The Kids Are All Right — A Summer Movie I’m Excited About for all the Right Reasons

Summer movies. Every year we are greeted with essentially the same rundown of events. We see the titles of upcoming movies grabbing headlines from every media outlet around, including blogs, newspapers, magazines and 30-second teaser trailers that pop up on television, blogs, Facebook and other social media sites. We’re told that if we are not super excited and brought down to the level of a hysterical and screaming Twi-hard, we must be missing an essential chromosome in our makeup. We are privy to the secret lives of celebrities as they appear on the covers of magazines with the promise that they will be spilling about their oh so normal lives on the inside. We get lengthier teasers that grow up to be full-length promotional trailers and before we know it, we’re seeing the smiling faces of the celebrities we just learned essentially nothing about in all of the countless magazine covers, stories and interviews they appeared in, only this time the celebrities we love so much and simply cannot get enough of are attached to designer labels, as they glide down the red carpet at their premieres. And finally, the big day arrives and you’re standing in line at your local movie theater and you’re excited to finally see this movie you’ve been hearing about for months on end. And sadly, a lot of times it sucks and you’re walking out of the movie theater an hour and a half to two hours later wondering where that precious time just went and what else you could have been doing that would have been better than watching that movie; like maybe washing the dishes or getting a Pap test.

We know the runaround and this summer is, of course, no different. Summer 2010 holds many little gems we have been told, are currently being told, and will be told we must go see or we will positively die! But when you get right down to it, summer blockbusters are generally a dime a dozen; there are a few chick flicks, a few movies for the kids, a few action-packed thrillers, and in essence, they all have pretty much the same ingredients that go into a summer blockbuster–and yes, most of them suck. But I recently came across a movie that is due out July 9th that looks like it won’t suck; in fact, I’m pretty excited about it.

Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right was a major success at Sundance and looks so promising that of course, I knew right away that it would not receive the amount of recognition that it most likely profoundly deserves. And what initially made me think it was a promising piece of work? It got the thumbs up from Women & Hollywood, the same blog that pumped me up and proved to be exactly right when it came to the film Sunshine Cleaning, and it also garnered a rundown of promising qualities from Jezebel.

The Kids Are All Right is a film that took seven years to finish, although its timing could not be better with the topic of same-sex marriage still very much on the minds of politicians and their critics across the country. The film stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in a refreshingly real, undeniably human (and yes, lesbian) marriage as they parent their two teenage children.

From the trailer alone, because I am not special and do not get to see it before it is released, there are a great deal of obvious warm and fuzzy moments that are a real treat to see being put in a film that could be for the masses–if only Hollywood would let it.

First of all, Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are amazing actors. They are both phenomenal women with impressive bodies of work who seem to jive and play off of each other very well. There is humor and quirkiness and real obstacles that long-time married folk find themselves in at some point or another.

In this case, their family is thrown through a loop when the eldest of the children, played by Mia Wasikowska from Tim Burton’s recent Alice in Wonderland, has just turned 18 and now as a legal adult, possesses the power to find out more about the sperm donor who helped to create her and her younger brother Laser; no I am not kidding. So she calls the sperm bank to find out more about this guy, played by Mark Ruffalo, and then after the kids meet him, they want to spend time with him, get to know him and, from what I have gathered, propel him into the role of ‘father’. And that is where the conflict comes in–Annette Bening’s character, Nic, feels like she and her partner aren’t enough for their children.

There are, of course, parts of the trailer that kind of make my stomach lurch in terms of ‘Yes, we know this is a story about a lesbian marriage and we know that they are lesbians, and oh yeah, lesbians‘ but that doesn’t take anything away from what looks to be a great journey in this coming-of-age story.

So hello summer movie that I am actually excited about. Of course, this movie is only being released in select theaters and seeing as how I live in the Middle of Nowhere, it will most likely not make it to a theater near me, leaving me very eager for the day it is released on DVD so I can go pick it up. I’ll let you know how the movie as a whole pans out for me and hopefully it’s worth the hype we’re seeing across the woman-written blogosphere.

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