Blue Valentine Movie Review

Everyone in their early twenties should watch this movie. It is almost like Requiem for a Dream in regards to a relationship.

It is the kinda’ movie I want to make and the movie about relationships I’ve been more or less waiting for. (Fuck not ending a sentence with a preposition.) But 500 Days of Summer was kinda’ the pop version of this film.

Blue Valentine flashes back and forth between the honeymoon period of a couple and a disastrous weekend at a motel many years later.

In their early lives we meet Dean (Ryan Gosling) who is relentlessly charming, intelligent, and most of all, is a hopeless romantic. He pontificates about love with a cool, black dude he works with at a moving company.

Now I’ve worked with inner city black guys at a moving company and I’ll tell you that love is the only thing, in regards to women, we dared never talk about.

We meet Cindy (Michelle Williams) who is young, pretty, hopeful for the future, terrified of her parents, and also bit of a whore.

(I mean I’m a progressive guy but twenty something partners before college. Daaamn)

The two meet and fall instantly in love.

All these traits are so different when the movie shifts to the future. Cindy seems beaten down and Dean, still funny, but seemingly is more obliged to be so. Like he’s using humor to take the edge off, instead of as a flirtation device.

The movie will make many my age queasy (mid-twenties). The earlier part of their relationship I’ve seen a lot of in my life. The latter part, not so much yet.

I always grew up thinking the decision to have a child was always premeditated. A really great moment in someone’s life when they decide, “hey, lets make a kid”. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found I was naive.

As Katt Williams said, “The first nut is slippery”. How many dads are running around with kids that aren’t theirs or families built around a failed pull-out without birth control? I can think of a couple…and I don’t even know that many people.

There is a moment when Cindy makes a life changing decision…you know the one. It is, indeed, a beautiful one, but beautiful decisions can be bad decisions. Hard decisions can be almost impossible to make, but might be the correct ones. It is tough.

For you tech weirdos out there director Derek Cianfrance filmed the earlier sequences in 16mm film and the later with the Red One. Why? I literally have no idea. Maybe a contrived experiment that one period is romantic and beautiful, while the other is more artificial and immediate. I don’t know.

There is a moment when Dean, seemingly fed up, throws his wedding ring into a bunch of weeds. He immediately regrets it and looks for it. Cindy, sweetly, joins in and they both go searching for something that they’re just not going to find.

Cool stuff.

B+/5

-Collin

I guess people in Pompeii were also up to stuff that the MPAA wouldn't like

Note: That this movie almost got an NC-17 is proof positive that the rating system designed by the MPAA is broken. I was expecting a bang fest. There are like 2 sex scenes and they are brief and innocent. One scene Dean eats out Cindy, holy shit!