Elizabeth Gilbert was miserable.  She crashed out of her marriage, careened into another relationship way too quickly and was just overwhelmed and seriously fucked up.  She needed a change — not just a haircut or new clothes — a fundamental change to everything she knew.

Not many people have the guts and the money to make such a fundamental change.  Smart girl that Gilbert is she sold a book proposal which allowed her to travel the world for a year to get her shit together.  Out of that journey came the best selling book Eat Pray Love.  If I was her publisher I would think that her advance was the best investment EVER.

Detractors of the book and now the movie starring Julie Roberts as Liz Gilbert which opens today, complain that she comes off as self-centered and privileged.  What right does she have to go away for a year and on someone else’s dime no less.

I for one say power to her.

The film takes us on Liz’ journey through the food of Italy, the prayers of India and the gorgeous blue skies of Indonesia.  The Bali scenes made my mouth water even more than the pasta of Italy especially when Javier Bardem entered the film as her lover (and now husband.)

The problem for me with the film is that it feels too superficial.  Ryan Murphy who directed and co-wrote the script (with Jennifer Salt, daughter of blacklisted writer Waldo Salt) is known now for his huge TV hit Glee.  What Glee accomplishes so well (and what is lacking here) is the layers to each character and its heart.  Heart is very difficult to describe and harder to accomplish.  It’s like lightning in a bottle.  Glee has it.  You feel for them.  You are on their side. You want them to succeed.

Here in Eat Pray Love you don’t feel that heart.  I don’t know if it’s Julia (who I liked) or Murphy but you never really care about what happens to Liz.  That’s a big problem.

I know (and write about) the lack of films that tell stories about women, our lives, our concerns and our fears.  It’s not that I disliked the film, I had a fine time, it just didn’t move me the way I expected or hoped.  On the other hand, this movie is leagues above Sex and the City 2 so those who were put off by that film and the reviews should feel comfortable plunking their $10 or $12 bucks down for this.

I come back again to the point I made earlier this summer when I wrote about Sex and the City 2 about how gay men have been anointed by Hollywood as the purveyors of women’s stories.   I renew my concern about this trend especially since Julia Roberts and Ryan Murphy are making another movie together cause they had a great time making Eat Pray Love.  Good for them.

Personally, I want female stars with clout to use it get women some gigs working for the studios when appropriate.  Eat Pray Love should have — and could have– been one of those occasions.  Maybe then my  reaction to the film would have been something other than – so what.

That being said I hope and pray that the movie makes tons of money this weekend.  We’ll see on Monday if Julia has more juice than Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables which looks to be a reunion of everyone Stallone fought in the Rocky films with a little Bruce Willis thrown in, and the comic book geek fest, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I am a seriously big fan of Patricia Clarkson.  I’ve seen her in countless movies going all the way back to High Art and she has never once hit a false note.  Not once.  She is always good (even if sometimes the material does not rise to the occasion.)

But for some bizarre reason for over 20 years she has never been the lead, the driver of the story.  I am happy to report that the drought is over and Patricia Clarkson at 50, has her first romantic lead in Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time.

The film is about a Juliette, a woman who goes on vacation to Cairo to meet her husband who is working for the UN in Gaza.  Her kids are out of the house, she edits a small but prestigious magazine and works too hard.  She is content, yet not happy.

Her husband gets stuck and cannot make it to Cairo so he asks his former colleague Tareq (Alexander Siddig) to meet and help her get situated.  Juliette is used to being alone so she attempts to tackle Cairo.  The problem is that Cairo is not New York City.  A woman walking alone is harassed and bothered incessantly and Juliette becomes unmoored.   She calls Tareq for assistance and they wind up spending lots of time together and develop feelings for each other.

Now Tareq is friends with Juliette’s husband and he’s also very respectful of Juliette (and don’t forget he’s a Muslim.)  Juliette, in turn, is also quite conflicted about her feelings for Tareq.  And while nothing sexual technically happens between the two, you can feel the sexual tension poring off the screen.  There is serious chemistry between Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson.  They are hot in a way that Bella and Edward could never be (and I can’t believe that I just compared them) because these are two adults who understand and respect the implications of their feelings.  Her marriage, his friendship.  This is not a film about two people who meet and have an affair and never see each other again.  This is a film about people and feelings and love and how sometimes taking that next step is not the right step for either party.

The film feels like one long stroll, restrained, not rushed.   Now we just need more leads for Patricia Clarkson.

When we first meet Ashley Judd as Helen the title character in the new film written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck her life looks perfectly normal.  She’s got a job she loves as a music professor, a husband (Goran Visnjic) who loves her, and a teenage daughter who still speaks to her.  Perfectly normal.

But very quickly you can see that perfectly normal is a facade.  Helen is one of the millions of people struggling with depression.  She’s been able to hold it at bay for a long time but she can’t any longer, and the film shows her decent into a deep dark and lonely place known as depression.  Helen spends the movie fighting herself as the people around her struggle to figure out how to help.  She is so sick that she can’t accept help.  She gets stuck at the bottom of the rabbit hole and she risks losing everyone and everything around her.

This is not an easy film to watch, but it really gives Ashley Judd an opportunity to shine in a way we have not seen before.  She is beyond good.  She takes all her skills and personally knowledge of the disease and allows herself to be as raw as we have every seen her before.

The film co-stars Lauren Lee Smith (The L-Word) as Mathilda, a fellow traveler in Helen’s world of mental illness.  These women cling to each other for survival because they know what the other is going through.

Though it’s tough to watch Helen’s journey, the film is not depressing, in fact it’s a film about hope and shows all of us that it is possible to get better.  It takes time, help, patience and love.

Film opens in NYC today at the Quad and will be out on DVD August 10.

First things first.  Angelina Jolie is a very believable kick-ass spy in the new, exciting, thriller Salt opening today.

What’s so great about this film is that it could be a game changer. The reason why is that there are no gender issues with Jolie playing a CIA agent who kills while at the same time trying to escape from being killed and captured.

Let’s not fool ourselves.  There have been women who have kicked ass in movies before.  Salt’s foremothers are Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Aliens and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, but that was the late 80s and early 90s, and interestingly both those women had a mama bear focus that gave them the permission to kill everyone around them because they were saving their kids (Ripley did not technically have a kid, but Newt became her kid in the film.)

There have been others who have been more cartoony like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and the women of Charlie’s Angels, and we can’t forget the films that got Angelina started on this track –Tomb Raider.

But Salt feels different — firstly because it doesn’t seem created to attract only the male demographic), and with all the excitement around The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo it feels that we might be at a turning point where women kicking ass takes us to a new place for female characters in film.

By now you know that the film was initially written for Tom Cruise but when he bowed out Amy Pascal suggested that they do a gender switch to Angelina Jolie.  I’m going to go out a limb here and say that a male studio chief would have been looking for the next male star for the film, and it took a woman to think about it from a different perspective.

There are other things that make this different, not better or worse, just different from your typical Hollywood thriller.

The violence and the action sequences did not make me feel like I was being assaulted.  Yes, she kills people.  A lot of people.  But if you look closely a lot of the violence is with a small caliber weapon (spoiler: she does wipe out her Russian friends with a machine gun) with a couple of shots.  She kicks a lot, and uses her body and her training as a weapon.  In other words, not that much shit blows up.  But you don’t even notice because the action is so fast paced.  There are great car chase sequences and Jolie is basically on the move the whole film.

Another thing I noticed is that having a female lead opened up parts for other women in the film.  Action films are notorious for their lack of women.  None of these characters are major, but having other female voices in the film matters.

For example, there was a woman on the assault team that tried to capture Salt; there was a female secret service agent on the protection details at the church in NYC; there was a female deacon at the service; and the head of the CIA was a woman.  It would have been great to have another female have a significant part, but a girl can’t get everything.  And another funny moment that made this different is that Jolie used a sanitary napkin to blunt an injury.  She pulls off the sticker, slaps the napkin on her side and heads out of the bathroom and back onto to the motorcycle.  That just wouldn’t work for a guy.

I hope the film makes tons of money and that both men and women see it.  The great thing is that even before it has opened it has had an effect.  Scarlett Johansson is going to co-star with Robert Downey Jr. in an upcoming film Gravity.  According to the NY Daily News, Jolie turned the part down because she didn’t want to share screen time with a male star even if it is Robert Downey, Jr.  Now that’s some frickin Hollywood power.

And by the way, Salt 2 has got to already be in the works (if it’s not they are really stupid) cause the ending had sequel written all over it.

You would have to be living under a rock not to know that there is a serious battle for gay rights going on in this country. The long awaited new film The Kids Are All Right directed by Lisa Cholodenko (High Art) is timed perfectly to the debate, and shows just how far the issue has come to real people living it each and every day while legal and political factions still duke it out in the public arena.

I do believe that films can affect culture. They seep in to our culture’s soul and over time, make people think about things differently. This funny and accessible film starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as two long time married spouses who happen to be gay is one of those films. Here we have two pretty major female movie stars playing lesbians moms in a way we have never seen before in a mainstream movie. That alone is extremely exciting.

There have been very few gay and lesbian films that have been able to break through to reach a mainstream audience. One of the first I remember is In and Out starring Kevin Kline. Then there was Brokeback Mountain which profoundly altered the conversation. And recently there was Milk which won Sean Penn as best actor Oscar.  But now with The Kids Are All Right the conversation is shifted.  And that is such a good thing.

The thing about The Kids Are All Right which is directed by Lisa Cholodenko and written by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg is that it is not a gay film. It’s a film about a family and how it gets through a moment of crisis.

The premise is that 18-year-old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) who is about to leave for college is convinced by her 15-year-old brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) to inquire about their sperm donor dad. Turns out he’s a hot organic farmer/restaurateur played by Mark Ruffalo. Donor dad starts to insinuate himself into the family and (SPOILER) begins an affair with Julianne Moore that sends the whole family careening into crisis.

While all the performances are spectacular and this is one of the best films of the year so far, having now seen it twice, I am still blown away by Annette Bening’s performance as Nic. She plays a tightly wound doctor who likes things to be just so and how she reacts to the different crises and issues is magnificent. Julianne Moore is fantastic and has a great speech at the end, but I’ve seen this from her before. Bening on the other hand just blew me away.

The film opens in limited release today and will be rolling out across the country in the coming weeks.

Don’t miss it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgwjTy_cohg

I honestly don’t know the reason why Love Ranch got made.  Well, I guess I do.  It’s because director Taylor Hackford wanted to work with his wife Helen Mirren.  But Dame Helen made it clear to hubby that she wouldn’t just play any part.  Here’s what Taylor said about the process of finding the right film to work on:

I looked for various projects and suggested some but she’s tough,…She only wants to do things that are great roles, and she’s right.

Sort of.

The film they decide to work on was Love Ranch which opens tomorrow.

The film takes place in the 70s and Dame Helen plays Grace Bontempo the brains behind the legal brothel known as Love Ranch in Reno, Nevada. The brawn and the idiocy is provided by Joe Pesci (who has made a career of playing Goodfellas over and over again.) The chemistry between Pesci and Mirren is non-existent though Dame Helen kept trying. She’s just clear out of his league.

Dame Helen is not only running the show, she is also den mother to her rag tag bunch of sex workers played by some great and sadly underutilized actresses like Gina Gershon and Bai Ling. Grace’s whole world changes when (SPOILER) she gets a cancer diagnosis and meets and becomes the manager (don’t ask) of a sexy much younger Argentinian boxer named Armanado Bruza played by Spanish actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta.

Even though she knows better, Grace falls for the sexy boxer and starts an affair that turns into the real thing. You can probably guess from the fact that this all takes place in a brothel and involves a loose cannon like Joe Pesci that the story doesn’t have a happy ending.

What the film does well is show a sexual relationship between an older woman and a younger man. Helen Mirren seems to be the one in the 60 plus set (even in the 50 plus set) that gets to have sex onscreen. I guess we could say that Meryl Streep had a sex life in her last two movies, but she doesn’t do onscreen sex like Helen Mirren does. I appreciate that she pushes the envelope on this issue cause we need it badly.

I just wish the film was as good and as worthy of Dame Helen.

On the surface, Just Wright is your typical romantic comedy.  Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, boy likes her best friend, best friend dumps boy, boy and girl fall in love, boy hurts girl and tries to get back with best friend, boy realizes that he screwed up and loves girl.

You know the drill. But if you decide not to see this film because it follows a formula, I warn you that you will be buying into the bullshit that romantic comedies cannot be interesting and different.  I never felt demeaned or  talked down while watching this film.

What makes this film so different aside from the fact that it was directed by a woman — Sanaa Hamri (have you listened to my interview with her?) — is that the film stars an African American woman with her name above the title in capital letters who is in her thirties, not a stick figure, is a physical therapist, owns her own home, loves basketball, and is not pining away her nights lamenting over the fact that she doesn’t have a man.

Queen Latifah plays Leslie Wright the lead of this film.  I have never see the Queen look better and more comfortable on screen.  It’s not surprising since she also produced the film and helped shape it.  This film is a good example of a woman engaged in producing work for herself that actually works for her.  When women produce and help develop films that they are going to be in, they are inevitably a better fit.

In a nutshell, Queen Latifah runs into NJ Nets star Scott McKnight played by Common.  He invites her to his party and she brings along her best friend Morgan played by Paula Patton.  Morgan’s job (in her mind) is to become a trophy wife and she turns on the charm and snags Scott in about two seconds.  She’s one of those women who makes your skin crawl.  They are gorgeous and manipulative and we all have met them before.  At first I didn’t understand why Leslie was still friends with Morgan.  They are so different.  But then I thought more about people who have been friends since they were little.  You love them no matter what.  Even if they spend their time doing something you find utterly revolting.

After Scott gets hurt Morgan sees her payday disappearing so she bails.  Queen Latifah’s Leslie is hired to rehab Scott and, no shocker, they develop feelings for each other.  And they have sex.  Think about it, when was the last time you saw a sex scene (no matter how chaste it is) with a woman who wasn’t a stick figure?  And was a woman of color?

But when Scott recovers, Morgan returns and the Queen being the good friend she is bows out quickly and silently, but angrily.  It’s the hard awakening of how people you love let you down constantly.

But this wouldn’t be a romantic comedy if it didn’t have a happy ending so you won’t be surprised that the Queen does get her man.  And the thing I liked best about the ending was that it was able to redeem Patton’s character too, make the NBA star pursue his woman and have the girl get her boy on her terms because, you know, she’s damn worth it and he damn knows it.

Just Wright opens nationwide today.

Just in time for Mother’s Day, Mother and Child peels back the layers of three very different women all linked together through adoption.  Karen (Annette Bening) gave away her daughter when she was fourteen and she has never fully been able to recover from the experience.  She writes her letters and thinks about her all the time.  While she is an adult of 50 she still cannot allow anyone to get close to her and comes across as difficult.

Elizabeth (Naomi Watts) is a kick ass rootless attorney who was adopted and has constructed a wall around her never letting anyone in.  When confronted with an unintended pregnancy she is forced to examine herself in ways she never expected to.  Lucy (Kerry Washington) runs a bakery and is desperate for a child.  She and her husband tried to get pregnant and now they are in the process of adopting a child.  But Lucy’s husband wants a child of his own and Lucy dumps him to adopt on her own.

These are all hard stories, don’t think this is a “lite” feel good film.  But it is worth the work.  What I’m trying to say is that there is no bullshit here, just real life, and real life ain’t always pretty.

Many male directors write and direct movies about women.  Happens every week.  But writer/director Rodrigo Garcia clearly is in a league of his own, able to dig deeper into these women’s souls and construct a film with three very different and very flawed women that works beautifully.  And to top it off it’s about a topic that you don’t see regularly addressed in movies.  All the women are controlling and prickly (some more than others) and over the two hours each needs to figure out a way to let go in order to move forward.

Here’s to the first Oscar worthy film of the year.  If this movie is any indication this will be a good year for actresses.

Film opens in NY and LA today and will roll out throughout the country over the next couple of weeks.

Mother and Child

Mother and Child on Facebook

When you strip it down, Chloe is really about women and aging and the different value placed on men and women as they age.  The film written by Erin Cressida Wilson based on the French film Natalie and directed by Atom Egoyan, tells the story of Catherine (Julianne Moore), a gynecologist who is of the age where women notice that they aren’t being noticed anymore.  She beings to doubt herself, her sexuality, and her long term marriage to David (Liam Neeson), a professor who has young women throwing themselves at him daily.

So she decides to assess his fidelity and hires Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), a young, gorgeous woman equally unsure of her footing in the world to test David.  Turns out that it is Catherine who fails the test when she becomes embroiled with Chloe and that adds up to a whole mess of actions with devastating consequences.

Cressida Wilson writes one of the best monologues I have seen about how women start to become invisible as the age while men become more desirable.  It was hands down the best scene in the film and Julianne Moore nailed it.

Chloe opens nationwide today.

I’ve been watching Zoe Kazan since I saw her on stage in The Seagull where she and Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan acted circles around veteran actors Kristen Scott Thomas and Peter Sarsgaard.  Last year was a breakthrough year for her onscreen playing daughters, first of Robin Wright in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and then of Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated.

But this year begins with a bang and Zoe gets her own film.  She stars as the Exploding Girl in Bradley Rust Gray’s new film.  He wrote it for Zoe after they spent a lot of time walking and talking together.  Zoe plays Ivy a young college student home for spring break.  She’s at the beginning of a new relationship with a guy at school and this week away has made Ivy unsure of how they feel about each other.  Ivy is a typical 20 year old and spends a lot on time on the phone.  The cell phone is basically a character in the film.  The conversations with Ivy and the boyfriend are full of awkward silences and remind us that while we might be more connected to people, at the same time it’s even harder to truly connect.

The emotions of a young woman not yet an adult and no longer child are written all over Zoe’s face.  She’s at the stage where everything feels slippery and unsure.  She doesn’t yet know where she fits into the world and to complicate matters she also has to deal with a chronic medical condition that has made her grow up much faster than others around her.  For example, she might have a hard time having children because of the medication she takes.  That’s just her reality.  She also can’t take a bath alone because she could have a seizure and drown.  But she manages this chronic condition with the help and understanding of her long time friend Al (played by Mark Rendall), and their week together (his parents rented out his room so he sleeps on Ivy’s mom’s couch) brings to the fore feelings she really never knew she had.

Zoe Kazan is the real deal.  She’s going to have a long career in film and theatre as an actor and a writer since she is also a playwright.  I am excited to keep watching her work.  Count me as a big fan.

What I love about Andrea Arnold is that she is not afraid to show the grit and grime in everyday life.  In her Cannes Jury Prize winning film Fish Tank (opening today in limited release), Arnold tells the story of Mia, a 15-year-old girl fighting to find her place in the world.  She lives in the “fish tank” which is the low-income high rise of Essex with her mom and younger sister.  They are a family in crisis.  Mom is struggling just to get by, has a bad history of boyfriends, and Mia spend lots of time on her own getting into trouble. So much trouble that she has been kicked out of school and needs to go off to some kind of reformatory. Her dream is to dance her way to a new life.  She finds vacant apartments, plugs in her music and dances for hours creating routines.  When mom brings home a new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) who shows affection for Mia and her family, Mia misinterprets that affection in her desperation to be loved.

The film is raw and exciting to watch.  You see the uninhibited energy of newcomer Katie Jarvis as she struggles to find her place in the world without any adult guidance.  It’s a sad portrait of a girl who is way too alone, but finds sanity in her dancing.  From the film notes I learned that Arnold did not give the script to the actors before filming began.  She didn’t want them to over prepare.  If you haven’t seen her first film, Red Road, you should.  She is a great talent, telling hard stories about women.  Fish Tank should be seen by anyone interested in seeing a very talented woman director at work.

The best thing I can say about Leap Year is that it was not as bad as I expected it to be.  Films that open in early January are usually really, bad.  Remember Bride Wars?  That being said I still found the movie at times to be infuriating, especially the first 20 minutes when I literally wanted to drop kick Amy Adams’ character Anna across the room.

Adams plays a Type A apartment stager – meaning she pretties apartments about to go on the market so they get better offers.  On a side note I am sick and tired of these female romantic comedy characters who start off as high strung control freaks and through the love of a man they defrost and start to let go and live life one day at a time.  Enough.

Anna lives with — but is not engaged to — a cardiologist jerk who gives her status which she needs since grew up with a loser dad who lost their house.  (Of course there is no mention of her mother, but I’m not going to get into that one.)

Her best friend tells her one day while trying on dresses that she saw Mr. cardiologist jerk leaving a high- brow jewelry store with a package in his hand.  You know what that means!  But poor Anna jumped the gun and in the package were only beautiful diamond earrings not her expected engagement ring.  Whoops.

But Anna won’t be deterred.  She decides to fly to Dublin where Mr. Cardiology jerk is at a conference and propose to him, because on Leap Day a woman can do that.  Once every four years a woman can propose to a man.  It’s beyond insulting.

Suffice it to say her journey to Dublin is fraught with turbulence — literally and figuratively — and when the plane is diverted due to a storm the one thought that crosses her mind (which unfortunately for us she says out loud) when it feels like the plane might go down is “I can’t die without getting engaged. “  My thought at that moment was please save me.

The film improves with the introduction of Matthew Goode (one of my favs) as a pub owner from a small Irish town who Anna hires to drive her to Dublin in time to make her proposal.  Thus begins the typical  romantic comedy relationship — they first loath each other, then only hate each other, then they discover the other one isn’t so bad, then of course, they fall head over heels for each other.  Been there, done that.  But it made me think that the time has come for Mr. Goode to be the lead in a film.

So watching Leap Year made me come up with my first new year’s wish to Hollywood: stop making stupid formulaic romantic comedies.  People are smarter than you give us credit for.

I don’t really think too often about Tennessee Williams’ women, but in the last couple of weeks I have seen a movie, The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond and a play A Streetcar Named Desire so his women have been on my mind.  In anticipation of seeing Cate Blanchett in Streetcar (which by the way was one of the BEST performance on stage EVER) I pulled out my old copy of the play off the shelf and on the cover was a picture of Marlon Brando.  But then I saw the play and I was reminded — it is all about Blanche.

It made me think more about Williams and his women.  He seriously had a knack for writing these southern women who just couldn’t fit into the culture, who were stultified and driven mad when the constrictions of their world closed in on them.  Bryce Dallas Howard is Fisher Willow (love that name) the latest Williams incarnation in the newly discovered script that Williams wrote directly for the screen, The Loss of the Teardrop Diamond.  The script was found by actress Jodie Markell who fell in love with it and set about making this film her directorial debut.

Howard is very interesting as a young woman who tries to play by a lot of the rules of her stature in 1920s New Orleans but at the same time chafes at those same rules.  She just doesn’t fit in and wants to get the hell out, but at the same time knows she’s stuck.

Film also includes performance by Ellen Burstyn as a woman who wants to die with dignity, Mamie Gummer and a brief cameo by Ann Margaret.

Film opens today in NY and LA.

If you are a Nancy Meyers fan the good news for you is that It’s Complicated will make you happy, but if you have issues with Nancy Meyers and her filmmaking style this one won’t sway you her way.  It’s Complicated is pure Nancy Meyers for better or for worse.  Meyers gives us another aging white, rich baby boomer woman at a crossroads in her life.  Meryl Streep plays Jane Adler the owner of a spectacular bakery in Santa Barbara whose youngest has just graduated from college.  On the trip to NYC to attend her son’s graduation she winds up in bed with her ex, Jake played with lusty hysterics by Alec Baldwin.

Jane becomes unmoored by this turn of events.  She had become comfortable in her life.  She has her friends, she has her kids, she has her work, she about to get a new HUGE addition put on her house that she’s been saving up for for years.  But while she’s content, she’s not really happy and Jake, the guy who left her for a younger woman pushes all the right buttons and she becomes unglued.

What Meyers is able to do is to ask some questions about women’s roles, expectations and disappointments.  She doesn’t challenge anything or put a political spin on it.  She gives us a person who followed the blueprint of a woman of her race and class, married  the guy, had three kids, took care of the family and then like so many other women like her, got left behind for a younger woman.

The thing that you need to be reminded of during this dance of Streep and Baldwin is just how bad the divorce was.  And it’s the kids (now in their 20s) who are the ones not understanding this renewed friendship between their parents.  These are the kids who clearly remember the times when their dad wasn’t allowed in the house.  They are confused, and Zoe Kazan says say eloquently as Gabby, the middle child “I am very damaged from the divorce.”

So even though Jane has had 10 years to get over it, she still has residual anger.  Who can blame her?  But the thing is, she’s not the same person she was a decade before and doesn’t want to revert back to that woman and those habits which you can see is very easy to do.

Baldwin as Jake, sees Jane differently than he did when he left and also sees an independent, adult woman who’s not amped up on hormones wanting to have a baby.  But Jane doesn’t let him off the hook and says, “isn’t a baby part of the package when you marry a woman her age?”  Baldwin is great as a guy who just wants his life to be easy again.  He feels he can ease back into Jane’s life and while he has changed (a bit) in their 10 years apart, she has grown exponentially and they clearly just “don’t fit” anymore.

Streep is able to show Jane’s confusion with the excitement over her personal sexual revolution with her ex-husband to her utter horror over the fact that she is the one having an affair with a married man.  It’s the small gestures by Streep when she is alone that convey Jane’s emotions and nobody NOBODY does it better.

Steve Martin plays third prong in the love triangle and I have never seen him as retrained on screen.  He plays a man who has been bitterly devastated in a divorce and is desperate to find some normalcy in his life.  He likes Jane because she’s an adult and says that her age is one of the things that he finds attractive about her.  (When is the last time you heard that in a movie?)

But there are a bunch of things that bothered me in the film.  The tone deafness about the economy is a big one.  It just kinds of seems in your face.  Everything is white and plush, the people are all white and skinny and it just seems kind of off.

But then I need to remember that this is a Nancy Meyers film.  She makes films for a certain type of woman.  The thing is there are lots of baby boomer women out there who will wistfully look at this film and be able to relate to certain aspects of it.  If enough of them go to see it, it will be a hit.

I’ve been a fan of Rebecca Miller’s work ever since I saw Personal Velocity at Sundance in 1992.  What I like most about her is that she makes movies where the women are necessarily very likable.  They are complicated and screwed up and not your typical Hollywood fare.  Her latest film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee which she wrote and directed (based on her novel) opened last week in NY and LA and will be opening further in the coming weeks.

The film stars Robin Wright as a woman who discovers as she approaches 50, that she has no idea who she is and it scares her into changing her whole life.  Pippa spent most of her adult life married to a man 30 years older because she was desperate for security after growing up with a manic and medicated mother (played by Maria Bello.)  She meets an older book publisher Herb Lee (Alan Arkin) and — after a tragedy with his rich Italian wife — makes a life with him and their two children.

As the movie begins, they move from NYC into an Connecticut retirement community (keep in mind that Pippa is nowhere near retirement age) and everything unravels.  Robin Wright gives a very strong performance as Pippa, a woman who begins the movie as a weak, and gradually gets stronger as she realizes she has plenty of time to discover who she is and what she wants in life.  Blake Lively plays the young Pippa, a wild child desperate for love.

What moved me a lot was the relationship that Pippa had with her kids.  Her son Ben (Ryan McDonald) adores her, yet her daughter Grace (Zoe Kazan) cannot stand her.  She’s a daddy’s girl, a high risk photographer and looks down at her mother for having no career or life outside of her family.  My favorite scene was when mother and daughter really talked to each other and Grace admits how she feels and how much effort it takes to hate her mom.  That scene between Wright and Kazan was fantastic.

I don’t really know why Rebecca Miller’s work doesn’t get the recognition it should.  Actors seem to love to work with her based on the stellar cast in this film in very small roles including Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, and Keanu Reeves among others.  But this film is Robin Wright’s film, and as always, she is really interesting and mercurial.  Now that we are in the year end awards conversations, I think that people should take a hard look at her performance, because she is a woman at the top of her craft.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is now playing in NY and LA.  Here is info on where the film will be rolling out.

Women are going to seriously dominate the box office this weekend with the opening of the juggernaut New Moon as well as the Sandra Bullock starrer, The Blind Side.

New Moon is the 2nd chapter of the Twilight saga the love story between the mortal Bella Swan and the vampire Edward Cullen.  The good thing about this film is that no matter what any critics say this film will be a hit, especially among younger women.

What can I say about the film?  It’s totally cheesy and at times pretty bad that you kind of have to cringe.  But it’s critic proof just like Transformers 2 was. (BTW – Transformers 2 had only 19% on rotten tomatoes compared to New Moon‘s still low 28% as of 7am today.)

Even though the movie has so many problems (I know that Summit wanted to rush out the sequel and didn’t want to give Catherine Hardwicke the time she wanted to make this film better but honestly they should have waited and listened to her) the boring script being the big one, I am excited to watch this movie roll out because I can’t remember the last time a movie with a woman at the center was essentially critic proof.  It would be better for all of us if the movie was stronger, but this is a movie that women want to see and they will not be kept away.

If you want to experience a cultural phenomenon go and see it this weekend (if you can get in.)  Just be prepared, there will be lots of screaming fans with you in the theatre.

The Blind Side

Here’s my confession.  I’m a big Sandra Bullock fan.  Don’t know exactly why, but I’m just always rooting for her.  Maybe it’s because she knows exactly the type of movies she will be good in (All About Steve notwithstanding) and lays it all out there.

In The Blind Side, Bullock takes on the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy based on the true story of a wealthy white Memphis family who takes in and virtually adopts a young black man.   They work hard to help this boy, including hiring tutors to help put him on the road to success.  And by success I mean finishing high school, getting a college scholarship, and now having a successful NFL career.

I’m a sucker for a feel good sports movie, but this is not about football the same way that the TV show Friday Night Lights is also not about football.  This film is about family and Bullock is great.  She kicks butt as the gun toting NRA member who astounds herself and her family by taking in and loving a 350 pound black young man.

It’s hard not to think about Precious when writing about this film.  This boy has potential and options that Precious never had.  Sports.  Sports are still a way out for boys that girls just don’t have.  I’m not trying to gloss anything over and say this boy had it easy, he didn’t.  He lived on the streets and was lucky to be alive.  But when you look at a big boy you can see the potential for his life and his future, and when you look at a girl of the same size you see all the limitations she has.  That’s just the reality.

But nonetheless, this is a heartwarming and moving story that’s fun and is a film that both men and women can enjoy.

Precious is one intense and powerful movie.  It’s about an obese, illiterate, sexually and physically abused African American girl who refuses to give up on herself when everything around her conspires to wreck her and beat her down.

The reason why the movie works as well as it does — in spite of a not great script– is the performances of the women.  This is a movie all about women and their struggles to be seen and heard in a world that doesn’t give a shit.  Gabourey Sidibe makes an incredible film debut as Clarieece “Precious” Jones the girl who refuses to give up.   She breaks your heart and mends it all in a two hour period.

Monique, who is best known for her comedy, plays Precious’ vicious mother Mary.  Mary is a monster.  I have not been as terrified watching a woman onscreen since I first saw Margaret Hamilton in her green face holding Dorothy hostage in The Wizard of Oz.  Mary is even scarier than Faye Dunaway channeling Joan Crawford in Mommy Dearest.  Just when you think Mary can’t get any worse, she does, and you honestly cannot believe you are watching such horror unfold onscreen.

Paula Patton plays Blu Rain the teacher who helps Precious discover love.  She shows her that people can care about others.  She has a smooth, calm and reassuring voice that guides Precious.  Mariah Carey (sans makeup and any glimpse of her real life) plays the social worker Ms. Weiss who tries to connect with Precious and get her to talk about the abuse.

Precious challenges and assaults every nerve ending.  It pushes the viewer to see people that are mostly invisible in the culture (and onscreen) and humanizes them.  But Precious is by far not a perfect film.  The script by first time screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher is really far fetched and paints a picture that is only there black and white (not talking about color here) and full of stereotypes.  For example, the women who brutalize Precious are dark skinned while the women who help her are lighter skinned.  What does that mean?  Is it intentional?  What if anything is he trying to say?  What is most missing from the film is nuance and gray areas and that is clearly the directing choice of Lee Daniels.   He wants you to think in extremes because Precious’ world is extreme.

I hope that people go out and see Precious.  It’s very much worth it.  But be prepared, it is a movie that will move you, and challenge you and leave you breathless at times.  Don’t go if you are looking for something light.  Go and use this movie as an opportunity to have some really important conversations that most of us usually avoid because they are hard.  That just might be the most important thing this movie can do.  Make us talk and listen.

Precious opens up in limited release today in Chicago, NY, LA, and Atlanta.  Details here.

Sandra Laing and Sophie Okonedo

Skin is the heartbreaking true story of Sandra Laing (played by Sophie Okonedo) as a woman with black skin born to white parents in apartheid S. Africa.  She is a white girl who looked black.  As a young girl she knew she looked different but her biggest problems began when she showed up to school. They couldn’t and wouldn’t believe she was white, and were of course convinced that her mother (Alice Krige) had an affair with a black man instead of the fact that maybe somewhere in her family’s past there was actually mixed race blood.  This poor girl was just torn between two very different worlds.  The place she felt safest and most comfortable was amongst people who looked like her, so she left her family to live in the black community.  Her family then broke all ties with her because they just couldn’t believe their white daughter would rather live with black people. The whole thing just broke my heart.  This is a small film that makes you really think about race and how much racism hurts.  Skin opens today in NY and LA.

Sandra Laing is an very quiet woman (now I understand Okonedo’s understated performance) and she answered some questions about her life and the film.

Women & Hollywood: How did the film come about?

Sandra Laing: Tony Fabian the director of the film phoned me in 2000 that he wanted to meet me and told me that he wanted to make a film about my life.  I agreed because other people — newspaper and tv people — always came to me and they just took the story and went, and in Tony’s case I felt that he was the one who would change my life.  He did but it took 7 years to make the film.

W&H: Did he change your life?

SL: Yes, I was staying in a small rented house wasn’t working and couldn’t support my children, but now I am in a bigger house and my life is much better.

W&H: What was the hardest part for you to watch in the film?

SL: The time when I called my mother from my cousin’s house which was the first time I spoke with her after 10 or 15 years since I left home but I still didn’t know where she was staying she didn’t tell me.  And then the time when I found her in the old age home.

W&H: Why do you feel it was important for your story to get out there?

SL: I wanted to let the world know what apartheid did to a person in S. Africa and to let people know that if something happens to you long ago and you are scared to talk you must talk about it and let it out and you can then go on with your life.

W&H: In the press notes you say that this is a story of family, forgiveness and the triumph of the human spirit.  Have you forgiven your family?

SL: Yes, I have forgiven my family.  I didn’t get a chance to ask forgiveness from my father but I did see my mother before she died and now just my brothers are left.

W&H: Have you spoken with them?

SL: They don’t want to speak to me.  They are still angry with me from when I left home and when I chose black people over them.

W&H: It is so hard to rationalize what you must have felt — you were white but had black skin.  What can your experience teach people about racial issues?

SL: I think you mustn’t see a person through color whether she is black or white or brown.  We are all the same.  We all have the same blood.  Inside we are all the same.

W&H: Were you ever on the set?  What did you thnk about Sophie Okonedo playing you?

SL: Sophie is a brilliant actor.  I do see me in her acting.  She is doing the same things that happened to me.

W&H: Anything else you would like to add?

SL: Ask people to pray for me so that my brothers will one day come and see me.

W&H: Will this film open in S. Africa?

SL: It will it open in S. Africa on January 22, 2010.

It’s opening day for Amelia and Motherhood.

I am out of town today at a meeting so here are truncated reviews of both films.  I will have an interview with Katherine Dieckmann writer and director of Motherhood next week.

Amelia Earhart is one of those women in history who fascinates.  She broke every boundary and convention for a woman in her time.  Hilary Swank takes on the role of Amelia as a woman who just wants to fly and be free in a time when women were literally grounded.  She wore pants, refused to say obey in the vows at her wedding, and didn’t take her husband and promoter George Putman’s name.  It was exciting to watch the story of a woman who was one of the first real celebrities ever, who because she did things and lived the way she did made it easier for everyone who came after her.  There are not many women who can say that.  I kept waiting for the film to soar like Amelia herself but it got bogged down in a sappy love story between Amelia and Putman (played by Richard Gere).  And speaking of Swank and Gere, in real life Earhart and Putman were only 10 years apart, but in the film there is 25 years between the actors (not cool).  Even though you know what happens (well no one really knows what happened exactly) the last ten minutes when they are flying over the pacific looking for Howland island are nail biting and it made me for once wish for a happy Hollywood ending. Film is directed by Mira Nair and it has a wonderful score by Gabriel Yared.  (Opens on 800 screens in most cities.)

Writer/director Katherine Dieckmann wanted to make Motherhood because there were no “decent “comedies about mothers.  So she took pieces from her own life and added Uma Thurman as Eliza a harried mommy blogger desperate to regain her writing voice and herself, and we have Motherhood.  I respect that Dieckmann tried to show the realities of one day in an urban mom’s life, focusing on the mundane issues that women go through on a day in and day out basis that grind on you and suck out your creativity.  Eliza is desperate to regain the edge she had before kids yet no matter how hard she struggles, the lists she creates, or even how early she gets up, she is only able to catch a few minutes here or there for her and her writing.  The film illuminates the frustrations women face but I kind of wish she would have left out the whole Eliza as a mommy blogger storyline.  I think that the problem was that between when the movie was made and released mommy blogging and blogging in general has exploded.  As a blogger and a person who knows lots of mommy bloggers, blogging is a serious endeavor to all of us.  It’s not something you do in the 10 seconds you have between laundry loads just so you can have written something.  That being said, one of the film’s strengths is that it is able to show the joys and challenges of being a certain type of woman today (white, middle class, educated) who was promised lots of opportunities yet still feels held back.  I’m sure there are lots of women who will relate to it. (Opens on 35 screens in NY, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.)  Also if you buy your ticket through Fandango, $1 will go to the Susan G. Komen Fund for breast cancer research.

This interview of Nair comes courtesy of the folks at MakingOf a behind the scenes look at how movies are made:

The second An Education opened at Sundance last January the buzz began.  The buzz was most especially focused on the star making performance of a pretty unknown English actress Carey Mulligan.  Sometimes the buzz blows over or gets overtaken by new buzz, but the buzz on Mulligan, and the film, has stayed steady all through the lead up to the film’s release today.

I was blown away by Mulligan when I saw her act circles around Kristin Scott Thomas in The Seagull (which they are now making into a movie with most of the same cast) on Broadway in the fall of 2008, and I remember how much I enjoyed her performance in The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard so I knew that she would be great in An Education, and she is.  The good news is that she is one just one of the excellent pieces in a pie full up of excellent pieces.  Everything about An Education is great which is directed by Danish director Lone Scherfig from a script by Nick Hornby based from the memoir by Lynn Barber.

An Education is a feminist coming of age story of Jenny (Mulligan) a too smart, too worldy for her own good, young woman in 1961 London when young women had few choices.  The country is still living in a post war mentality.  The 60s really haven’t begun yet.  What Jenny has going for her is that being the only child of Jack played by Alfred Molina, he has drilled it into his daughter that she must get a proper education in order to be successful.   She believes it and works hard for it.   From those scenes you get the sense that dad has been drilling her about getting into Oxford since she could walk.

But Jenny’s different and her role models of educated women are not very enticing, so when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard in a creepily good performance) an older con man who opens her up and offers her a different type of education she leaps in head first.  He takes her to concerts, makes up stories about people he knows and not only enchants Jenny, but also her parents so much so that plan A for Jenny’s education — university — is thrown out the window in favor of plan B — marriage.

So Jenny, this young woman with so much potential to be different and special because she is so smart becomes just like all the other girls.  But she doesn’t.  Suffice it to say that things don’t work out with David cause he is a con man and Jenny needs to figure out how to get back onto plan A.

It’s not easy.  Jenny has let down the women who have invested some serious time and attention into her future.  Olivia Williams as her teacher Miss Stubbs is incredibly personally hurt when Jenny betrayed her, as is the school’s headmistress played by Emma Thompson.  These are women who close plan A, but had to make immense personal sacrifices to become educated women in that time.

Most of all An Education is about choices and how each choice we make has consequences and can snowball out of control.  But it also about how those choices teach us — give us an education if you will — so that as we grow up maybe, just maybe, we will make different ones next time.

Film opens today in limited release and will then roll out over the next couple of weeks.