Author Topic: L.Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right: The movie we've been waiting for all year  (Read 8896 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://www.slate.com/id/2259922/

The Kids Are All Right
The movie we've been waiting for all year.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, July 8, 2010, at 6:15 PM ET




Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right  (Focus Features) is the movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs. And it leaves you feeling wistful for at least three reasons: because of what happens in the story, because the movie's over, and because there aren't more of them this good.

Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are a middle-aged lesbian couple in Los Angeles with two teenage children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Nic, a physician, is the breadwinner of this stable, well-off family, while the unfocused Jules has vague plans to start a landscaping business on her partner's dime. Near the start of the movie, Joni, at her younger brother's urging, calls up the sperm bank that provided their mothers with genetic material 18 years ago. Behind their mothers' backs, the siblings make contact with their hitherto anonymous biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a hedonistic restaurateur who's flattered by the attention but unsure how to proceed. Gradually, Paul is incorporated into the fringes of the family: The children bring him home for an excruciatingly awkward lunch, and against Nic's wishes, Jules takes on the job of landscaping his yard.

It's fitting that gardening—Jules' landscaping project, Paul's achingly trendy farm-to-table restaurant—plays such a large role in The Kids Are All Right, because the movie is at heart about the ecosystem of a family, and the way that system changes when an exotic species is introduced. The presence of Paul changes everything, exposing fault lines in Nic and Jules' relationship and forcing the children to defy their mothers and reassess their peer friendships. (A subplot in which the introverted Laser finally stands up to his jerky best friend is particularly well-handled.)

In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Nic unleashes her hostility toward Paul in an icy diatribe about the organic-food fad: "If I hear one more person say how much they love heirloom tomatoes, I'm going to punch them right in the face." Without ever making the comparison outright, Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg draw a parallel between the aspiration for organic purity and the myth of the perfect family. However assiduously you cultivate your garden, they suggest, there's no predicting what might crop up by surprise or how it'll grow.

In a movie whose story hinges entirely on how the characters treat one other, the acting here is really interacting, and this stellar ensemble cast gets it exactly right. Bening makes Nic a force to be reckoned with: an acid-tongued workaholic who loves her wine a little more than she should but who's such lively company you understand what Jules sees in her. A scene in which Nic sings Joni Mitchell's "All I Want" a cappella at a dinner party veers from embarrassment to exaltation—and then back to embarrassment again.

The ever-astounding Julianne Moore finds lots of layers in Jules: passive-aggression, vulnerability, coquettish vanity, sexual hunger. Ruffalo just Ruffaloes it up, playing the kind of part that's been his subspecialty since You Can Count on Me:  the immature but well-meaning and rakishly sexy scamp. And as the kids who aren't always, but eventually will be, all right, Wasikowska and Hutcherson are tentative and tender and convincingly sibling-like. The scene in which the family drops the college-bound Joni off at her freshman dorm will wring tears even from the few audience members who made it dry-eyed through Toy Story 3.

More than anything, The Kids Are All Right  is a film about marriage. Not about gay marriage in particular, though the portrait of this couple's decades-long bond underscores the absurdity of the debate about what to call same-sex unions. Cholodenko, who has a donor child with her partner, isn't making a rah-rah commercial for alternative families—in fact, some gay viewers may bristle at the movie's less-than-orthodox take on lesbian sexuality and the complications of donor parenthood. What Cholodenko has aimed for, and achieved, is something bigger: a serious and funny film about the simple yet incomprehensibly fraught act of moving through time with the person you love.


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(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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I like Focus Features, they are my absolutely favorite production company.
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Film got a bad review in The New Yorker.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/movies/09kids.html?hpw



Movie Review
The Kids Are All Right
NYT Critics' Pick


Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in “The Kids Are All Right.”


Meet the Sperm Donor: Modern Family Ties

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 9, 2010


I’m tempted to start this review by falling back on a tried-and-true movie critic formulation and saying something like “Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘Kids Are All Right’ is the best comedy about an American family since ...” Since what? Precedents and grounds for comparison seem to be lacking, so I may have to let the superlative stand unqualified for now.

Which is fine: Ms. Cholodenko’s film, which she wrote with Stuart Blumberg, is so canny in its insights and so agile in its negotiation of complex emotions that it deserves to stand on its own. It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.

But its originality — the thrilling, vertiginous sense of never having seen anything quite like it before — also arises from the particular circumstances of the family at its heart. There is undeniable novelty to a movie about a lesbian couple whose two teenage children were conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. Families like this are hardly uncommon in the real world, but Ms. Cholodenko (“Laurel Canyon,” “High Art”) and Mr. Blumberg have discovered in this very modern arrangement a way of refreshing the ancient and durable wellsprings of comedy.

“The Kids Are All Right” starts from the premise that gay marriage, an issue of ideological contention and cultural strife, is also an established social fact. Nic and Jules, a couple with two children, a Volvo and a tidy, spacious house in a pleasant suburban stretch of Southern California, are a picture of normalcy.

Which is to say that they are loving, devoted, responsible and a bit of a mess. Some of this is midlife malaise: not quite a crisis, at least not at first. Nic (Annette Bening), an OB-GYN, is the breadwinner and principal worrier. Jules (Julianne Moore), who has dabbled in various careers while taking care of the children, is restless and maybe just a little flaky. They are comfortable with each other, more or less content, but also frustrated, confused, a bit out of sorts. As I said: normal.

It is almost impossible to find the right shorthand for these women. Their speech patterns and habits certainly seem familiar. The screenwriters’ ear for the way therapeutic catchphrases and hazy insights recalled from college reading lists filter into everyday conversation is as unerring as Ms. Moore’s offbeat comic timing or Ms. Bening’s tactical use of silence. But though they are recognizable, Nic and Jules are hardly predictable; they are not types, but people, and the acid of satire is applied to them sparingly and sensitively enough to avoid corroding the essential empathy that grounds the movie.

Of course, in every family empathy has its limits. Nic and Jules don’t always communicate very well, and their children — the 18-year-old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her 15-year-old brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) — have reached the stage when parents seem like alien, irrational and outmoded beings. Your parents are supposed to understand you (not that they ever can), while you have no choice but to tolerate them.

Joni, about to leave for college, is trying to figure out the terms of her fast-approaching independence, while Laser follows along behind his best friend, a bullying goofball named Clay (Eddie Hassell). Laser’s wide-eyed fascination at the sight of Clay rough-housing with his father registers curiosity and barely articulated longing. What would it be like to have a dad? To help him find out — and to shut him up — Laser’s skeptical, kindhearted sister tracks down the sperm donor, who turns out to be a restaurant owner and organic farmer named Paul.


From left, Josh Hutcherson, Mia Wasikowska and Mark Ruffalo in "The Kids Are All Right.


The shorthand description of Paul is that he is played by Mark Ruffalo, with specific reference to the goodnatured, feckless brother Mr. Ruffalo played in “You Can Count on Me.” Paul is sort of like a cleaned-up, more self-confident version of that guy, with the same hesitant intonation, crooked smile (behind a graying goatee) and slightly dangerous charm. When Joni calls him, Paul, a good sport and a bit of an adventurer, gamely accepts her invitation to meet the family (“I love lesbians!”), and his relaxed manner smoothes over an awkward initial meeting.

Much more awkwardness will follow, along with some real emotional peril. Nic and Jules are not won over at first — “a bit full of himself” is their not inaccurate verdict — but he manages to connect with both Joni and Laser in ways that their moms can’t. His position as a sympathetic outsider grants him insights that the family members lack, and in turn Joni, Laser and Jules come to see him as a confidant and counselor, a special kind of friend.

But nothing is more disruptive to domestic order than an unattached heterosexual man. In mid-19th-century America, anxiety about guys more or less like Paul drove movements for social and religious reform, and Ms. Cholodenko suggests that those advocates of temperance and other remedies may have had a point. Not that Paul, an effortless seducer (of at least one co-worker and at least one lesbian mom), is exactly the villain of the movie. He starts out too good to be true and winds up causing a lot of trouble, but at the end he’s more scapegoat than demon, and the filmmakers forgive him even if the other characters cannot.

Along the way, Ms. Cholodenko somehow blends the anarchic energy of farce — fueled by coincidences and reversals, collisions and misunderstandings — with a novelistic sensitivity to the almost invisible threads that bind and entangle people. The performances are all close to perfect, which is to say that the imperfections of each character are precisely measured and honestly presented.

There is great music too, both on the soundtrack and, in one extraordinary scene, sung a cappella at the dinner table. (It’s Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” beautifully harmonized by Nic and Paul). The title is a musical reference, of course, to a song by the Who, a good choice for all kinds of reasons. Another one might have been the name of a lovely ballad of enduring love recorded a few years ago by Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler: “This Is Us.”

“The Kids are All Right” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There’s sex, kids.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Opens on Friday nationwide.

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.




"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Marina

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This does look very, very good - and Joni Mitchell too?  I am so there.  :)
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Film got a bad review in The New Yorker.


We shall see....


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/07/12/100712crci_cinema_lane


The Current Cinema
Wives’ Tales
“The Kids Are All Right” and “Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno.”

by Anthony Lane
July 12, 2010



Mark Ruffalo, Annette Bening, and Julianne Moore in Lisa Cholodenko’s movie.


Not long ago, in “Mother and Child,” Annette Bening played a controlling, easily angered woman who worked in a hospital and found her status as a parent challenged by unforeseen events. Now, in “The Kids Are All Right,” she opts for a complete change of tack, playing a controlling, easily angered lesbian who works in a hospital and finds her status as a parent challenged by unforeseen events. The drought of intelligent roles for women in middle age is so severe that you have to applaud Bening for seeking out these movies and making them her own, yet it would be disingenuous not to be taken aback by the harsh purpose with which so accomplished a seductress—think of her in “The Grifters” and “Bugsy”—has peeled away any trace of glamour in favor of a saturnine frown and a pursed mouth.

Her character, in the new film, is Nic, who lives in Los Angeles with her wife, Jules (Julianne Moore), and their two children—Joni (Mia Wasikowska), who was, needless to say, named after Joni Mitchell, and her younger brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), whose name is a less flattering fit. Joni is eighteen, a straight-A student about to leave for college, and you sense in her, behind the shyness and the curtain of long hair, a thwarted questing. It leads her to contact a guy named Paul, who, years ago, was the anonymous sperm donor picked by Nic and Jules to be the father of both children. Paul, a bearded restaurateur, turns out to be randy but unthreatening, warm to the touch but cool about stuff, with a dash of smugness in his easy smile, all of which is a way of saying that he is played by Mark Ruffalo. One of these days, someone should cast Ruffalo as a quarterback, or a Cistercian monk, just to see what happens.

“The Kids Are All Right” is directed by Lisa Cholodenko, from a script that she wrote with Stuart Blumberg, and what convinces most in her work here—as it did in her 1998 film “High Art”—is that it seems honestly torn between adventure and repose. You instantly accept the curiosity that tugs the children into tracking down Paul, even if they couldn’t explain their own reasons. Equally, you know for sure that his intrusion will bring chaos, and there is no mistaking the deep breath of relief, toward the end, when Joni arrives in her college room and discovers, after a hundred minutes of full-on bickering, a space devoid of antsiness. There are not only glancing moments but whole sequences in this movie when the agony of social embarrassment makes you want to haul the characters to their feet and slap them in the chops. Just watch Joni and Laser, who have told their mothers about Paul, bringing him home for a meal. I’m not sure which is more aghast, the look on his face when he is asked, “Did you always know you wanted to be in the food-services industry?” or the look on Nic’s face when she discovers that he dropped out of college. One of the reasons the women originally chose him is that he was meant to be studying international relations. Now, he says, “I’m a doer.” Oh, God.

All of this is made so much worse by everyone’s aching need to be holier, and hipper, than thou. The California that we get in this film is a greener, gayer update of the California that Woody Allen took such perfect potshots at, more than thirty years ago, in “Annie Hall,” the difference being that Cholodenko doesn’t always know that it is funny. She wants us to laugh at Paul’s initial response when he learns of the family setup (“I love lesbians!”), and she rightly notes the casual, bantering racism of the liberal bourgeoisie (listen to Jules address a Mexican gardener), but do the screenwriters not realize that half of the women’s conversation—“We just talked conceptually,” “It hasn’t risen to the point of consciousness for you,” “It’s so indigenous!”—is pure, extra-planetary prattling and nothing but? The prattle turns chronic when Jules, who fancies herself as a landscape designer, is hired by Paul to reshape his back yard; she suggests “a trellisy, hidden garden kind of thing,” or, alternatively, “you could go with the Asiany.” I wouldn’t trust her to pick a rose.

As anyone could have predicted, this new friendship soon becomes what Jules would call making-outy, as she and Paul put down their plants and retire to his boudoir. What Cholodenko, at her sneakiest, is doing here is to ask what occurs when a moral elasticity encounters sturdier, more traditional forms of living. Paul, for example, may only be a makeshift father figure, but under his influence Joni begins to stand up for herself against the brittle Nic, and Laser is inspired to drop an unsuitable friend—something that his mothers have long been urging him to do, without success. As for Jules, she gets laid by a man, which, if nothing else, makes a change, the problem being that the small, tolerant world of these prosperous folk can’t handle a change that extreme. Just as the California sunshine somehow loses its relaxing suffusion and hardens into a cruel noontide, so, by an irony that Cholodenko may not fully have intended, the climax of “The Kids Are All Right” grows suddenly humorless, and close to vengeful, in its moralizing glare. Danger shrinks back, and the kids are all right again, although you have to wonder who the real kids are: Joni and Laser, wise and wry, or their messed-up moms and feckless dad, who have so much more to learn?


Halfway through dinner, in “The Kids Are All Right,” Nic finds out that she has been betrayed. Without warning, other people’s talk dies away, to be replaced by a strange churning sound, like an underwater helicopter. The sensory world is warped by the force of her feelings. Take that deformation, multiply it a hundredfold, and you approach the eruptive mania that consumes the hero of “Inferno,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film—or remarkable stab at a film—from 1964.

(Con't)

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/07/12/100712crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=2#ixzz0tD1xF8x8
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
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Offline Shakesthecoffecan

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Reviews never really interest me. I usually like or don't like something once I see it. I like Mark Ruffalo.
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Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/67022/

THE MOVIE REVIEW
The New Normal
The Kids Are All Right’s portrait of gay parenting is fearless enough to be hugely entertaining.
By David Edelstein
Published Jul 4, 2010



(Photo: Suzanne Tenner/Courtesy of Focus Features)


Annette Bening has a genius for a kind of “existential” acting—for illuminating the chink (or moat, or abyss) between a person’s front and the quivering creature underneath, desperately trying to hold the mask in place. As Nic, the more patriarchal half of a same-sex married couple in Lisa Cholodenko’s high-strung comedy The Kids Are All Right,  she wears a short, blunt haircut; drops her voice (she purges the tinkle); and presents to her teenage children, a boy and a girl, a façade of stability, of someone who values structure above all. Nic’s political agenda is unspoken but implicit: that two mothers (the other is Jules, played by Julianne Moore) can create a home that’s every bit as traditional as one with a mother and father. Nic is admirable, inspiring, but also a bit of a pill (and a compulsive drinker). Like the best comic protagonists, she takes herself very, very seriously and tries so hard to do the right thing—which all but guarantees that her orderly world will become unmoored and collapse in a shower of travestied ideals.

It happens like this: As her inward, angry son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), skateboards on the edge of delinquency, her daughter, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), decides to track down a true father figure for the boy—in this case, their anonymous sperm donor. (Both Joni and her half-brother have the same biological dad, although each mother carried a child.) Enter Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a shambling, freewheeling bachelor restaurateur. When he shows up for dinner on his motorcycle, Nic regards this interloper with distaste bordering on horror. (Bening’s frozen deadpan barely conceals a hundred different impressions—all bad.) But the flightier, femme-ier Jules is intrigued.

Cholodenko, who wrote the screenplay with Stuart Blumberg, has a female partner and a child, and in this political climate, with gay marriage and parenting under fire, you wouldn’t expect she’d even flirt with the notion that two moms aren’t enough. But she’s a true comic dramatist. She tests what is, presumably, her ideal, her design for living; she bombards it with every weapon in her arsenal. Then she surveys the wreckage, ostensibly in the hope it can be reassembled into something more in balance. And why not? Boys do, in this culture, look to fathers to help form their identities. Introspective modern kids do attempt to discern which parts of their personalities are nature and which nurture. As in her High Art  and (to a lesser extent) Laurel Canyon,  Cholodenko’s world is too complex, too discombobulated, to let the characters she loves—all of whom practice an “alternative lifestyle”—get away with thinking their revolutionary bubbles are necessarily impregnable.

Cholodenko and Blumberg reportedly wrote many drafts of The Kids Are All Right,  and the scenes are beautifully shaped. Moore’s dithery lyricism carries echoes of Diane Keaton, but as a duettist she’s in a class of her own. She takes on the rhythms of her co-stars—implying that marriage to someone as strong-willed as Nic would have kept Jules soft and suggestible. When alone with Paul, for whom she’s designing a backyard garden, she turns giddy and girlish and self-deprecating. It’s easy to see why she’s charmed. Working in mainstream films, Ruffalo has been in danger of losing that incisive flakiness that made him so magnetic in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me.  Well, it’s back, baby. What’s so winning is how hard Paul, who is naturally abstracted, tries to make contact: first, with supreme awkwardness, with his biological kids; and then with the woman who gives him a glimpse of how good domesticity—how making gardens grow—might feel.

The kid actors are more than all right—less showy but sharp. Wasikowska has the gift of watchfulness. Her Joni (named, yes, for the singer) is about to leave for college and needs to fit together the pieces of her puzzle life. She also needs to leave her half-brother in a better place. Hutcherson at first seems too closed off, but that’s part of his strategy. More and more, he lets you in: not all the way, but enough to let you glimpse, in embryo, the person who’s fighting to emerge.

The title, like Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give,  is one that trails you out of the theater and gives you something to brood on. (It has nothing to do with the Who—who spelled all right wrong anyway.) I think Cholodenko wants you to see that, despite the gaps and uncertainties in the pioneer family life of Nic and Jules, Joni and Laser have enough of a foundation, enough love, to grope their way to all-rightness. That this idea might be viewed as radical or degenerate is part of the larger tragicomedy of American life. But the self-satire of The Kids Are All Right  is so knowing, so rich, so hilarious, so damn healthy that it blows all thoughts of degeneracy out of your head.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"

Offline Ellemeno

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Yummy, thanks for these, John.  I have really been looking forward to this movie, John.  What a cast.

I love this line about Annette Bening:





Annette Bening has a genius for a kind of “existential” acting—for illuminating the chink (or moat, or abyss) between a person’s front and the quivering creature underneath, desperately trying to hold the mask in place.