Blue Valentine (2010)

Watching Blue Valentine is like going to see and watching your favorite band from your formative years. 
It takes you back to some of your favorite times but you realise that they don't really apply you today. It's not that they're bad far from it. It's just not what you're interested in anymore.
It stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple falling in and out of love. The hook is the narrative. There'll be a tense, strained scene from the present then a cute, tender scene of the start of their coupling then back to the present and so on. We see how the characters have changed over 4year, what's happened their ambitions and personalities.
At this point, it goes without saying that Gosling and Williams are amazing in this film. Gosling- more obviously; his transformation is more physical, more in attitude. Michelle Williams has the harder task of having to be more prescribed in her performance of a young woman making important decisions to a mother aching with frustration at the fact the love of her life has become this awful, awful dingus. Gosling playing said dingus, is literally 2 different characters- the sensitive young 'smart-alec' who we see will become this unreasonable, balding asshole.
In other words- this is less a love story but a study in what happen when a relationship is compromised beyond it's original shape.
They have a child and never in a way, that they would even consider resenting the child but they're ambitions have been but on hold straight away. Gosling is a painter and decorator whereas he all set to be a musician and Williams has to settle for being a nurse when she'd been training to become a doctor.
Blue Valentine also features very strange cameo from John Doman. John Doman, most memorable from The Wire as the 

egregiously ill-tempered Rawls. He's pretty ill-tempered here too as Williams' religious father but you can't knock the guy's hustle. He's the best at playing grumpy pricks.

In an unusual use of the SPOILER ALERT, the following SPOILER ALERT consists of the technique used in making this film...
During the early parts of the relationship, Cianfrance shot one take and in the 'end of' scenes, he used the last take of scenes presumably performed ad-infinitum by that point. I'm not sure where i gleaned that information but I'm sure it would have been a neater trick if I'd found that out after watching the film but it still works on the basis that Cianfrance is an arch-dramatic-technician; that he innately how best to produce great performance. 




I watched Blue Valentine (2010) at the cinema.
My 2011 in Movies will return with Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984)...