Movie Review #6 - Blue Valentine (2010)

"You said for better or worse. (...) Now this is my worst"

---

Two nights ago, I managed to get my brother and some of our friends to come along to go see the critically-acclaimed indie "love story" Blue Valentine. I had been looking forward to seeing it ever since its trailer was released. With the controversy surrounding this movie's initial NC-17 rating in the US (and the headlines it made after winning the appeal for an R rating), I was even more excited to see this movie. The day it got its limited release in the US, I thought for sure that it would be playing in some Toronto theater. But in reality, I had to wait over a week until I could see it in the ONLY Toronto theater screening it. Of course, when we rushed to the 7:30PM showing and arrived more than 15 minutes early, the enormous theater was already packed. It just comes to show how many cinephiles reside in the Toronto area. We were worried about getting in, since the movie had an 18A rating and none of us were 18. To our great surprise, they let us in without any hesitation. And I am so glad they did!

Movie Review # 5 - Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

"Losers are people who are so afraid of not winning, they don't even try."

Little Miss Sunshine is about nothing and everything. The story is catapulted by the determination of the bankrupt Hoover family to get their daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin) to the finals of a beauty pageant in California. This embarks the whole family on a series of events as they journey across the country in a yellow VW bus. The dad, Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear), is a failed motivational speaker who is desperately trying to pitch his "9 steps to success" concept, which basically divides people into two categories: winners and losers. His wife, Sheryl (Toni Collette), is a stay-at-home mom who agrees to look after her gay brother Frank (Steve Carell), a Proust scholar who recently had a failed suicide attempt when he was rejected by his boyfriend and lost his #1 spot in his domain to a competitor. Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin) is an extremely vulgar old man and a heroin addict who was kicked out of the retirement residence Sunset Manor for his scandalous behavior. Olive's older brother Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a fifteen-year-old who has taken a vow of silence as a follower of the great philosopher Nietzsche, and whose ambition is to become a jet pilot. Throughout the film, these misunderstood characters are deeply explored and we begin to find out who they truly are.