‘Aloha’ squeaks by on charm
The latest from writer-director Cameron Crowe is an ungainly collection of likable but awkward scenes.
Crowe introduces a serious topic without really examining it, and even the romance feels off, with a pair of lovers who seem mismatched.
[...] yet, in a lumbering, knocking-over-the-furniture sort of way, “Aloha” is an engaging and pleasant experience, because there is something about Crowe’s personality as a filmmaker that’s very easy to be around.
Cynicism is such a reflex in our culture that it’s a pleasure to inhabit the mental landscape of an artist who isn’t cynical at all, and who is at least as intelligent as the cynical people.
Brian (Cooper) is returning to Hawaii to work for an eccentric billionaire (Bill Murray), who has partnered with the Defense Department on a project to launch a satellite into space.
The captain is the movie’s most unusual character, clownishly by-the-book and constantly bragging that she is one-quarter Hawaiian, and yet, in a way, the movie’s moral center.
[...] on three occasions people talk out loud about someone in the next room, without any worry about being overheard.
Somewhere in here Crowe tries to make a movie about the privatization of outer space, the sacredness of the sky, the danger of the military industrial complex and the power of love.
The treatment is earnest but glancing, and a key scene in which Crowe implies that the collective force of rock ’n’ roll can dismantle a nuclear weapon is either ridiculous, or a metaphor, or both.