O Brother, There Art Thou!

My brother and I have long loved talking about movies, pondering over them, raving about them or ripping them apart. He's recently moved away and I miss these animated chats. It was great to get some long-distance bonding by blog-buddying this latest. Enjoy!

Mike's Review of Beginners

Son and Lover by Mike Murphy

In recent years, a number of indie-ish films have centred on angsty thirty-something white guys finding redemptive meaning to their lives by falling in love with beautiful but quirky women.  The standout example is Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004), though Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005) fits in, as does the goofier recent variation on the subgenre, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010).

Caitlin's Review of Beginners

IN THE END
a review by Caitlin Murphy
 
As the most intensely collaborative medium, film can bear witness to some strange alchemy.  Often a movie has so many great things going for it, yet those things somehow don’t add up the way we sense they were intended to.   Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, 2005) had a few too many gifts under his writer/director’s Christmas tree for his most recent outing, the often charming, but uneven Beginners.