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L.Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right: The movie we've been waiting for all year

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Marina:
This does look very, very good - and Joni Mitchell too?  I am so there.  :)

Aloysius J. Gleek:




--- Quote from: Jeff  Wrangler on July 09, 2010, 01:39:17 pm ---Film got a bad review in The New Yorker.

--- End quote ---


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

Shakesthecoffecan:
Reviews never really interest me. I usually like or don't like something once I see it. I like Mark Ruffalo.

Aloysius J. Gleek:

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.

Ellemeno:
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:



--- Quote from: jmmgallagher on July 09, 2010, 11:40:39 pm ---


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.


--- End quote ---

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