Posted on April 9, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Julianne Moore stars in this new film about an English teacher whose former student, a playwright, comes back to town. Michael Angarano and Lily Collins co-star.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBAFsqL8DrU
Posted on July 29, 2011 at 9:55 am
This painful comedy about the agonies of love has some deftly observed moments and strong performances but its essential tawdriness overwhelms its efforts to be cuddly and life-affirming.
Everyone is miserably in love with the wrong person. Steve Carell plays Cal, married for almost 25 years to his teenage sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore), who tells him in the opening scene that she wants a divorce. Their 13-year-old son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (the heart-twistingly vulnerable Analeigh Tipton). Jessica has a crush on Cal. Emily slept with her co-worker, David (Kevin Bacon). Cal goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets someone who is not miserable and not in love: Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who takes a different beautiful woman home from the bar every night. Jacob tells Cal that he lost Emily because he lost his sense of what it means to be a man. For Jacob, being a man means pitching the New Balance shoes and ill-fitting suits and manipulating women to have sex by pretending to listen to them. Cal is soon channeling his inner playa, first seducing a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) and then a series of montaged lovelies. Meanwhile, Robbie is texting romantic pleas to Jessica and Jessica is following the advice of a classmate and taking nude photos of herself to give to Cal and Emily is dating David, whose role seems to be nice guy whose unfitness for love is demonstrated by everyone’s intended-to-be-funny-but-not-funny-at-all inability to pronounce his last name correctly.
Got that? Then, just as Jacob’s method begins to work for Cal, it stops working for Jacob. The one woman who turned him down is Hannah (Emma Stone), a recent law graduate studying for the bar exam. Circumstances lead her to return to the bar to proposition Jacob and back at his sleek bachelor pad something unprecedented happens — a night of real intimacy, talking and laughing. Now Jacob needs advice on his uncharted territory: how to be a part of a relationship that lasts more than 24 hours.
There’s an inexpressibly lovely moment as Emily calls Cal, not realizing he is right outside their house because he sneaks over at night to maintain the garden (metaphor alert). She tells him she is in the basement trying to restart the pilot light but he can see she is upstairs and just needed an excuse to call. And Stone continues to be one of the most endearingly honest, intelligent, and expressive performers on screen. She shows us how the flurry of mixed emotions she feels that first night with Jacob flicker across her face as she tries to manage her feelings of confidence and fear, longing and logic.
But that is not enough to make up for the smarminess of the story’s assumptions and the characters’ behavior. There’s an excruciating climactic scene in which two of the characters made humiliating public declarations that are intended to be gallant but come off as self-indulgent and completely inappropriate. And other than Hannah, the characters are just not very nice. Jessica keeps telling us she loves Cal because he is such a kind man and great father. Not from what we see. He shows little concern for what his children are going through with their parents’ separation or anything else they are going through. He does not know who his son’s teacher is. And he is awful to the women he sleeps with, which the movie seems to think is fine. When one of them becomes angry at him because he never called her, she is portrayed as shrewish and unreasonable. Jacob, whose only evidence of responsibility or being aware of anyone else’s needs or feelings is his decision to help Cal become a lady-killer, provides very little reason other than hotness for deserving Hannah’s love or making any effort to earn it. The film is as callous toward the one-night-stands who get tossed aside as Jacob and Cal are. There is no suggestion that someone should give them pointers on how to respect themselves enough not to fall for manipulative cads. Even worse is the treatment of the Jessica/Robbie relationship. She is, we are repeatedly told, 17. Taking nude pictures of herself to give to a man is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible signal to a prospective romantic partner but probably a crime. Giving those pictures to a 13-year-old is portrayed in the film as an act of compassionate generosity when it is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible mixed message but definitely a crime. The movie is going for a wistful romanticism. For me it was more like a pervy sociopathy.
Posted on July 15, 2010 at 6:01 pm
B+| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some teen drug and alcohol use |
| Profanity: | Very strong and explicit language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drug use, by adults and teens, adult abuses alcohol |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Tense family confrontations, scuffle |
| Diversity Issues: | A theme of the movie |
| Date Released to Theaters: | July 16, 2010 |
Life is messy, and one of the ways we try to make sense of it is through stories. With their selection of detail and events and resolution — whether a happy or a sad one — they give us a sense of structure and logic and catharsis. They help us sort through life’s ambiguities and complications, even if only for a couple of hours.
At least, that’s what stories do most of the time. Once in a while, they are content just to reflect back to us the very messiness and ambiguity we are experiencing. And when they do it well, they give us a sense of recognition that is in its own way cathartic. This film manages to do that and to be subtly subversive, lulling us across some of our own internal boundaries with its matter-of-fact portrayal of family life.
Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a long-time couple who have each given birth to a child, biological half-siblings because both women used sperm from the same anonymous donor, selected as optimal on the basis of his profile. Now the children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska of “Alice in Wonderland”) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson of “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) are teenagers and curious about their biological father. So, without telling their moms, they contact him.
He is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an organic farmer and restaurateur whose free-spirited approach to life is very appealing to two teenagers emerging from a home that is rather hot-housed by comparison. Nic and Jules have created a deeply nurturing, “Let’s talk about our feelings” environment that feels claustrophobic and intrusive to their children, especially Laser as the household’s only male. In a brief but beautifully filmed scene that opens the film, Laser looks on with a mixture of curiosity and longing as a friend casually roughhouses with his dad, captivated by this particularly male kind of communication. It may be in part this emotion that keeps Laser connected to a friend his moms correctly believe to be a bad influence.
Paul is an enticing figure for the teenagers, comfortable with his maleness and easy-going. And Paul himself is enticed by Joni and Laser, who surprise him with a sense of connection and stability he did not realize he was missing. Just as they are separating from overshare central in the house they grew up in as a normal part of adolescent search for identity, he is drawn to the road he did not quite realize he chose not to take. And this plays out in ways that threaten everything the family has built.
The title focuses on the kids, but the movie is really about the adults. The small miracle of this film is its portrayal of a long-term marriage, its perspective unadorned but sympathetic, satiric but tender. The dynamic of affection, distraction, familiarity, and frustration is deftly portrayed. The expectation of the movie is that audiences will take for granted that a same-sex relationship is just like every other relationship we have experienced and seen portrayed, and if there is any surprise at all it is how quickly we do.
And then, just as we get comfortable with the familiar discomforts of the relationship, it all gets turned upside down and we and the characters are asked to jettison yet another level of expectations and boundaries.
Bening and Moore are magnificent. It is a pure pleasure to see women with real faces on screen. They hold nothing back in allowing themselves to be seen fully in every sense of the term, opening themselves up with breathtaking generosity of spirit. The kids are all right in this film; the grown-ups are even better.
Posted on July 15, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Lisa Cholodenko co-wrote and directed one of the best-reviewed films of the year, “The Kids Are All Right,” about the teenage children of a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who seek out their biological father, leading to upheavals and realignments. I spoke to her about developing the film from her own experience.
It was a joy to see middle-aged actresses with beautiful but real faces. Bening and Moore let us see their real faces in this film.
I adore them. They are tremendous people on and off screen. One thing that was great about the experience was that everyone had the same agenda, to bring this script to life and make sure we got it right. We spent five years developing and revising the screenplay. It was five years in the making. By the time we got it together, with very little money, they were ready to bring it forward and it was more than I ever expected, what they did with these roles.
How did the screenplay evolve?
It originally evolved from a very personal place. My girlfriend and I were deciding to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor and it was complicated. It took us a long time to make the decision and find the right donor. I had been fully absorbed in that process and when I sat down to write a script I realized that there wasn’t much on my mind but that. I started from a place of imagining this girl turning 18, her prerogative to open that Pandora’s box and make contact with her sperm donor, what that would be like.
I have a four-year-old now. I imagined he would want to meet this person and that the donor we selected would be open to that. That was something I felt strongly I would want for him. I made a right turn there with the narrative and made the moms are more anxious about it. I sort of threw a dart at the wall and that’s where the story began.
Stuart Blumberg (the co-author), I had known before and we re-connected. It turned out he had been a sperm donor in college.
Josh’s character Laser has the keenest, most perceptive take than anyone in the family.
What are the biggest challenges for people in long-term relationships?
It’s keeping an equilibrium. It’s easy to get lost, as Jules says at the end. Boundaries get blurry and identities can get lost easily. It’s easy to take your partner for granted. Keeping boundaries and equilibrium so you can move through the whole menu of life experiences and recover and grow.
In this film and in “Laurel Canyon” you allow middle-aged people to be sexual, which you don’t see very often in movies.
We don’t see it in a way that resonates as true or interesting. What interested me about the characters in these two films is that understanding their sexual gravitas helped to understand them as people.
Who are some of your influences as a film-maker?
I was very influenced by the films of the 70’s. It was a golden era for independent-minded films being made at studios — Hal Ashby, Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, movies with a keen sense of character and psychology and were also funny, drama-comedies, taking bigger risks with character than we see now, more naturalism than we see now. Everything today is more digital and finely crafted and controlled. I really wanted this family to feel natural and lived-in and real.
Posted on December 10, 2009 at 3:22 pm
B| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for some disturbing images and nudity/sexual content |
| Profanity: | Strong language |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drunkenness |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Attempted suicide, aftermath of car crash with bloody body, themes of grief and loss |
| Diversity Issues: | A theme of the movie |
| Date Released to Theaters: | December 11, 2009 |
Designer Tom Ford has exquisite taste, and his first movie is an exquisite movie. Based on a story by Christopher Isherwood, as adapted by Ford, it is the story of one day in the life of a British literature professor in Los Angeles, shortly after the loss of his male lover in a car crash. It is November 30, 1962. And so the awful isolation of grief is multiplied by his inability to acknowledge what they were to each other and who he really is.
Ford’s images are so meticulously arranged they feel like a perfume commercial. There is a remote quality that distances us from what is going on. But there are moments, as when we see a flashback of the professor (Colin Firth) getting the news from a sympathetic relative who has to deliver the message that the funeral is “family only” where the grief and the pain of holding it in is raw and real and devastating.
Firth is revelatory as the professor who feels that his truest self and his deepest emotions are invisible in a world in which being gay is still “the love that dare not speak its name.” We see in memory the man he loved (the always-enticing Matthew Goode) and in the present his encounters with a curiously attentive but respectful student (Nicholas Hoult, all grown up since “About a Boy”). And he spends the evening with his closest friend, a boozy fellow British expatriate (Julianne Moore) with whom he believes he can be almost completely honest, but who still sees him as she wishes he was. There is a hint that all of what happens on this last day could be in his mind; I suspect that it is, but either way, we are caught up in his emotions and his story.
