Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

There is a genre of movies that focuses on the emptiness of families in suburbia. American Beauty and The Ice Storm are two such movies.

I find this genre a hard one to grasp. I don’t know why I can’t really connect to their emotionality. So while I can recognize the outstanding acting in The Kids Are All Right, I just couldn’t get into what it wanted to say.

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a long-term (married) couple. They both had children by using the same sperm donor, who is now coming back into their lives and the lives of their children. Even before this big event, the cracks in their family were already showing.

Big things happen once the “father” comes into the picture, but the movie doesn’t play these for over-the-top drama. Things are still rooted in the everyday. I know there are people who will appreciate this choice, but it still leaves me cold. I think, I don’t want to know this about the real couples in my life. Why would I want to visit a fictional couple’s played-for-real problems? Perhaps my reactions are an outgrowth of my own childhood experiences in the ‘burbs. Because despite appearances, it is a desperate, desperate world out there.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Picture:

• True Grit
• Black Swan
• Toy Story 3
• Inception
• Winter’s Bone
• The Social Network
• 127 Hours
• The Fighter
• The King’s Speech
• The Kids Are All Right

Best Actress:

• Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
• Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole)
• Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)
• Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right)
• Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone)

Tags: Movies by Ms. SP
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I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Sometimes you lose track of your Netflix queue and something unintended shows up. That’s what happened here.

It’s been so long since this movie originally came out that I forgot all about how special its special effects were supposed to be. I relearned it from the DVD features, but in the meantime, I just watched the movie.

It’s a rip-roaring throwback but with a lot of modern imagination. It actually made me feel giddy and buoyant at times. I can’t remember what the last movie would be that made me feel just happy to be taken along on a grand ‘ol adventure.

The movie is not without fault. Even though it is a throwback, I still wish they did more with the female heroine. In this day and age, does the woman tagalong still have to fall at the most inopportune times and therefore require an appropriately heroic response by the male? Does plucky not come with brains?

Still, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow have good chemistry together and established a very enjoyable give-and-take. The designs of the sci-fi elements—robots, airships, etc.—are very cool and fun. It’s a return to the days when sci-fi was shiny and kitchy cool.

This is a movie that almost didn’t need the all-over computer manipulation of its images. During the best segments, the movie manages to look like a stylish graphic novel. During the worst segments, the movie manages to look like the worst coloring job on an originally black-and-white movie ever.

But strangely enough, it manages to feel like a radio program to me. And I don’t even know how to really explain that one.

Tags: Movies by Ms. SP
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