gbkmmaurstad
Nic is an OBGYN, (Annette Bening) married to Jules, (Julianne Moore) a stay at home wife flirting with starting a landscape business. Both of the women have given birth to a child provided by the same sperm donor. Underage son Laser, (Josh Hutcherson) wants to know more about his biological father and convinces his 18 year old sister to find out who their father is.Unbeknownst to Nic and Jules, the brother and sister meet their biological Dad (Mark Ruffalo) and being seeing him. Eventually the two Moms find out and decide they should all get to know each other a little better. This is where I think the film falls a bit short, great actors, good script idea, but the ending was a bit to Pollyanna. Still, it does bring up some interesting thoughts and if you like Bening, Moore, or Ruffalo it's still worth the watch.
vijaythepro
i saw this film when i was in school 7 years back. i was so moved by the end of the film. i've re-watched many times ever since. the actors are so great in their own zone doing an unpretentious job. mark ruffulo is cool, julian moore is so great, so is her wife annette, the kids also have done a splendid job. i love this film so much i want to thank the creators behind this. thank you !!! :)
Scott-101
"The Kids Are All Right" is a pretty admirable dramedy whose main accomplishment, so far as I can gather, is portraying a family of two lesbian mothers as naturally as it would a hetero-normative (sorry for the fancy word) family. Aside from that, it's a fairly standard entry in the film genre of indie dramedy. The characters aren't amazingly rich although the kids are colored in pretty well. It's even kind of admirable that Mia Wasikowska isn't any shade of basket case as that's what this genre sort of thrives on and Josh Hutcherson (AKA the guy who's constantly getting out-acted by everyone else in "The Hunger Games" films) is pretty low-key in his teenage angst as well.Julianne Moore is the standout character of the cast for my money as a woman who's kind of hip and counterculture (her t-shirt collection could be the stuff of tumblr fame if she starred on a TV show like "The Big Bang Theory") without pushing it too far.The characters, on the whole, are well-drawn but not inherently exciting which brings the movie down the notch because there isn't a whole lot of action. There's a marriage that oscillates between loving and duck for cover (when Julianne Moore says to Annette Bening "do you even love me anymore?" that's pretty strong) and not enough of a seamless transition to make it flow. Retroactively, you leave the film with a clearer view of what the actors, screenwriter, and director was going for-- a loving couple who fights just like any heterosexual couple -- so I could understand looking back on it positively, but as it is happening, it's awkward. Similarly, there's an affair between Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore and it's kind of a fun twist but it's not particularly earned. It also sheds big question likes on Moore's placement on the Kinsey scale as she clearly says "I'm gay." It's hard to judge this film without mentioning it got a Best Picture Nomination at the Oscars. That was the reason I saw the film in the first place, I'm a little baffled. My guess is that seeing such a natural portrayal of a homosexual couple was the novelty factor and the indie feel is something people dug although indie sometimes means slow and slightly boring. The film also got nominations for Bening and Ruffalo but they are the two most boring characters of the quintet. On the whole, it's an OK film that could potentially hit you better than it hit me.
hamass-mujadid
Don't look at this movie individually; look at it retrospectively with Linklater's Sunrise trilogy (especially Before Midnight) and Brokeback Mountain and you'll love it even better. Its smooth-flowing and ordinariness is also comparable to the fluency of Alexander Payne's Sideways, which was an "alcoholic" masterpiece, surely.The Kids Are All Right is a colloquial reference to an unusual situation—kids wanting to meet the part-engenderer of their existence. Brought up in a lesbian household, Joni's (daughter) eighteenth birthday is followed by Laser's request to contact their mothers' (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening) sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), and so the movie follows a low-pitched, conversational, and touchy discourse. Nic is the man of the lesbian household; she controls everything, being the only breadwinner of the family. The unconventional family goes with sperm donor's eventual involvement and interaction with kids and other kin with consent, conflict, ambiguity, judgment, and family-thing, that is, argument, disappointment, fragmentation, and upheaval. There's implied bias for both spouses on relationship with each others' biological offspring, and although no such thing is genuinely true, it's used as perfecting the rituals and situations of nearly all couples, conventional or not. There is inequality for sure, and that's used as a means by Nic to show her command of the shaft. The movie employs a chronology up until Joni's first day of college which is conducive to the ultimate rehabilitation of the whole family, without the sperm donor, of course.Paul's character is in question at so many places. He's been brilliantly portrayed by Ruffalo who's had a similar role in Begin Again, where he is an inconsistent and tormented father along with being a struggling song-producer, which he again did brilliantly. He's a good actor—Ruffalo. Paul is in between nothing; he's a college-dropout, but owns an above-average restaurant. His involvement with Jules is a plot of the movie, with many others, Joni Mitchell, and Indian employ being two of them. The little yet filling details made The Kids Are All Right a movie that seems like you're watching the exact life in your neighborhood.With everything said, I think it was Lisa Cholodenko's big and only one shot. Every once in a while, even a crow becomes a falcon. She might have pulled it out of nothing, and her idea, which was nothing but a regular production, turned out to be eccentrically attractive to many, out of good-luck and somewhat unprecedented potential. But it's very unlikely that she'll write any such piece ever again. However, it doesn't mean that The Kids Are All Right was an accidental discovery. I just think that even Lisa wouldn't have thought that highly of her script before its release.From Paul's BMW to Laser's skateboard, everything was perfectly synced together, and in those one-hundred and something minutes, I felt like I watched the gay version of Modern Family. It felt comedic, yet lively, and quite appropriable to what actually happens in lives, not necessarily unconventional ones. Actually if you look at it, after some time, it doesn't really matter if it's a hetro- or homo-; the groundwork is always same. The tags and gigs are all the same.More than anything else, Annette Bening's authoritarian character was most flabbergasting. She was terribly good with Nic, and honestly looked like the practical head of the family. Her gait, expressions, and voice was at times pretty totalitarian, and I personally felt sorry for Jules (Julianne Moore) and her tenderness.The honesty with which Lisa's presented this idea is simply commendable. It might seem like an easy-going, totally-happening script, but the reality is immensely different. You can't think of so every-day ideas, and present them with the same ease as real-life. Movies are more taken as action, and drama (melodrama is more like it), but coming up with something which underlines the questions that actually come from the growing minds of all families is finite and very confined. So yeah, hats off to Lisa, and Annette for being the core of the movie. I hope to see more of TKAAR thingies.
