Black and White Thinking

Movies: The Help and Drive

The two movies couldn't be more different, yet Drive and The Help both say powerful things about race and gender in the movies. And they don't say very nice things.

Drive, an intense and violent thriller about a stunt car driver who moonlights as a getaway driver, has been receiving rave reviews among film critics. Ryan Gosling's performance as a taciturn lone wolf who descends to Travis Bickle levels of obsession and violence in order to protect a woman he loves (and barely knows) is without a doubt astonishing and terrifying. It's hard to believe this is the same kid who wooed Rachel McAdams in The Notebook.

The Help, for those who have been living under a rock for the past year or so, is a sentimental film based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett about black maids and their white employers in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi. Although the acting is excellent, the film is predictable and, to use a phrase that I overuse, "on the nose". It tells you exactly what you need to feel about each one of its characters (especially the white characters, who fall into two stark categories: noble, liberated hero and dastardly villain).



The Help has been enormously popular among mainstream audiences and has received fair to good critical reviews. However, various media outlets, both progressive and conservative, have taken their turn crapping all over The Help. Why? For more conservative thinkers and anti-PC police, The Help represents Hollywood Liberalism and reverse racism at its worst. To this group of haters, The Help paints all blacks as saints and all whites (save the main "women's libber" character, Skeeter Phelan) as terrible, horrible, no good, very bad racists. Ironically, the more progressive and PC factions are not much kinder, seeing The Help as condescending toward black people and implying that black people--both historically and today--need help from white people to overcome societal injustice and should be damn grateful for that help.

What struck me as interesting after seeing the two films was that although I enjoyed Drive more than The Help and my instinct is to say that Drive is the superior film, I can't help but notice that while The Help has a cast full of women, both black and white, and makes a good faith attempt to examine the lives of black, white, poor, and rich women during a turbulent time in history, Drive treats women like they barely exist at all. You've heard of the Madonna/whore complex? The erroneous and subconscious belief that women are either saintly mothers or filthy sluts? Drive is a laughably textbook example of this kind of thinking.

In Drive, there are two women with speaking roles: Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother whose husband is in jail and who catches the eye of Ryan Gosling's character. Gosling (his character is nameless) sees Irene as someone who needs protection. He ends up getting involved way too deeply in a number of crimes that lead him to basically kill his way out of trouble. The other female character is in two scenes and comes to a very untimely and unhappy ending. Oh, and there's a scene where Gosling beats the shit out of a bad guy in the dressing room of a strip club, while wide-eyed, bare-breasted strippers silently look on. Fortunately, this scene is very intense--otherwise, I would have not been able to contain my laughter at the ridiculous misogyny of the whole situation. I mean, featuring strippers in your movie is one thing--strippers can be smart and cool and sexy (see: Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler), but a room of voluptuous, nude women just freakin' sitting there as the men folk fight, curse, and all but whip out their penises for a measuring contest just makes me laugh at the sad obtuseness of it all. Maybe director Nicolas Winding Refn was actually trying to say something about the violent world of men and how women have no place in it (actually I'm sure he was on some level), but other directors have managed to pull this off far more successfully. Martin Scorsese's The Departed was all about the violent world of violent men and had very few female roles. However, Vera Farmiga's character Madolyn, was an educated woman with a successful career who could take care of herself. Note to Refn: if you're going to have only one or two female roles in your movie, at least make them dignified. kthx!


And let's not forget race/ethnicity! Yes, The Help may treat black characters with some benevolent condescension, and that's not OK, but at least there are some meaty roles for black characters in the film. And at least these characters are fully drawn. In Drive there are no black characters. The closest Drive gets to having any "ethnic" flavor are the two greedy villains who will kill for money and power--and who are Jewish. Nice. Oh, and Irene's ne'er-do-well jailbird husband who is Latino.

So while I enjoyed Drive, a film that kept me on the edge of my seat, and merely thought The Help was a pleasant movie, there's no denying that on a practical level The Help is a better movie for women and minorities. The cast is filled with women--white, black, old, young, conventionally beautiful and not so conventionally beautiful. These women have conversations with each other, and men are rarely the focus of those conversations (the film passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors). Sure, some of the characters are two-dimensional (like Hilly Holbrook, the sociopathic mean girl), but overall the characters are far deeper than the characters that populate Drive.

Neither movie is perfect, but what I found fascinating was the media (including my beloved liberal media outlets, like http://bitchmagazine.org/ and http://www.salon.com/ ) was so willing to jump on a movie filled with women and minorities for not being feminist and racially sensitive enough, while ignoring or even offering slavering praise to Drive, a film that offers women and minorities less than nothing.

My enjoyment:
Drive: 4 out of 5 stars
The Help: 3 out of 5 stars

Treatment of women and minorities:
Drive: 1 out of 5 stars
The Help: 4 out of 5 stars

Aliens, Innit?

Movies: Attack the Block

Just as Shaun of the Dead was a fresh, funny, and very British take on the zombie genre, Attack the Block is a fresh, funny, and very British take on the alien invasion genre. Set in a working class neighborhood in South London, Attack the Block sets itself up as different from other alien movies right away. The heroes of this film are not the white, middle-aged American men we're accustomed to seeing in movies like Signs, War of the Worlds, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. The heroes of Attack the Block are young, black (with a token white kid), poor hoodlums who terrorize and mug a nurse on her way home from work in the first scene.

I liked how director Joe Cornish took the conventions of the alien invasion genre and turned them on their head. Not only does he play with moral ambiguity--i.e. the "bad guys" turn out to be good and the criminals become the protectors; he also makes a point that the most vulnerable and, presumably, weakest members of society--minorities, inner-city youth, kids from bad families--are stronger, smarter, and braver than we might think.

In addition to the unique spin, Attack the Block has plenty of laughs ("What's Ron's weed room?" "It's a room, filled with weed, that belongs to Ron...") and a few scenes of horror that seem all the more horrific given that they take place in a comedy. To use Shaun of the Dead once again as a comparison, the scene where a character gets his intestines ripped out by zombies is especially shocking because it comes right after a scene where they beat up a zombie to the jukebox strains of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now". In these two movies, the humor serves to both alleviate and exacerbate the violence and dread.

The main problem I had with Attack the Block was simply that I had trouble understanding the dialogue. The thick, English accents and slang made it damn near impossible to understand what the hell people were saying half (or more like 60 percent) of the time. And sadly, this diminished my appreciation and enjoyment of the movie.

Also, although Attack the Block is funny and scary, it was never THAT funny and scary to me. I giggled, I chuckled, I covered my eyes. But in the end, the movie was more forgettable than I expected it to be. I don't think it has the rewatchability factor that Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, or other similar comedies have.

So in conclusion, I like what Joe Cornish did with this movie, and I would recommend it to fans of alien movies and genre-defying flicks, but personally I wasn't crazy in love with it.

3 out of 5 stars

Black and Green and Red All Over

Movies: Black Dynamite, Greenberg, and Deep Red

Black Dynamite

Black Dynamite is a spot-on spoof of blaxploitation films of the 1970's and one of the more hilarious movies I've seen recently. Michael Jai White plays Black Dynamite, a former CIA agent, Vietnam vet, and all-around BAMF, who is on a mission to avenge his brother's death at the hands of drug dealers. Along the way, he uncovers a top secret operation called "Code Kansas" that goes all the way to the White House, leading to a final confrontation between Black Dynamite and Tricky Dick himself.


Black Dynamite was born out of White's affection for over-the-top blaxploitation movies and even though the film mocks this particular genre, it does so with love in its heart. Black Dynamite was shot in Super 16 Color Reversal Kodak film (thank you Wikipedia!) to give it that color-saturated look of cheaply shot 1970's exploitation movies. The script is cheesy and slangy ("We're gonna fricassee their honky asses!"). And the plot twists are downright absurd in the best possible way (the scene where Black Dynamite and a gang of pimps deduce what "Code Kansas" stands for is just...words cannot describe how funny it is).

I was in hysterics for most of Black Dynamite and as soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again immediately. You can't say that for a lot of movies. Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders really put their brains and hearts into this film--and it shows.

5 out of 5 stars

Greenberg

From indie screenwriter and director Noah Baumbach comes Greenberg, a comedy about a misanthropic manchild, Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), who comes to live at his rich brother's house after having a nervous breakdown. What could have verged very quickly into cutesy, "aren't emotions just cah-raaazy!?" territory is saved by Stiller's performance and a pared down script free of too much affected quirkyness. However, Greenberg left me with a feeling of "it's all been done before". As in Baumbach's other films (Margot at the Wedding and The Squid and the Whale), the audience is expected to sympathize with irritating, immature, and downright selfish characters. Over the course of the film, Greenberg begins an affair with his brother's assistant/nanny, the much-younger Florence (played by Greta Gerwig, who does a fine job). He emotionally manipulates her and their relationship resembles something freshmen in college would go through: drama, pointless fights, and really horrible sex. It's hard to see why either one would want to be with the other and why we the audience should care. While Florence is the more sympathetic, "nice" character, I almost liked her less because she willingly put up with Greenberg's hot-and-cold (mostly cold) behavior.

Greenberg has some really funny moments, such as when the 40-something Greenberg attends a party with a bunch of 20-somethings and asks if it's ok to do coke when you're on Zoloft. But in the end, it's a forgettable movie about two random people who carelessly bump into each other while stumbling through life.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Deep Red

Italian director and master of horror Dario Argento considered Deep Red to be his best film. I've only seen one other Argento film, Suspiria, and I did indeed enjoy Deep Red more. Deep Red combines the gore and creepy-ass atmosphere of Suspiria with the taut murder mystery of Blow-Up. In fact, David Hemmings, the star of Blow-Up, also plays the lead in Deep Red.


Marcus Daly (Hemmings) witnesses a murder one night and when he goes to investigate, he notices something that he can't put his finger on is amiss in the murder scene. He becomes obsessed with figuring out what he saw that night and with solving the murder. Over the course of his investigation, more grisly killings occur and it seems like the killer is one always one step ahead...

I like Argento because his films contain enough gore to get a reaction out of the audience while still relying on atmosphere and plot to heighten the tension. If you're a fan of horror films, especially horror of the late 60's and 70's, Argento's Deep Red is definitely worth checking out.

4 out of 5 stars

Wisdom of a Fool

Movies: Our Idiot Brother

Our Idiot Brother, starring lovable Paul Rudd as the titular lovable idiot, is such a breath of fresh air after a summer of mean comedies. By no means perfect, the film and its laid-back attitude seem miles away from misanthropic, trying-too-hard yuks in movies like Horrible Bosses and The Change-Up (full disclouse: I did not see The Change-Up, but I feel no qualms about judging it anyway).


Paul Rudd plays Ned, who is labeled by the film as an idiot because he is overly trusting and not cynical enough towards humankind, as evidenced in the first scene where he sells pot to a uniformed cop. 8 months later, Ned is let out of prison early for good behavior, only to find that his hippie girlfriend is shacking up with a new man on the communal farm that used to be Ned's home. She kicks Ned out of the commune and, to add insult to injury, claims possession of Ned's beloved Golden Retriever, Willie Nelson.

Now that Ned is homeless and penniless, he takes turns living with members of his family--first his passive-aggressive, might-be-an-alcoholic mom; then his depressed sister Liz (Emily Mortimer) who is married to a grade-A asshole (Steve Coogan) and their young son; next his bitchy, bossy, career-driven sister Miranda (Elizabeth Banks); and finally his bohemian, lesbian, might-actually-be-bisexual sister Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) and her frickin' awesome girlfriend Cindy (Rashida Jones). Got all that?

Wherever Ned goes, it seems that chaos follows. However, it becomes clear that Ned does not create this chaos, but merely inconveniently brings it to light--such as when he catches Liz's husband in a (very) compromising position with another woman, and explains what he saw to another sister who then brings it up to Liz. Liz is so angry at the situation, that she immediately blames Ned. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the real idiots are Ned's sisters who lie, deceive themselves, and fail to take other people into consideration--and thus end up hurting themselves and others. Ned's only failure is that he is too good for this world.

I read a review of this movie that labeled Paul Rudd as cinema's first Manic Pixie Dream Boy, in that he is a magically quirky character whose job it is to encourage other people to be better, or to bring meaning to others' lives. I think there might be something to this. Although Ned certainly has interesting qualities, he serves less as a well-rounded character with a distinct arc than as an agent of change for the other characters. It would have been nice to see some of Ned's truly bad qualities. Although his foolishness and gullibility are apparent, Ned is fundamentally a good person. We never see any darkness or resentment--even when Ned blows up in anger at his family. Our Idiot Brother was a very fun, entertaining film, but I think it would have been better if Ned was allowed to be a bit more human and bit less of a magical hippie earth sprite.

Overall, Our Idiot Brother lives up to its intended purpose. It's a funny, light-hearted, end of summer comedy that has a better attitude (and funnier script) than many other similar comedies. Like Ned, it may not be the deepest movie, but it has a good heart.

4 out of 5 stars.

A Bloody Good (and bad) Time

Movies: Blood Car, April Fool's Day, Heartbeeps

Recently, I was lucky enough to watch a few movies with friends that ranged from awful in a genius way to awful in an awful way.

Blood Car

Everything you need to know about the 2007 indie horror film Blood Car is right there in the title. It is about a car that runs on blood. In the not-too-distant future, gas is priced at nearly $40 a gallon. Practically no one drives, although to actually be able to afford to drive is the ultimate status symbol. Our hero, Archie Andrews, is a vegan kindergarten teacher who attempts to invent a car that runs on wheat grass. When Archie accidentally cuts his finger one day and gets a little blood in the mechanism, causing the engine he's working on to whir to life, he has his "eureka" moment. It's not long before Archie is turning his back on his vegan principles: shooting puppies and killing disabled, homeless war veterans to fuel his car. Why does Archie feel the need to commit serial murder to run his blood car when he has a perfectly good bicycle? To get laid, of course! Blood Car has a really complex view of women: there's the dorky, nice, good girl who works at the wheat grass store and pines for Archie...and the bitchy, slutty, bad girl who works at the "meat shack" and wants to use Archie for his car and his...erm...meat. But I can't really condemn Blood Car for it's laughable misogyny when Archie himself is such a terrible, undeserving person as well. If there's such a thing as a sociopathic hipster, Archie is it. Also, it's a horror film. The whole point is to hate the characters so you don't feel bad when they end up in the trunk of Archie's death car.

For what it is, Blood Car is actually pretty damn funny. The very concept of a "blood car" has limitless potential, and I liked the idea of a self-absorbed, horny vegan guy as both the protagonist and the killer at the center of the story.

3.5 out of 5 stars

April Fool's Day


Speaking of terrible, sociopathic characters, April Fool's Day (the 1986 version) is full of them! The film is about a group of preppy college friends who get together at the "remote island mansion" (there's your first clue that something will go horribly awry) of their friend Muffy St. John (no, she's not a porn star...just a hardcore WASP) during April Fool's Day weekend. It's not long before bodies start piling up. But the characters are so, so awful that's it's actually a disappointment when you find out...

SPOILERS!

...that the whole "mass murder" thing was staged by Muffy as an elaborate April Fool's Day prank! Oddly, everyone was in on it except for two of the friends who were the ultimate victims of the prank, which is like, really mean when you think about it. I was so mad that no one was actually killed by the end of the movie because they all totally deserved to die horrible deaths. Lame.

Oh, and April Fool's Day may be the preppiest film of all time. Here's a partial list of the characters' names:
Muffy
Kit
Nan
Chaz
Arch
Skip

And yes, they behave exactly as their names suggest.

2.5 out of 5 stars

Heartbeeps

In the horrendous affront to human dignity that is Heartbeeps, Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters play humanoid robots that go on the lam and fall in love. I watched this movie at a "bad movie party" where the idea was to sit around and laugh at a bad movie. While Heartbeeps does have it's share of laughable-bad moments, there were also long stretches that were so bad and so boring that no one was laughing. One of my friends did fall asleep though.

The whole thing was just...weird. The dialogue was mostly stilted because, you know, these are robots. But after an hour of stilted, "logical" robot discussions about the nature of love and the meaning of life, I was ready to shoot myself. It was like listening to Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" talk for 80 minutes, but minus the humor and nerd references. Also, Andy Kaufman has a really annoying voice.

However, Heartbeeps was so terrible that you got to a point where you just surrendered yourself to the terribleness and end up gawking at the screen, gape-mouthed, the way someone would watch a train wreck. The badness was like a drug that made you unable to move...just sit there and wonder "how did this get made?!"

Oh Christ, no.







1.5 out of 5 stars

Warm Hearts and Cold Beds

Books: The Uncoupling

Meg Wolitzer's 2011 novel The Uncoupling mixes magical realism and suburban dysfunction. The novel centers on the students and faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt High School (known lovingly as "Elro") in Stellar Plains, NJ. A vibrant and intimidating new drama teacher, Fran Heller, is hired at Elro and decides to put on Lysistrata, the play by Aristophanes about a woman who leads the women of Ancient Greece to withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to end the Peloponnesian War.


Soon, a "cold wind" begins to blow through Stellar Plains, causing the women of the community to lose sexual desire (and romantic desire). Teenage girls break up with their boyfriends, young women stop sleeping around for fun, and night after night, the wives of Stellar Plains turn away from their husbands.

It's not long before bitterness and sadness (mostly of the part of the men) begins to build to a fever pitch in the community. The men of Stellar Plains are literally begging the women to take them back, love them, and have sex with them again. I won't reveal what happens at the climax (heh) of The Uncoupling, but I will say that it's difficult to tell who triumphs in the end--the men, the women, or both.

[Side note: There's only one gay couple in liberal Stellar Plains, and the spell doesn't affect them. Apparently, there are no lesbians. Wolitzer gets a C- on her LGBTQA inclusiveness]

Wolitzer is excellent at the "realism" part, and not so excellent at the "magical" part. She masterfully creates a suburban world and high school that has just enough fictional elements to make it seem even more real, if that makes sense. She sprinkles made-up pop culture references (a band called "The Lungs" is named-dropped; the students of Elro are all into an MMORPG called "Farrest") that sound real, even though she just created them for the book. Wolitzer is great at getting the small details of suburban and high school life just right. I could see clearly the halls of Elro and what all the teachers and students looked like.

Wolitzer also gets the feelings that the characters go through. Every couple affected by the spell reacts differently: a passionate couple argue fiercely; an older couple who have already given up on sex give up on it even further and grow in resentment; a couple with a solid, happy marriage simply become bewildered and then resigned when the wife becomes repulsed at the thought of being touched. Each couple's current sex life is key to how they react when sex is suddenly off the table.

As far as the "magical" part, it's clear that the whole "cold wind" thing is just a construct to move the plot forward. The fact that it's supernatural (as opposed to a coincidence or a collective decision by the women) is taken for granted and then barely mentioned until the end. Why include this element of magic and then never comment on it or explain it? It's clear than the drama teacher, Fran Heller, has something to do with it. At the end it is revealed that, yes, the spell "follows" Fran, but she does not control it. She's not a witch or a gypsy with magical powers or anything like that. I thought this "explanation" of the spell was lame and flimsy.

Wolitzer is obviously more interested in the politics of what would happen if women collectively denied men sex. But even this intriguing scenario isn't examined very closely. The women of Stellar Plains start denying men sex, the men get upset--individual relationships get tense, but the community as a whole remains unaltered. When the spell is broken, most relationships are mended and are even better, and hotter, than before. This conclusion was a bit of an anti-climatic let down.

Overall, Wolitzer is great at describing people and relationships. If this book was anything, it was realistic, and the details of the characters' everyday lives were fascinating. Wolitzer is not so great at making a point. I read the book and wondered, "Did I learn anything about male/female relationships or men and women's sexuality?" No. No, I did not. I didn't feel like I wasted my time, because The Uncoupling was very well-written and entertaining. It just felt a bit lacking in the end, like Wolitzer had the opportunity to say something interesting and controversial...but chose not to.

I'd recommend The Uncoupling to readers who like literary fiction, specifically about adults living in suburbia. If you like Tom Perrotta, you'll probably dig The Uncoupling.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Twee Factor

Movies: Beginners

Cute is in right now. It's unavoidable. You can't do a Google search without a lolcat popping up in your face. You can't avoid Zooey Deschanel--she even has her own TV show now! You can't walk around in a downtown urban area without seeing guys in pants so tight you can read their credit card numbers right through the butt pocket, and young women with dyed black hair and tattoos of kittens wearing Native American headdresses (it isn't racist because I voted for Obama!!). Cuteness, tweeness, hipsterness, whatever you want to call it, is here and dammit, you better learn to like it!

And in addition to fashion and the Interblognets, tweeness is quite prevalent in movies and entertainment. Garden State, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go, (500) Days of Summer, Sunshine Cleaning, Lars and the Real Girl...and now, Mike Mills' (who is married to the Queen of Twee herself, Miranda July) semi-autobiographical film Beginners, about a man, his gay dad, his philosophical dog, and his Manic Pixie French Dream Girlfriend. Now, before you think I'm going to rip into this movie, let me just say this: I'm not. I really liked Beginners. I thought that, despite the twee elements, the movie had more emotional depth than 1,000--nay, 10,000!--Days of Summer. I thought that the lead actors--the wonderful Ewan McGregor and legendary Christopher Plummer (as well as the supporting actors, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visinjic, and Mary Page Keller)--elevated Beginners above the mire of oppressive cuteness.

But let's talk a little more about twee since I'm on a roll here. When did twee begin? Whose fault is it, really? Some may point the finger at Wes Anderson (full disclosure: I love Wes Anderson). But I personally would trace twee back to French New Wave. Have you seen Breathless? There's a reason college kids love that movie. It's twee as fuck! Or how about another one of my favorites: Jules and Jim, which features a scene of a woman drawing a moustache on her face, as well as shots filmed by cameras mounted on bicycles (the preferred method of twee transportation, btw), and mild homoeroticism. Twee!

The difference between old school twee and new school twee, in my opinion, is that old school twee didn't use preciousness as a substitute for character development. Take Jules and Jim as an example: the character Catherine is described as "capricious" and "free-spirited", much like Natalie Portman's character Sam in Garden State. The difference is that Catherine is a woman with a full range of personality traits and emotions. Catherine is simultaneously seductive and frightening; fickle and decisive. You can't decide whether you love her or hate her--and neither can Jules or Jim. What is Sam? Sam is a girl who wears a helmet to work and thinks the Shins will "change your life". She, like every other character in Garden State, is merely a collection of quirky traits and interests who exists for the sole purpose of getting Zach Braff's pathetic life back on track. Catherine is part of a vibrant and sexy and ever-changing love triangle...Sam is a really cute crutch.

So this sums up my problem with twee. Actually, I have two problems with twee. The first is that twee movies use weirdness, quirkyness, and preciousness in place of quality story telling and character development. And they usually go overboard with the whole "quirky" thing anyway. The second problem is that twee really, really, really wants to live in a world without problems. In the world of twee, Lars of Lars and the Real Girl acts like a sex doll is his living, breathing girlfriend...and the whole town goes along with the charade! In real life, Lars would probably be institutionalized or, at least, mocked. In the world of twee, 16 year old Juno gives her out-of-wedlock baby to a very nice woman and gets back together with her boyfriend. In real life, Juno would be tormented at school, her parents would probably be ashamed and angry at her, and her boyfriend would almost certainly break up with her at some point. The world of twee is a fantasy world where people are infinitely accepting of eccentricities and where sad things happen, but horrible things never happen. Oh, and the world of twee is almost exclusively populated by white people (It isn't racist because they listen to Danger Mouse!!).

But I'm being way harsh on twee movies. The fact is, I enjoyed a lot of the movies I've poked fun at. I'm not immune to a soundtrack populated by Belle and Sebastian and Nick Drake. I love the clothes people wear in twee movies. And I can pretty much guarantee that most twee movies have better scripts, cinematography, and acting than a great many blockbusters. At this point though, twee movies seem to be just as formulaic as any other lazy and oversaturated genre. Twee has gone mainstream.

But back to Beginners. The movie is about a man named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) whose 75 year old father, Hal (Christopher Plummer. Give this man an Oscar already!), comes out as gay after Oliver's mother dies. Hal decides to make up for lost time. He joins gay political organizations and gay movie nights. He gets a disturbingly younger boyfriend (Goran Visinjic). Four years later, Hal is dying of cancer. The movie is also about the avoidant, closed-off Oliver starting a relationship with the avoidant, closed-off Anna (Melanie Laurent), and the problems the two inevitably face, both being avoidant and closed-off and all. Beginners jumps back and forth between these two plots and I have to say, I strongly preferred the former. The whole coming out of the closest as a senior citizen story was both funny and fascinating. When Hal gives Oliver a rainbow sticker and tells him that it means gay pride, Oliver tells Hal that everyone knows that, which Hal can't believe. To Hal, gay culture is new and exciting. To Oliver, gay culture is pretty much just part of everyday life. McGregor is excellent as a modern and tolerant man who is bewildered by his dad's homosexuality, but not disgusted by it. He watches Hal kiss Andy, his younger boyfriend, on the lips, and the look on Oliver's face is amazement: this is a new side to his dad that was always there, but always hidden, and now surfacing. Oliver isn't threatened or angry, but simply in the process or recalibrating his whole view of his father.

When Hal gets sick, his attitude changes from "let's fight this thing", to complete denial, to acceptance. Plummer is remarkable in this role. He plays Hal as a gentle man with a happy and thankful disposition. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, Hal takes advantage of all the happiness and pleasure and fun available in life--even while lying on his deathbed. It's Oliver, who like Hal is a very gentle man, though a bit more passive, who carries the sadness of Hal's sickness like a weight on his shoulders. Maybe that makes Oliver a good son: he bears the emotional pain for his father, who is forced to bear the physical pain.

McGregor and Plummer breathe life into these fully-drawn characters, so that even when the cuteness is a little too much, the film remains grounded and substantive.

I was less thrilled with the other story, the love story, though Melanie Laurent and McGregor definitely have chemistry. I don't know how else to explain it, except to say that their kisses look real. Maybe it's just because I've had the hots for Ewan Mcgregor since early high school, but he kisses actresses like he freakin' means it (and maybe he does...McGregor and his wife apparently have an open marriage).

Overall, I found that Beginners was a rare twee movie that worked. The characters (well, Hal and Oliver at least) have solid personalities, yet they both change throughout the film. They have arcs. They react to situations such as cancer, sex, and love in believable ways. They live in a world where there are problems and hardships, yet they find ways to thrive and adapt. The father/son story in Beginners is heartwarming, but not sentimental or saccharine. Even at age 75, Hal is still able to teach his son something about life and embracing change. And that's exactly the point of the movie: it's never too late to try something different.

4 out of 5 stars