Captain Fantastic
That's the best acoustic cover of "Sweet Child O' Mine" I've ever heard. Great vocalist, nice beat, lovely harmonies and a killer harmonica player.
It's the little things
Viggo Mortensen is another actor I've always liked, ever since I first saw him in
G.I. Jane. Since then I've seen most of what he's done, always at least liking them and often finding them great. In this case, it falls to the liking side. I wasn't wowed by his performance here, but it's still a very good role. Playing the father of a family that just lost their mother, Mortensen has to pull them from the forest they've been living in since before most of the children were born and enter modern life, somthing the children, while well red and trained to survive in the wild, seem a bit unqualified for. They posses rudamentary social skills, but their lack of interaction with other people their own age (as well as a total lack of current popular culture) sets them at odds when meeting people in an urban environment. The actors portraying these children are fine, with the stand-out performance being MacKay, playing the eldest son Bo. Being the one with the most lines and the lion's share of the screen time, he's the one who gets the most fleshed out, it's not surprising that he stands out (to me, at least) as the most memorable character of the children. The girls, too, are both well played and have their own voices in the movie, but the younger kids blend together in my mind. I kept mixing up the two youngest kids, and it took me a long time to really nail down who was who.
As to the way the film was shot, I liked the intimacy of the campfire scene in the beginning, and how it was mirrored in the final shot with them all together again round the kitchen table. The quiet just before Mortensen interrupts their reading by going round the circle and checking their progress was a nice touch too, speaking to the ease with which they all could just sit there comfortably and enjoying each others company without feeling the need to fill the silence. Then to break that stillness with the impromptu creation of music that they, one after another, joined into showed just how broad their skills were. It does seem like Ben and Leslie did a good job of raising these kids, the unconventional means of which not withstanding.
It's a nice, warm movie about how our families shape us and, for good or bad, it can mold us into very specific individuals, both to help us and to hinder us in one way or another.
All in all, I liked this. It has its quirks, which I liked, while some lines just made me laugh and/or squirm uncomfortably a little.
Good pick, PG!