The Kids are All Right seemed to capture the mood of a lot of people and the state of society last year, with its raw and emotional portrayal of a middle-aged lesbian couple dealing with their kids growing up, and it absolutely is a big step forward for American society to embrace a story of such a family so openly, but I have to admit I found the film to be overly melodramatic and trying so hard to be “normal” that it ended up seeming way too negative.

Nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Annette Bening, Best Supporting Actor for Mark Ruffalo, and Best Original Screenplay, The Kids are All Right certainly has a solid pedigree behind it.  Director Lisa Cholodenko also co-wrote, and as a proud middle-aged lesbian herself she certainly must bring some authenticity (as with High Art in 1998) to this painful story of how a couple, played by Bening and Julianne Moore, struggle with the kinds of things that I suppose all couples deal with as their nests become empty and they have to face up to some of the repressed emotions which have dogged them through the years.  Perhaps the relatively short-form nature of a feature film is part of the problem here, since I was never able to come to any understanding of what attracted Bening’s and Moore’s characters to each other in the first place, since they seem to have opposite personalities, and are constantly bickering.  Even when recounting their earlier courtship in the “happy” scenes in the film, I still got the impression that they were never really happy or content together.  This has nothing to do with the same-sex relationship – it’s always awkward to see characters who have purportedly spent decades together while seeming to have never really enjoyed any of that time.

But the film isn’t entirely about that.  Their daughter has reached age 18 and is encouraged by her younger brother to contact the anonymous sperm donor who is their shared father (each of the women had one child with the same donor, so the children are actually half-siblings – pretty cool, actually).  After a shaky first meeting which leaves each of the kids with different impressions, they continue to see their father, unbeknownst to their mothers, until the news slips and they have to deal with that elephant in the room.  The film gets to explore the topic of the moral and legal obligations of sperm donors in this current age of records opening up when the kids turn 18, and this is layered on top of the relationship woes of the mothers including uncomfortable questions about their actual sexual orientation.

As I began to explain above, despite a few genuine moments, Moore and Bening didn’t seem ultimately believable to me as a couple, but I feel guilty for not trusting the director to have portrayed this in a realistic way.  The “tense couple moments” are too broad, which detracts from the more tender moments and makes them seem fake.  There are a few contrvived “movie moments” such as when Bening breaks into song during a family dinner, and while the ideas explored in these scenes are good, it’s too blunt a way of presenting them.  I found Bening to be just as annoying here as I almost always do; the only time I’ve ever felt that her intensity was correctly placed was in American Beauty (1999), a film which required everyone to be an exaggeration of the type they were playing.  Here, she’s just cranked up a few levels too high for the intimate intentions of the film.  In the end, as the daughter goes off to college, it turns out that the kids are indeed all right, and their mothers realize that they should perhaps take a page out of that book and get back to what brought them together in the first place.  The Kids are All Right didn’t really resonate with me as a complete film, though the themes were certainly worth pursuing.

Melodrama wrecks an otherwise thought-provoking story.

Canada’s Oscar-nominated entry for Best Foreign Language Film is a gripping and heartbreaking story of a woman’s children forced to come to terms with her past, after she is gone.  Incendies is nicely structured, keeps its audience guessing, and delivers a devastating revelation at the end.  I found it to be a worthy nominee and a tremendous film in its own right, and while the ending seems like a bit of a narrative cop-out to me, I have to forgive it because the setup is so well-crafted.

In contemporary Montreal, a lawyer brings together a brother and sister following the death of their mother, to read her will.  The mother has written cryptic letters to each of them, telling one to go and find their missing brother, and telling the other to go and find their missing father.  The news that they have a brother is a shock, and they had also long-assumed that their father was dead.  The sister pursues her mother’s wishes with gusto, travelling into the middle east to discover her mother’s rocky past, but the brother resists.  Eventually he is forced to join in, and the two could never have imagined what they would find on the path to discovering these two missing members of their family.

The film is lengthy, but that’s because it has a complex story to tell about a whole lifetime, and each new discovery leads to more and more questions about their mother’s past as well as renewed amazement at the strength she mustered in the face of the terrible things she lived through.  When the brother and sister eventually learn the truth about their family, they are dismayed but at the same time appreciative of the closure that they didn’t know they needed.

I shouldn’t say much more about the film, except that the subject matter (shootings, bombings, rape, death of children) is harrowing and difficult, which might impede its appreciation by some viewers.  Incendies is a world-class film which, as I say, relies on a not-uncommon resolution, but the depth of the story it lays out leading up to that conclusion gives it the right to utilize this particular device.  It’s a rewarding viewing experience if you can deal with the subject matter.

Impressive and engrossing Canadian Oscar entry.

How to Train Your Dragon is an animated film about a remote Viking community hundreds of years ago, plagued by constant dragon attacks.  For generations, youngsters have been trained as warriors, to kill dragons in battle.  One meek and gentle kid, whose father happens to be one of the most fearsome warriors in the vllage, doesn’t want to grow up to kill dragons, that’s just how it is.  Breaking from conformity is a recipe for being ridiculed by peers and having disappointed parents.  Does this sound like an idea which has been beaten to death in movies for kids?  Well, that’s because it has.

The kid, quite by chance, manages to bring down a “Night Fury” dragon during a battle, though nobody else notices this.  He goes out to find this downed dragon and discovers that it is just as afraid as he is.  I don’t think I’m spoiling the film for anyone, because of the title, when I say that he learns how to train dragons and figures out their motivations, and of course he becomes a hero in his village for it.

The story here is pretty heavy-handed, with the boy being forced to attend dragon killing classes which include the usual arrogant and hormonal teenage types as well as the hot girl who he wins over in the end.  The Vikings have Scottish accents, which I suppose might or might not be historically accurate but does give a certain Shrek-like tone to the comedy.  There are shades of King Kong at times, which I thought was perceptive and nice to see.  The animation is stylized but pretty clean, and the story is no more contrived than that of Toy Story 3, so I might have liked to see an upset in the Best Animated Feature category in the Oscars (I didn’t), and the film was also nominated for its musical score, which covered a wide range from heavy action in battle to the tender scenes of mutual discovery between a boy and his dragon.  How to Train Your Dragon is nothing special, but was perfectly fine typical entertainment for the kids.

Unremarkable animated story about personal growth.

Oscar season this year coincided with cereal-box movie passes, and I’m not one to turn down cheap or essentially “free” first-run movies (I eat the cereal), even if I am in the middle of a desperate campaign to see the 40-odd Oscar nominated films.  Being generally a fan of Vince Vaughn, I wanted to see The Dilemma before it disappeared from theatres.

I would like to characterize this as a concept comedy, but really, the concept is so weak and mundane that I’m surprised anyone decided to greenlight it.  Vaughn plays a man who is in the auto parts manufacturing business with his college buddy and best friend (played by Kevin James), and he finds out that James’ wife is cheating on him, and has to figure out whether or not to tell his friend.  That’s the movie.

This might make for a wonderful little 40-minute film about moral obligations and how modern society has forced different expectations upon people.  However, someone was trying to make it into a feature-length watered-down PG-13 comedy vehicle for two big box office stars (not to mention a complete waste of time for talented co-stars Winina Ryder and Jennifer Connelly).  I’d like to just say that it doesn’t quite work, but that would be a bit too generous.  Plot elements such as Vaughn’s sneaky pursuit of his friend’s wife’s lover are just jarringly out of place and detract from the moral question at hand.  Plot devices such as Vaughn’s struggle with gambling are seemingly tacked on just to smooth out a couple of plot contrivances, without addressing the huge implications not related to the story at hand.  And subplots such as the major automotive breakthrough the guys are about to make – throaty muscle-car sounds for electric cars to make them seem cool – are so unbelievable that it’s hard to understand how anyone thought they would be either funny or not a total distraction from the main story of the film.

I didn’t hate The Dilemma when I saw it, but in the time I’ve had to reflect on it, I’d have to say it has diminished quite a bit and I now don’t see a lot of redeeming value in the film.

A waste of tremendous comedic talent.

With an Oscar nomination for its makeup, I was compelled to see The Way Back this month, but I wanted to see it anyway.  An interpretation of the true-life story of a group of prisoners of war during the second world war who escaped from a prison camp in Siberia and literally walked thousands of miles to freedom, The Way Back falls a bit into the standard storytelling traps of this kind of movie, but it’s such an awe-inspiring story that it’s hard not to be impressed.

There aren’t a lot of big acting names here other than Ed Harris, who gives an understated performance as the inspirational and pragmatic patriarch of the group.  I don’t know how closely the film sticks to the real story, and I can’t imagine that in reality there were such standard types as the “guy you know is going to die first”, the “guy who remains heartless until a key moment in the journey and then changes”, and the “guy who is too compassionate for his own good but ends up saving the cynic’s life because of it”.  I tend to like this kind of underdog story, and the scope of the journey offers opportunities for hiking set-pieces covering all kinds of terrain and all kinds of weather, from the bleak winter in the forest to the nearly impassable mountains to the endless dry and hot desert.

I can’t quite decide whether this is just a formulaic throwaway movie, or one which is more deep and meaningful.  I don’t think I’ll bother trying to figure it out since I won’t likely see the movie again any time soon, but if this type of film sounds intriguing, go for it.

A good example of its type.

The combination of Disney and Tim Burton seems to result in something tremendous to look at, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  With his usual muses Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter on board, Burton gives us his odd take on the Lewis Carroll story, a warped interpretation of Wonderland and its inhabitants, with a story driven by a strong and simple moral.  I wouldn’t have bothered with this if not for the Oscar nominations for art direction, costumes, and visual effects, and I can’t say that I feel that viewing this film was time well spent.

At first, I wasn’t even convinced that the visual effects were even all that great, with the strange physics accompanying Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, but the effects improved significantly after that and were well worth the nomination, with live-action and CGI elements mixed together throughout the film.  The costumes represent a typical Burton-esque take on Carter’s Red Queen and her minions as well as Anne Hathaway’s creepy and perhaps miscast White Queen.  The weird cast of supporting characters includes Alan Rickman and Crispin Glover in appropriate roles, but their tone only added to my wondering what the intended audience was for the film.  It didn’t seem to be geared towards kids, but at the same time it wasn’t oriented to the adult perspective either.  This was OK entertainment but I really didn’t care.

Throwaway entry with artistic Oscar nominations.

I had considered watching Salt but might not have bothered immediately if not for the Oscar nomination for Sound Mixing.  Angelina Jolie seems to be starring in ever more unlikely thrillers and actioners, and Salt pushes the boundaries of plausibility far past anything the viewer can reasonably be expected to forgive, but I found that it had a certain gleefully irresponsible charm, as if it deliberately went so far beyond real-life believability that it could confidently revel in its own manufactured reality.

Angelina Jolie and Liev Schreiber play two CIA agents who have been devoted to their jobs and their country for many years.  Out of nowhere, a man comes in and claims that Jolie is in fact a Russian spy, at which point she goes rogue and tries to prove her innocence and save the life of her husband, who she believes to be in danger.  This is one of those movies where almost every character is either all good or all bad, but there’s plenty of misdirection along the way to keep us guessing about which ones are which.  I guessed a major twist about 13 minutes into the movie, though admittedly that didn’t make the whole movie entirely predictable, since Jolie’s character remained impossible to interpret until near the end.  However, it’s all still pretty standard stuff.

But I’m a total sucker for action thrillers with super-spies, so I was totally in my element.  There’s just something about individuals being able to escape from full squadrons of police and special forces staff, while at the same time destroying half of a major city, that appeals to me, and I must not be the only one.  Jolie jumps off bridges onto semi-trucks, she escapes dozens of people shooting at her in broad daylight, she jumps her way down an elevator shaft, she steals stuff from anywhere and everywhere all the time, and she MacGyvers together bombs and other weapons in minutes while under hot pursuit.  It’s completely impossible, and yet I love to believe that it could be.

Salt is ridiculous action filmmaking gone wild, and I loved every minute of it, even though I know it’s total crap.  So sue me.

Audiences love spies who can escape.

I watched Unstoppable, technically, because of its Oscar nomination for Sound Editing, but I was interested in seeing it before that nomination forced my hand.  On the surface it was likely to be simply another hyperactive and overwrought Tony Scott action film, but it reviewed well during its theatrical run and did fairly well at the box office.  The film, extremely loosely based on real events, is about an out of control train running through urban areas and the courageous actions which brought it to a halt.  I wouldn’t call this a great film by any measure, but it was entertaining and it was loud, and that’s what I was looking for.

The stage is set with the standard character setups, with union-based tension between the old-time freight train conductors who are being laid off to make way for younger and cheaper newcomers.  Denzel Washington is one of the grizzled veterans and Chris Pine is a young fellow who seems to have come into the profession by way of inside connections and intergenerational family guilt.  Washington, unlike the other long-time employees, gives Pine the benefit of the doubt, which turns out to be a good thing since the two of them are then paired up to drive a train together on that fateful day.  Lazy rule-breaking in the freight yard leads to a train with no driver accelerating along a heavily used track between busy cities, and as it gains speed and a few close calls are avoided, the administration tries to decide how to handle this uncontrolled and unstoppable train, which of course happens to be carrying hazardous chemicals as part of its load.

All of the standard players are here.  There’s the bureaucrat who’s so far removed from the reality of driving trains that he decides not to derail the train in a safe area because of the potential loss of money.  There’s the plucky female dispatch operator, played here by the always wonderful Rosario Dawson, who knows the right decisions and pushes for them to be made, but is powerless to enact them unless she puts her own job at risk.  There’s the egghead regulator guy who happens to be visiting the dispatch office that day for an inspection, and he has thoughts about how to stop the train but nobody listens to him because he’s only talking theory and hasn’t done the dirty work of actually driving trains (I’ll give you one guess as to whether or not his suggestions turn out to be right).  There’s the train full of schoolchildren learning about how great rail travel is, who miss being plowed down by the unstoppable train by a margin of about 4 feet.  There’s the recently-estranged wife of Chris Pine, who has a restraining order against him but gets caught up in the drama of his heroics and is right there waiting for him when he emerges successfully from stopping the renegade train.  Unstoppable is “inspired by true events”, not even “based” on them, and it’s easy to see that some artistic license has been taken here.

Still, this is an engaging action premise about men and their big toys, with a freight train doing a side wheelie as it goes too fast around a critical bend on an elevated track in the middle of a city, and the heavy bass rumbling as trains attach to one another and rumble down the track is exactly what Tony Scott is known for bringing to life.  My only serious problem with the film is that the impression of speed is not really achieved.  I know that obviously the real movie trains aren’t travelling as fast as they purportedly are in the story, but usually fast and careful editing can fix that, and I’m surprised that it didn’t.  I could also have done without the silly sentimentality at the end, but it’s inescapable in a movie like this, so I have to let it go.  Unstoppable is good popcorn entertainment, nothing too high-brow, and pretty much delivers on what it promises.

Just prototypical modern-day Tony Scott fare.

With a snow day declared in Toronto and the whole family home for the day on February 2, was there really any option other than to watch Groundhog Day?  This 1993 Harold Ramis film depicts Bill Murray re-living the same day over and over again, without any idea of what will break the curse of his existence stuck in small-town Pennsylvania on the day when the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil comes out to predict the weather.  The film is a comedy first and foremost, but it raises some serious questions about the meaning of life, what to do with the possibilities opened up by endless amounts of available time, how endless repetition and hopelessness can drag a person down, and the limitations of how much you can change people’s long-held perceptions of you in just a single day.

I’ve always loved the concept behind this film, since there’s such potential in it, and I think the movie does a convincing job of taking us through the roller coaster of emotions and reactions to being stuck in a situation where the same day is repeated again and again. There is the initial shock and bafflement, panic when wondering whether or not this is real, eventual glee when realizing that there are no consequences for any actions at all, boredom and depression after realizing that you’re stuck, a renewed interest in the finer things in life after realizing that there’s time to appreciate them, and the eventual settling on a goal which ends up turning out to be the way to break the spell.  Bill Murray is a long-underappreciated dramatic actor who was buried for years under his own curse of being typecast mostly in goofy comedies, and it’s been good to see him steer towards more weighty work over the past decade.  Here, he delivers a performance which requires not only the sarcastic wit for which he’s well known, but also the ability to show a full range of emotions as he goes through every imaginable human triumph and defeat.

How many decades did Murray spend reliving the same day every single day?  It’s unknown, but it’s clear that it was many years.  As a viewer, I don’t remember the first time I saw this film, so in my memory there hasn’t been a time when I didn’t know what needed to happen in order to break the pattern.  It’s an important point, though, since the unknown nature of his problem is key to the emotional journey.  Still, there’s plenty here for the repeat viewer, and we can take a certain joy from the knowledge that Murray’s life will eventually come around to being full and rich, and that he will live a certain February 2nd as many times as it takes before that happens.  This is thoughtful and intelligent comedy which doesn’t need to rely on gross-out gags or coarseness for its laughs, and there’s always a place for that in cinema.

Underappreciated classic comedy about life’s meaning.

How do you know when or whether someone has recovered and is ready to be trusted again?  With some people, there’s a question of whether they can or will ever again be worth taking a chance on.  The Fighter, based on a true-life story, illustrates how families wrestle with that painful dilemma all the time.

Dicky is a former boxer who nearly had a shot at the title, but missed because he didn’t quite have what it takes.  His younger brother Micky is now close to getting his shot, but his family and particularly Dicky may screw it up.  When it comes to family, even in the face of obvious evidence that they aren’t looking out for you, it’s really hard to decide not to stick with them.  After a disastrous Las Vegas fight which they should have turned down because of a substitute opponent, Micky is facing his options and having a hard time deciding what to do.  He eventually goes out on his own, and at the same time Dicky’s drug use catches up with him and he spends some time in jail.  When Dicky gets out the circumstances are different but it’s hard for them both to adjust, especially when this goes against everything they’ve known for decades.  Dicky is an unmatched instinctive fighter, and Micky needs him in his corner in order to succeed, but Dicky has blown so many chances with so many people that they can’t accept him for who he now is.

The Fighter doesn’t deviate far from the typical formula of a sports underdog who triumphs over adversity, which is exactly what I expected, but still, it was better than average.  Amy Adams as Micky’s on-again, off-again girlfriend is mostly wasted, despite her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.  Melissa Leo as the boys’ mother did deservedly win that award, as she completely inhabited the character of the domineering mother who can’t comprehend that one of her children would go against her.  Christian Bale also won the Supporting Actor Oscar, with his energetic performance as the hyperactive but brilliant Dicky.  The Fighter is a quality film, not one I feel any great attachment to, but absolutely worthy of its high consideration during this recent awards season.

Standard story based on real people.