Blue Valentine

I felt broken by Blue Valentine. It almost makes one never want to fall in love. almost. And yet, despite being heart-wrenchingly upsetting, it's also a beautiful meditation on falling out of love. The film opens with a couple (Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams) about 5 years into their marriage. it's awkward to watch the subtle signs of their failing relationship, the willful miscommunication; the silences loaded with disaffection, frustration, disappointment and disillusionment; effort made by one party and its passive deflection by the other. slowly we flash back to how they met, how they fell wildly in love - it's like you imagine it being in the movies. what happens in between the two opposing points is left to circumspection, imagination: in between lingers a hazy void where the arc of the relationship is concrete in its invisibility - the journey from burgeoning beginnings to a sobering, grey flat lining.  Every look and touch taken from each side of the arc is painfully opposed; it's crushing. It's nominated for Golden Globes on Sunday. Michelle Williams in particular 100% deserves her award.

Blue Valentine is out today.

The Lovely Bones

Gah, urrgh, bleh - was pretty much my reaction to this bit of utterly pointless CGI goop, otherwise known as The Lovely Bones, (out Feb). it was so bad i didn't even cry - despite it being about a young girl who is murdered by a local creep (a toothy, comb-over, cardigan wearing, NHS bespectacled Stanley Tucci - cliche? Nooooo) and watches over her family from limbo (that being a weird gazebo in a cornfield with her strange little Pocahontas friend). Her voiceovers as she sees her family break down and her killer seemingly get away with it are constipatingly cringeworthy. Mark Wahlberg as her scale-model obsessive father is woefully miscast (surprise?!) and Rachel Weisz is criminally underused. Peter Jackson goes totally CGI crazy, which is indescribably distracting and completely pointless. One measly redeeming feature for me was Susan Sarandon as Suzy Salmon's (the murdered girl, played by Saoirse Ronan) hard drinking, chain smoking, 1960s coiffed and kohled grandmother: totally rocking (not quite sure what it contributed to the plot though). This is a film devoid of nuance or subtlety (which i gather were the key things about the emotionally wrought book by Alice Sebold). Gah, urgh, bleh.

The Blind Side / Everybody's Fine / the Disappearance of Alice Creed

O god. it's official. i might just be the most pathetic, wet, nauseatingly sentimental person ever. i keep copiously weeping in film screenings, a fact which is made that much more humiliating because it's always mostly men in screenings. old ones not given over to being swept along by a wave of mushy sentimentality. snivelling doesn't go down well. o and i've got a cough. popular, moi? hell YES. anyhoo.. first up was Everybody's Fine (out in feb, adapted from the Italian film Stanno Tutti Bene). Robert de Niro is Frank, a blue collar sort who has worked hard to afford his children the opportunities to be creative and succeed in life. as an artist, musician, actress and ad exec, they are now testimony to his dream being realised. After his wife dies though, he hears less and less from his children, who are dispersed across the US. After they each cancel at the last minute for a reunion weekend (the most heartbreaking scene, as Frank returns from a supermarket splurge for the celebrations only to pick up messages on his answerphone from his flaky kids saying they can't come), Frank decides to travel across the US to visit each one. but with every visit, each one is too busy for him. GOD it's heartbreaking. but is there enough emotion to warrant a tsunami of tears i ask you? no.

then there was The Blind Side (out March). Sandra Bullock playing a don't-mess-with-me Mississippi mom who takes in a young, poor black boy who has recently started at the all-white-bible-bashing school where her kids go, and invests time into him, making him a part of her family etc. it's the true story of All American Football star Michael Oher, so you know where it's going, but still - to think i actually rather loved this film... it's about American Football!! well, obviously it's actually not - it's about family and blah blah blah. but anyway, i loved it for what it was and sobbed like a baby. even more embarrassing: it was a lunchtime screening, there were only 3 of us in the screening room, i was the only girl, so there was no mistaking where the sniffing was coming from. and thanks to the music, i basically started crying from the opening credits. a proud moment, i can tell you.

I didn't cry in The Disappearance of Alice Creed (out March). and if i did it was because i was tearing my eyes out of my head in order to stop watching. A kidnapping goes wrong. there are lots of twists, none of which i gave the tiniest shit about. I for one couldn't escape fast enough.