I'm familiar enough with Anderson's films, and can at least understand why some of his other ones were well-received.
But I can't for the life of me figure out why people love this film. There wasn't a single part that made me laugh. Not one.
Just my opinion, and since so many people seem to have enjoyed it, I was curious to get other people's reactions.
You are not alone in having been firmly underwhelmed by MK. Agree with someone above in especially liking Norton and to a lesser extent Willis. Frances McDormand was wasted, I thought, in a too-vaguely sketched role, and Bill Murray's sad ennui wore thin for me as well.
In a sense, it was as Wes Andersonian as anything else he's made (pretty palette, hyper-rich tableaus, themes of child-parent alienation, etc.), but neither my wife nor I could bring ourselves to care about the kids or their journey.
SPOILER ALERT:
There was a point in their journey, after a lot of shots of them stepping over streams and what not, when they first settle down and eat hotdogs or something and then are preciously and precociously bantering. Right there I got a sinking/panicked feeling that THIS was it: the movie wasn't getting any deeper than this. The centerpiece was this very slight dalliance. Didn't work for me.
Thought the Schwarzman interlude - and the marriage - at the other summer camp was unfunny and indulgent to the point of baffling.
Schwarzman, Murray - a lot of this seemed like fan-masturbatory retread, fitted onto a kid mobile. One quintessentially Andersonian touch - that in earlier years or in a more engaging movie I would've no doubt admired - came right after the dog gets killed in the forest after the scout troop fails to apprehend the fugitive pair:
The boy and girl lean over to eulogize the animal.
The girl says something like: "He was a good dog."
The boy, very philosophically, replies: "Who can say?"
Good line, of course, but, to use the parlance of film geeks, "unearned" I thought. Not a bad film by any stretch, but very slight and a little disappointing for me.
I wonder where in Rhode Island this was shot? It seemed like a Block Island-type world, but all the forest and stone and stuff suggest it was inland somewhere.
