EIFF TONIGHT: The grown-ups are looney in Moon Point
“Never trust anyone over 30” is the hidden message in Moon Point, a melodramatic comedy about three whiny little turds on a road trip to nowhere.
It screens Friday at 9:45 p.m. at the Empire City Centre. The cast and director will be in attendance.
Every single grownup in this amusing yet affecting little film is completely bonkers: the blithe parents, the demented innkeepers, the old guy in the banana suit at the AA meeting, the serial killer karaoke singer. You can see there are a lot of colourful obstacles for our protagonists to overcome. It’s a very slow road trip movie: Darryl (Nick McKinlay) is a 24-year-old slacker who still lives at home, has no visible means of support and no form of transportation except in a wagon towed by his paraplegic buddy Femur’s (Kyle Mac) electric wheelchair, whose maximum speed is about 5 mph. Along the way in the quest to reunite with Darryl’s childhood crush Sarah Cherry – who made it big in show business and drifted away – the pair meets another wayward traveller, Kristin (Paula Brancati), who has Gen-Yne problems of her own. Yes, we all have a “Bag of Hammers” and it’s what you do with those hammers that determines what kind of man, or woman, you are. No, wait, wrong movie.
Anyway, there are some tragic backstories here, some painful coming-of-age epiphanies, a smattering of love interest and when these characters get to where they’re going, finally, there’s wisdom at the end. And more crazy elders, of course.
Enjoyable if too a bit too obvious in places, this movie plays out like The Wizard of Oz, except that they all need a brain.
