butt. I'm pretty sure you can find those things in better movies than this.

moviedude1 When a family spends the summer of '69 in the Catskills, both mother and daughter find new love interests. Diane Lane stars as a wife and mother who turns to the "blouse man" for affection when her husband can't get out of the city and spend any time with his family. Anna Paquin plays her teenage daughter who comes into her own during this time and needs her mother's emotional stability, which isn't there.The first thing I ask myself is the reality behind this film. Could this really happen? Yes. Could I believe something like this could happen in Lane's character? Not with her mother-in-law living in the bungalow, as well. It's a nice film based on a time when things were a little simpler, but I don't think the director gave very much opportunity for any of the stars to "give it their all," especially co-star Viggo Mortensen. Bottom line: good plot, great actors, bad fit.7 out of 10 stars.