The Kids Are All Right

The lesson for this movie is that lesbians should only get sperm from their most natural donors: gay men.  If they had just asked one of their fabulous friends to impregnate them instead of going to a sperm bank none of this drama would have happened, since no gay man is going to have any interest in partaking in the nonsense that takes place in this movie.  

I appreciated this movie, although I would not say that I truly enjoyed it.  There are some good things about it: Annete Benning's acting and most of the rest of the cast.  However, I didn't find the plot or most of the story particularly believable for the most part.  I felt like the plot existed so they could make a movie out of it, which is idiotic since that's the reason the plot exists in every movie.  However, both Juliane Moore and Mark Ruffalo's characters were not fleshed out enough to make the affair to seem truly convincing.

Okay I get it, Nic (Annette Benning) was a little high strung, and then there was the time that she had to take a call from a patient and left poor Jules (Julianne Moore) in the tub all by lonesome.  But at the beginning of the movie they were getting it on to gay porn for christsake...things didn't seem to be THAT bad.  While Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is certainly sexy as hell, his character didn't really get my loins all hot and bothered with his west coast yippieness.   Their first kiss came literally out of nowhere besides rather forced sexual tension.  

The worst part is the outcome of the affair...Paul falls in love with Jules, and lets go of the gorgeous waitress he was banging at the beginning of the movie.   It goes against his all appeal of a free-spirit rebel.  However, once the truth comes out Julianne realizes she was just having a fling and loves her family.  I'm not the type to think if you have an affair it means you don't love your primary partner, but since one of the justifications for the affair was Annette's lack of attention was part of her 'justification' it didn't feel to really ring true for me.

Observing the family dynamics were another plus for this movie.  Having grown up in a rather emotionally repressed household, watching families even attempt to talk about their feelings in the open always stuns me.  Both the kids do a top notch job, especially Josh Hutcherson as Laser who finds his male role model and is ultimately let down.  The best scenes are when they are all at the dinner table together sharing stories and squabbling.  

I think the concept for this movie is great and introduces a lot of issues regarding family, motherhood, and fatherhood.  However, the affair just seemed sort of cliche and trite, when if they were creative they could have gone in a whole different direction.

I'm starting a blog

I'm starting a blog.

My first foray into writing for the internet was a 'columnist' for Oasis Magazine back when I was in high school.  It was a queer youth literary mag that helped me immensely with coming out and such, and eventually I started submitting articles until I left for college.  Then I was previously a member of livejournal.  I had a pretty big problem with overshare, and eventually decided to just call it quits to save me from myself.  I don't have any desire to return to accounting my various neuroses and goings on for the masses (*cough* few friends who bothered), but I do miss the aspect of creating/writing even though it was self indulgent and narcissistic.

So I've decided to start a blog that has absolutely nothing to do with me.  Well, except for my opinions.  I've realized that I spend a lot of time watching the same TV shows over and over again, or the same movies, or listening to the same music.  I want to branch out and experience more of what the vast cultural landscape has to offer.  I also want to avoid just mindlessly consuming things so that they are in one ear and out the other.  As a means to achieve this I'm going to write a ditty about every new book, movie, album, and perhaps show that I experience.  I'm not the best writer to grace the blogosphere, and I don't want to spend copious amounts of time editing so it will not be particularly polished.  However, I hope over time I will improve.

I initially conceived of this as a New Year's resolution, along with the goal of reading 1 book, ,watching 1 movie, and listening to 1 new album a week.  It is almost the end of January and so far I've only gotten to the movie party, so I think I might have been a tad overly optimistic.  But perhaps I'll gaine some momentum.  Besides it isn't the numbers that matter, although especially with books I have a tendency to put them down and pick them back up which doesn't really facilitate reading them so much.  We'll see.

A little background about me.  I'm 26 year old gay guy living in Pittsburgh, PA.  I gew up in the DC area and came here for college where I studied Economics and Anthropology.  Currently I work as a cubicle monkey for the mortgage industry, but hopefully that doesn't last forever.  As an example of some of my tastes, here are my favorites from my OK Cupid profile:

Books: Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), Lincoln (Vidal), A People's History of the United States (Zinn), Maurice (Forster), other authors I like include Andrew Holleran and Jhumpa Lahiri. I go back and forth between queer fiction, left-wing political non-fiction, and general fiction

Movies: West Side Story, Run Lola Run, The X Men Trilogy, Y Tu MaMa Tambien, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Rudy (I know I don't get it either...but it always moves me and I have a thing for Sean Astin), Glory, The Incredibles, Lagaan, Ikiru (To Live), Showgirls, Zombieland

Music: 80s (Prince, Madonna, The Cure, Erasure, Pet Show Boys), Motown (THE SUPREMES!, Four Tops), Donna Summer, Cher, Showtunes, Oldies like Simon and Garfunkel, etc.... Elton John, R.E.M, Opera (3 Temors), Shostakovich, Saint-Saens, Leaonard Bernstein, and some other American composers

So here goes.  If you happen to stumble across this blog thanks for visiting.