We’re a movie going family.  Ted was a film major, once upon a time, and loved seeing any film, even if just to see what was wrong with it.  I’m not quite (or nearly) so forgiving, but I do enjoy plopping down and enjoying a story, seeing what they might have to tell me, figuring out if it worked, all of that.  So this last week, on our Thanksgiving break, in addition to seeing ‘Like Crazy‘, we saw three other new films, and one old one. First, on Wednesday, we went to see ‘The Descendants‘.  I’ll admit that when I first saw the previews a few months ago, I was…

Jacob and Anna are a young couple who meet in college.  They fall in love and spend a wonderful year together, before they graduate and it’s time for her to go home to England.  She’s too much in love, though, and decides to stay through the summer before going home.  Mistake.  She’s violated her visa, and now she can’t get back into the country.  So now what.  He’s in Los Angeles, trying to start a business making furniture.  She’s in England, trying to start a business doing some kind of writing.  She can’t come to him, which she’s willing and eager to do.  He could go to her, but he’s…

One thing we did on our little ‘staycation’ was to go to movies.  Our first pick was Another Earth, which wasn’t playing out in our neighborhood (though it is now), so we went into the city and stopped and had a drink and an appetizer beforehand.  Nice way to start a movie, no?  Especially on a weekday, when your coworkers are covering for you because you’re on vacation. I didn’t know what to expect with this film.  I thought it was going to be a big sci-fi film, with mysterious aliens maybe and certainly some shoot-em-up violence.  Instead, it’s a film about very human trauma.  Rhoda  (Brit Marling, who co-wrote…

In the first moments of Terrance Malick’s new film, The Tree of Life, we are presented with two competing and supposedly alternate approaches to facing life and its beauties and hardships.  There is nature, and there is grace.  Nature is difficult and tries to find the worst in the world, Grace is generous and tries to find the best.  I think this is disingenuous, and that the truth lies in the middle.  Nature gives and takes, it doesn’t try to find the worst, but it doesn’t look for the best either.  Rather, it is indifferent.  Grace wishes to find the best and forgive the worst, but sometimes ignores the reality.…

Dean and Cindy are a husband and wife, far beyond the first blushes of love. It’s more like the first blushes of disgust, actually. They’ve been married now for 6 years, and their marriage is falling apart. Blue Valentine travels back and forth, from the early days of discovering each other and rushing into marriage, to a day 6 years later, when we see that Dean hasn’t changed at all, and Cindy wishes very much that he had.  Dean is a man without ambition, who considers himself to be living the good life because he has a job where he can have a beer when he gets up in the…

That picture says it all, doesn’t it? Secretariat was the great race horse who won the Belmont Stakes in 1973 by 31 lengths, thus winning the triple crown after a 25 year drought. It’s not an easy feat for any horse…you have to be fast, especially for the Preakness, the shortest of the races, which at 1 1/16 miles, favors horses with early speed. You have to have staying power, endurance, especially for the Belmont Stakes, which at 1 1/2 miles, favors horses with lasting speed. So a horse that can manage all three races, in 5 or 6 short weeks, is a rare bird indeed. Looked kind of common…

We saw two films last weekend, The Kids Are All Right and Salt.  Both were good, but I would say that I really, really enjoyed Kids, while Salt was more one of those movies where you come out saying, “OK, totally unbelievable in every conceivable way, but fun”. The Kids Are All Right is the story of Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), a long term lesbian couple who had two children, who are now coming of age.  They each carried one child, and both used the same sperm-doner, Paul (Mark Ruffalo).  Their daughter, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) has recently turned 18, and their 15 year old son Laser…

(Photos from film website. Click to enlarge. They’re gorgeous.) Thomas Balmes is a French documentary filmmaker, and in Babies, he brings us a nature film about, well, babies. The only dialog is that between the members of the various families in the film, and most of it we can’t understand, either because it is in foreign languages, sans subtitles, or because the voices are low. Because the families surrounding the babies are not the point of this film, except perhaps in that they all love their babies dearly. No, the point of the film seems to be how similar babies around the world are, whether they are being raised in…

Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are a couple that truly love each other, but are a bit worn out by life.  Especially the kids in life, followed by the jobs in life, then the daily chores in life…life is wearing them out.  They still make some effort, though, going out for a weekly ‘date night’ at their local steak house, where they enjoy spending a bit of time together, and laughing at their made up scenarios of the other couples around the restaurant.  These glimpses into their marriage show genuine affection, almost drowned by daily life. When they find out that their friends, who have sex…

Ted and Maya are huge science fiction fans, so we went to see District 9 on Friday night.  In case you haven’t heard, District 9 is the apartheid tale  of a group of aliens who find themselves stranded in Johannesburg for the past 20 years.  Humans are afraid of them, so they’ve been sent to live in abhorrent conditions outside of Johannesburg proper, conditions where crime runs rampant, and the aliens learn that humans are not to be trusted in the least.  Watching the gangs and violence portrayed by the aliens, and the dismissive racism (speciesism?) portrayed by the humans, is a grim reminder of what humans are capable of. …