We went to see Moonrise Kingdom the new Wes Anderson movie yesterday. It was a lovely movie. A vast improvement on the usual young love, Romeo & Juliet story line. Based on overheard comments as we left the theatre, I think you either love Wes Anderson movies or you don’t get them at all.

Our daughter was with us as she is also a big fan of Anderson movies. She is a great person to see a movie with because she suspends belief, gets totally into the story and doesn’t hide her reactions. She will laugh uninhibitedly, cry at the oddest moments and unashamedly cover her face during scary parts. And I can’t reliably predict any of those reactions.

When we saw Half-Blood Prince she was fine when Dumbledore was killed and was inconsolable when they burned down the Weasley’s house. Since I can never anticipate what will get a big reaction from her, its just a part of the movie magic.

We have taken her to a wide range of movies over the years including ones with subtitles at film fests, political documentaries and art films – not always age appropriate fare. Most memorable was Hipsters, the Russian movie about swing kids she saw when she was 10 that turned out to have full frontal nudity and a fairly explicit sex scene. Naturally she was the only child in the theater and when the sex appeared on screen lots of heads swiveled to stare at the bad parents.

In Moonrise Kingdom, maybe because she is the exact age of the children in the movie, the scene of their first kiss had her shrunk down in her seat with a look of horror on her face. I thought it was because she experienced this with her mother and father on either side of her, but talking about it later I think it was really that the characters were in their underwear when they kissed. It was all a bit much I guess.

You would think that after seeing exactly how the body parts work together in Hipsters and assorted other explicit or implied sex acts on TV and in movies, that a kiss would not faze her. But there you have it. It was a sweet kiss. A movie kiss. With all the delicacy and weirdness of the real thing.

That’s Wes Anderson in a nut shell.