We saw two films this weekend that we thought were great. Excellence is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and these movies may not be to your liking. But we enjoyed each of them enormously, even though they were very different from one another.
The Kids Are All Right features Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple with two teenaged children. The kids are intent on finding out who their father is -- that is, who was the donor of the sperm each of their mothers used in conceiving. Mark Ruffalo turns out to be that guy. He's a bohemian restaurateur, who unleashes a tornado of emotions in the family of four who find him. The feelings and emotions in this movie are about as real and raw as you will find anywhere. Very moving.
Salt is at the opposite end of the spectrum -- a shoot-'em-up, non-stop action thriller, featuring Angelina Jolie as a CIA agent who is identified (correctly? wrongly?) as a Russian mole, long-ago planted in the U.S. with the ultimate goal of sparking a world war by killing both the Russian president and the U.S. president. So: is she or isn't she? We don't know, until the end (which is just the beginning, I suspect, of countless sequels). Evelyn Salt is one hell of an action figure -- a lean, mean, fighting machine. Just as film makers of old pitted Godzilla against King Kong, we should hope somebody will soon pit Evelyn Salt against Lisbeth Salander of the "Girl Who . . ." series. Mmmmmmmm.
Don't miss either of these movies. Each film offers its own wondrous pleasures.