The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One

When we last saw Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) at the end of Catching Fire, she, along with some of the other contestants, had been rescued from the Quarter Quell.  In Mockingjay: Part One, we catch up with her in District Thirteen, where she, along with some of the other Quarter Quell survivors and escapees from the districts, prepare for the revolution.  She has no idea whether fellow District Twelve tribute Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is alive or dead. Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), the president of District Thirteen, and former gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) want her to be the face of the revolution.  She just wanted to save her sister...but Mockingjay: Part One is, more so than the other Hunger Games movies, is about growing up and realizing that the world is bigger than you, your family, your friends, and your concerns, no matter how big or small those concerns might be.  Mockingjay: Part One follows Katniss as she moves from reluctant figurehead of the revolution to actually believing in and fighting for the cause.  Along the way, she gets bits of information about Peeta via interviews from the Capitol where he looks increasingly tortured and beaten.

It's an emotional rollercoaster, to be sure.  It is exciting to see Katniss grow angrier at the Capitol and move beyond concern for her own and her family's safety to seeing the bigger picture.  It's scary to watch Peeta's slow transformation at the hands of the Capitol.  It's interesting to watch both the Capitol and the rebels try to manipulate the media for their own purposes. For as emotional as parts of it are, though, it also felt a little long. It's less action-packed than either The Hunger Games or Catching Fire; a lot of it is preparation for the bigger stuff that we know is coming in Part Two...but there's not enough left to happen that seems to justify a second movie. Don't get me wrong; I enjoyed aspects of it A LOT. I just think that if they had left it as one movie, they would have had to tighten it up a little bit.

It does include this song. The song was my favorite part:

thoughts on Laggies (spoilers)

Keira Knightley stars as Megan, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who is kind of stuck in a rut.  She has a graduate degree but spends her days spinning a sign out front of her dad's accounting office.  She's also still dating her high school boyfriend and hanging out with her high school friends, which wouldn't necessarily be bad things in and of themselves.  However, she's just sort of, as she herself eventually says, "floating"-- hanging out with the same people and doing the same things because that's what she's always done.  At one point she tells a story about how she and her boyfriend got together; everyone kept telling her that he liked her, and eventually he asked her out in front of everyone, so she said yes, not necessarily because she herself had developed a crush on him and decided that he was who she really wanted to be with, but because that's what everyone was telling her to do, and it was easy.  She realizes that this has become a pattern: just sort of going along with the things everyone else tells her to do rather than actively making her own decisions.

Her boyfriend (Anthony, played by Mark Webber) proposes to her at her friend Allison's (Ellie Kemper's) wedding.  Allison interrupts the proposal to ask Megan to go find Allison's mom.  Megan catches her dad (Jeff Garlin) making out with someone (possibly Allison's mom, but definitely not hers).  She freaks out and leaves the reception without saying goodbye to anyone.  She winds up at a grocery store, where some teenagers ask her to buy them beer.  She agrees, and winds up having a great time hanging out with them for a few hours.  When she gets home, her boyfriend is worried and upset that she disappeared from the reception; she makes up an excuse, and they start talking about his proposal.  She actually does want to marry him and is ready to run off to Vegas right away, but he reminds her that they have to go to Allison and her husband's wedding brunch the next day.  She tells him that the day after that, she is going to a weeklong seminar to help her find herself or some such.  Instead, she just sort of starts driving aimlessly, until one of the teens from the other night, Annika (Chloe Grace Moretz) calls and asks for her help with something.  Megan winds up spending the week with Annika and her single father, Craig (Sam Rockwell), telling them that the lease is up on her apartment and she can't move into her new one for a few days.

The movie is interesting in that, because you can pretty much tell where it's going to go even just from the preview (Megan is going to find what she's looking for with Craig and Annika and help them out with their problems, too), you wind up just focusing on and getting to know the characters, most of whom are interesting, and deciding how you feel about Megan's situation.  Example: Megan is, as previously noted, stuck in a rut as far as her career and romantic relationship goes, and you can kind of see why her mom and friends are exasperated with her.  However...not one person in her life is actually helpful.  Her friends and her mom just want her to move on, get a real job, and marry Anthony because that's what she's "supposed" to do.  Allison catches Megan getting coffee with Annika when she's supposed to be out of town at the seminar, and instead of asking if she's okay or why she would just disappear, she gives her a lecture, basically saying that if she doesn't marry Anthony, she's going to get left behind by the rest of them.  For Megan, the appeal of Craig and Annika is that they like her without really knowing anything about her; they're not pressuring her to do any one certain thing, yet she does seem to grow as a person around them, taking Annika to see her mother, who she is estranged from, and taking the rap for Annika's friend Patrick (Dylan Arnold) when he gets in an accident.  You get to see that she's a good person even if she doesn't exactly have everything figured out yet.  "You've got to let go of this imaginary future you have in your head and just go with your gut," she tells Annika at one point.  That's sort of the thesis of the movie; Megan hasn't moved forward with her life because she doesn't know what she wants, and with Craig and Annika, it's not like she suddenly finds the answers, but things feel right with them in a way that they just don't in her regular life.

I generally enjoyed the movie; I liked Megan, Craig, and Annika, and I thought that all of the actors gave pretty solid performances.  That said, there were a couple of things that bugged me about the story.  One of my least favorite movie tropes is, "Someone has a secret, and everyone's eventually going to find out, and they're going to be really mad for like five minutes, and then everything will be cool."  When Megan explains to Craig how she met Annika and why she wants to stay with them, there is not much of a reason for her to withhold the information that she is engaged and needs some space...but she does, and she makes out with and (presumably) has sex with Craig without telling him, and then Annika finds out by accident, and Megan has to tell Craig, and...yeah.  I guess she doesn't tell them about the engagement initially because she doesn't really feel that great about the whole thing, and I guess she just got swept up in things with Craig and decided to go for it, but the lies just make things so much more uncomfortable than necessary, and add an additional, unnecessary level of drama.  It would be challenging enough for her to try to figure out what she wants and deal with her feelings for Craig without also having to deal with the consequences of lying about the whole thing, and given how nice and understanding that Craig and Annika are, it seems cruel of her to mess with them like that. 

Also...she initially does what she says she was going to do, which is leave Craig and Annika at the end of the week and go off to marry her fiancé in Vegas.  The thing that makes her change her mind is that, though they had said they were going to go off and get married without telling their friends and families, Anthony takes a selfie of them at the airport and immediately sends it to their friends, wanting them to be involved.  This makes Megan feel like he's doing the whole wedding thing for the sake of the group, not for them, and tells him that she's "dropping out of the group." I mean, sure, don't marry him if you're doing it for the wrong reasons and also have feelings for someone else, and sure, distance yourself from your friends if you feel like they're not good for you anymore...but how about explaining what you're doing and what you want? It seems like her pattern has been to go along with whatever everyone else wants, never saying or even really thinking about what she wants, then running away when she realizes she wants something else; isn't "dropping out of the group" sort of the same thing? Why can't she try to explain herself to Allison and the others? I also have my misgivings about her jumping right into a relationship with Craig; presumably, her relationship with Anthony hasn't been good for a long time, but she's been with him for twelve years.  She must at least care about him, right? I think the point is that she didn't know what she wanted until she found it, and now that she's found it she's just going to go for it without a care about what anyone else thinks, which is great, but I think just abandoning her whole life seems a little drastic, as well.

So, bottom line: enjoyable movie, good performances. Misgivings about the story.

thoughts on A to Z, two episodes in

Ben Feldman and Cristin Milioti star as Andrew and Zelda, the A to Z of the title. (Isn't Zelda a cool name? You don't hear a lot of Z names for girls).  They begin dating in the first episode; we are told, via voiceover from Katey Sagal (I thought it was Allison Janney until I looked it up) that they will date for eight months, three weeks, five days, and one hour. I GUESS that means they break up at this point, but I am already freaking out about this possibility and hoping they get married at the end of this time instead.

Yes, two episodes in, I am emotionally involved.  After the end of the first episode, I thought the show had potential and a cute premise, but I found the two main secondary characters, Stu and Stephie (played by Henry Zebrowski and Lenora Chrichlow, respectively) fairly annoying.  I liked them better in the second episode; they both function as sort of sounding boards for Andrew and Zelda as they navigate those tricky first days of a new relationship.  I thought the show really did a good job of capturing the role friends play when you're trying to start a relationship: their advice isn't always perfect, but it's always well-intentioned, and you need friends to give you a push, sometimes, and to do ridiculous things that you couldn't or wouldn't do yourself.  In this episode, Stu spies on Zelda as she has dinner with another man, while Stephie digs up info on Andrew's date online and reports to Zelda.

I thought the second episode as a whole just did a really good job of capturing the beginning of a relationship.  Andrew and Zelda both like each other a lot, but in this episode, they're both trying not to let on too much, and, in Zelda's case, actually trying not to care too much.  Andrew's trying not to scare her off.  Zelda's trying to protect her heart.  It just rang really true to life.  It's also fun that it all takes place against the backdrop of Andrew's workplace, an online dating service that has just begun experimenting with a Tinder-like app.

I think it has potential.  I dig it.

thoughts on Gone Girl (contains some spoilers, but makes a reasonable attempt not to give away the best stuff)

Nick and Amy Dunne (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, respectively) met in New York City at a time when things were going well for both of them.  He, a good-looking "everyman" type from Missouri, was a writer for a men's magazine.  She, a beautiful heiress and the inspiration for a series of children's books called Amazing Amy, wrote quizzes for women's magazines.  As is common early in relationships, they both tried hard and perhaps put on a bit of a show to get and keep the other person.  He perhaps tried to seem smarter and more cultured than he was.  She eventually readily admits that she played the part of the "cool girl," the girl who eats pizza and drinks beer without ever gaining a pound, who watches sports and doesn't care if he blows her off to hang out with the guys once in awhile. 

Of course, they couldn't keep up the act forever, and once things got rough, the cracks in their relationship started to show.  The recession led both of them to lose their jobs and her parents, the authors of Amazing Amy, to have to dip into her trust fund.  His mom got sick, and they moved to Missouri, where she used the rest of her savings to help him open a bar with his sister.  She resented the move.  He resented the fact that he was beholden to her financially and that she was so unhappy in his hometown.  Their relationship dynamic changed; in New York, people respected her Harvard degree and thought it was cool that she was the inspiration for Amazing Amy.  In Missouri, people thought she was uppity and gravitated toward Nick, who they knew and loved.  He began having an affair with a much-younger woman.

All of this is revealed in the first third of the movie, which begins on the morning of Amy's disappearance.  The film alternates between the present, in which Amy's disappearance causes a media circus, Nick maybe doesn't seem quite upset enough that she's gone, and people begin to suspect him of murder, and the past, which is told to us through Amy's diary entries.  In the second third, we learn what has really happened to Amy, and things get twisty.  In the last third, a carefully laid-out plan goes awry, and things get off-the-rails insane.  This is not to say that things get unbelievable.  It is to say that it becomes very difficult to predict where things might go.

I'm glad that I read the book before seeing the movie, not because the movie was hard to follow or left out anything that I considered crucial, but because reading the book, I had a very emotional reaction.  Watching the movie knowing what was coming, I was able to get past that and appreciate the story, which is really very clever.  I felt almost betrayed while reading the book.  You learn in the second third that one of the narrators is unreliable, and I felt cheated by that; it wasn't fair, I thought, to lead the reader down one path only to pull the rug out from under them and say, "oh, ha ha; you're dealing with an entirely different kind of character than you were led to believe you were."  The thing is, though, while it might not be "fair," it's not just a thing that happens in fictional stories.  It happens in relationships, which is perhaps the thesis of the story: after you get to know someone and they've dropped whatever façade they had to put on in order to win you, after things happen that make it impossible for you to pretend that they are the person you hoped they were and wanted them to be, and after you have been through things together that cause the dynamics of the relationship to change, you are sometimes left with a very different person than you thought you started with.  At this point, you either learn to love the other person as they are, or you act out, or you break up.  Sometimes, the two of you have different ideas about what should happen at this point, and things get worse before they either get better or don't.  The second act of Gone Girl is the author dropping the façade and letting you see things how they really are, and once you can get past your emotional reaction to how you feel about having that "done to you," you can appreciate how brilliant it is.

I was able to enjoy watching the movie more than I enjoyed reading the book not only because I had the initial emotional reaction at the author's "betrayal" out of the way, but because the performances are completely amazing.  I've really turned a corner on Ben Affleck in the past five years.  I used to dislike him for a number of reasons, but he is absolutely perfect in this role, and-- I'm going to make a bold statement here-- I would not be at all upset if he won an Oscar for this.  Yes.  I just said that.  This is a character who has to come across as charming and handsome, but who you also have to believe is definitely an adulterer, possibly abusive, and possibly a murderer.  I can't think of anyone better for this role than Ben Affleck.  As Amy, Rosamund Pike has to come across as extremely multi-faceted, as well, and she's also great.  I know that Reese Witherspoon produced this movie and at one point wanted to star in it; Reese Witherspoon is my favorite, and I think she could have been good in this role, but I think it makes more sense for Amy to be played by a less well-known actor.  With Nick, you need someone who is instantly likeable who you could believe might be capable of sinister things in spite of the fact that you like him; having a well-known actor in that role speeds that process along.  With Amy, not having a preconceived persona to place on the character works much better: she could be anything or anyone, and she needs to be.  There are some supporting actors in the cast, too, and they're all well-cast, but when it comes down to it, this is the Nick and Amy show, and Affleck and Pike both knock it out of the park.

The ending is controversial.  It's the same in both the book and movie.  The odd thing is, while it made me want to throw the book across the room, and while I heard some people in the theater (including some of the people I was with) say they hated it, I really thought it worked in the film.  (For that matter, I think I would like it in the book upon rereading.)  Is it bleak?  Yes.  Is it the only outcome that could have befallen these two characters?  No, but it works, it's believable, and it's kind of wickedly awesome in it's way.  I can see how other endings might have been more satisfying, but I found this ending unsettling in a realistic way.

I really liked the film.  I'd strongly recommend.

thoughts on This is Where I Leave You

Jason Bateman stars as Judd Altman, who in the early moments of This is Where I Leave You catches his wife (Quinn, played by Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss, shock jock radio host Wade Beaufort (Dax Shepard).  Not long after, his sister Wendy (Tina Fey) calls to tell him that their father has passed away.  Not only that, their father wants Judd, Wendy, their siblings (Paul and Phillip, played by Corey Stoll and Adam Driver, respectively), and their mother (Hilary, played by Jane Fonda) to sit shiva for seven days.

This provides the impetus for the four siblings to descend on the family home with assorted spouses, romantic partners, children, and personal dramas in tow.  Judd arrives alone and makes excuses for why Quinn didn't come along; Wendy knows the truth and presses him to tell everyone until, of course, he loses it and winds up spilling the beans in front of a houseful of mourners.  Wendy has a husband who won't get off his cell phone and a toddler who carries around his plastic potty everywhere and drops his pants whenever and wherever he feels like it.  Paul and his wife, Alice (Kathryn Hahn), have been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for two years; at one point, Alice, who dated Judd before she dated Paul, tries to get Judd to impregnate her.  Phillip, the baby of the family, roars up to the funeral late, in a Porsche, and later introduces them to his much-older fiancée (Tracy, played by Connie Britton).  This is all proceeded over by Hilary, a therapist who is none too shy about showing off her new boob job and made her name with a book on child rearing that revealed details of her children's early sex lives that they would rather she had kept private (Paul used to masturbate with an oven mitt, for instance).  Also popping up now and then are Penny (Rose Byrne), a local woman who apparently had a huge crush on Judd when they were young; Horry (Timothy Olyphant), their neighbor and Wendy's ex-boyfriend, who hasn't been quite the same since a car accident and brain injury twenty years ago; Horry's mother, Linda (Debra Monk), who has grown close with Hilary in the wake of Hilary's husband's illness and death; and Rabbi Charles Grodner (Ben Schwartz), a childhood friend of the family who can't stand that they all still call him Boner.

Got all that?  It's all a bit crazy and confusing, but only because that's how visits home under trying circumstances are.  Certain things are familiar, yet others are a bit off; with a houseful of guests, Judd is relegated to a sleeper sofa in the basement that won't even fold out all the way, and the electricity always fails at the exact moment Judd has a headful of shampoo in the shower.  Phillip is gleeful to get to go out to a bar with his older siblings (he was always too young when they were all living in the same house)...but not long after they've all done their first shot, Paul is getting called away by his ovulating wife, and Penny's there eager to flirt with Judd.  The brothers have fights that devolve into wrestling around on the front lawn and, at one point, accidentally set off the fire alarm sneaking a joint at Temple.  Judd catches Wendy doing the walk of shame home from Horry's house.  Judd actually gets away with spending the night with Penny...except then Quinn is showing up with big news.

As with many movies that are adapted from books, as this one is, there are a lot of things you find yourself wanting to know more about, yet it still feels a bit too long.  Yet it plays out better on the screen than I remember it playing out on the page; the actors' performances are grounded in reality, making it seem less self-consciously funny and outrageous than I remember the book being.  Bateman, Fey, Stoll, and Driver are believable as siblings; these characters don't spend a lot of time together on a day-to-day basis (Paul is the only one who still lives in their hometown) and aren't the kind of siblings that would refer to each other as best friends.  Yet there is an easy dynamic between them that feels comfortable and familiar; there are old resentments between these siblings, to be sure, yet you can tell that they all would be there for each other in a second if they needed to be.  I liked the way that so often the other people in the siblings' lives just faded into the background as the four of them gravitated to each other.  These are people that know each other's shortcomings (when asked, Judd tells Tracy that yes, there is a good chance that Phillip has cheated on her with his ex-girlfriend; Wendy tells Judd that if he had really loved Quinn, he would have noticed that she'd been cheating on him for a year) yet always have each other's backs (Phillip cheerfully calls Quinn a "heartless slut" to her face; Wendy punches Wade in the face when given the opportunity).  Their interactions feel real.

I enjoyed it a lot.  Funny, touching, great cast.  I'd recommend.

thoughts on The Mindy Project Seasons One and Two

It's interesting how shows find their stride in the first couple of seasons.  Throughout the first two (and thus far only; the third season debuts on September 16) seasons, The Mindy Project is about a single gynecologist (Mindy Lahiri, played by Mindy Kaling) in her early thirties who, in a nutshell, has dating misadventures while interacting with a wacky bunch of coworkers and eventually realizing her feelings for fellow doctor Danny Castellano (Chris Messina).  But the supporting cast shifts around a bit as the seasons progress, and this really makes a huge difference.  In the first season, she has a married friend who lives in the suburbs (Gwen, played by Anna Camp); we don't see her in the second season, and we don't miss her.  Receptionist Shauna (Amanda Setton), an attractive Jersey girl with a crush on Dr. Castellano, is unceremoniously replaced by Beverly (Beth Grant), a sixty-something woman who is fired as a nurse in the first episode for doing things like taking blood samples home.  There are other cast changes, too, but probably the best is the addition of Peter Prentice (Adam Pally), a doctor who, during his interview at the practice, tells a story about having sex with a Christmas tree at an office holiday party.  More on him later.

So, I like the show a lot, for a number of reasons.  For one, the dialogue is hilarious.  I could give plenty of examples of humorous exchanges and one-liners (and have on my Facebook page), but I'm constantly cracking up from little things, like how Mindy is constantly saying "How dare you!" and addressing people as "sir" (as in, "Excuse me, sir, but how dare you!").  For me, also, a lot of the humor also comes from the fact that, as a single woman in my thirties, I can relate to a lot of the situations she gets herself into (sometimes to a painful degree)...yet she is nothing like me.  For one thing, she is way more outspoken than I am; sometimes I'm appalled by the things she says, while other times I wish I was better at speaking up for myself and less guarded with my emotions like she is.  It's like watching how a completely different person would handle aspects of my life, basically.

Then there is the supporting cast.  There is Danny, who grew up in Staten Island, was hurt badly by his divorce from Christina (Chloe Sevigny), is Catholic, practically raised his younger brother after their father left, and, though in his thirties, is kind of a grumpy old man ("Get this guy a sandwich, and I don't mean a WRAP.  I mean a REAL SANDWICH, with bread").  There is Jeremy (Ed Weeks), a handsome British doctor who Mindy occasionally hooks up with at the beginning of the first season.  There is Nurse Morgan Tookers (Ike Barinholtz), an ex-con who I have a hard time even beginning to describe, except to say that he is a ridiculous person, and hilarious (Danny, at one point, describes him as having a "charming Huckleberry Finn illiterate vibe," which is fairly accurate).  And there is the aforementioned Peter, who joins the cast in the second season and really adds something to it.  He and Mindy don't get along at first (she invites him to lunch to try to make friends, but takes him to, as Danny describes it, "that doll restaurant where you tell the story about your period").  He goes with Mindy to her ex's wedding, is the life of the party, and then winds up having sex with the bride.  He and Mindy become close when she has a falling-out with Danny, and he gives her completely different advice than Danny would ever give her, but it's kind of great.  There is also a nurse named Tamra (Xosha Roquemore) who is constantly complaining about her boyfriend Ray Ron (Josh Peck), and a pair of midwife brothers (Brendan and Duncan, played by Mark and Jay Duplass) who serve as sometime rivals for the doctors.  And don't even get me started on the guest stars.  James Franco! Bill Hader! B.J. Novak! Ed Helms! Max Greenfield! The list goes on and on!

Basically, the employees of Schulman and Associates make up a group of coworkers and unlikely friends that rings true for a group of mostly single, mostly thirty-something coworkers and friends.  Some of them wind up dating and/or sleeping with each other, or developing crushes on each other that nothing really comes of.  They get into arguments over issues both big and small.  They interfere too much in each other's lives.  They all have their quirks, and they're not people who probably would have hung out with each other had they met in high school or college, yet they're incredibly loyal to each other when it counts.  They're all pretty great, and pretty fun to spend a half hour with once a week (or, you know.  Hours spread out over a couple of weeks on Netflix).  I'd definitely recommend.

thoughts on Boyhood

On the bookshelves in my apartment, I have more than thirty photo albums.  I got my first one and started filling it with photos when I got my first camera at age seven, and most recently added pictures in late June of this year.  On occasion, I have gone through them looking for a specific picture or pictures and been struck how, in some ways, it seems that I am living the same year over and over.  In multiple albums, there are pictures, for example, of me decorating Christmas cookies at my parents' house.  There are multiple pictures of groups of friends sitting around dinner tables on Thanksgiving, plates full of turkey and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes.  Often, it is difficult to tell when specific pictures were taken; you can tell, maybe, by hairstyles or glasses or the absence or presence of people who have drifted in and out of my life.  And yet...there are enough photos of things that only happened once, or only happened for awhile, or people that I'll probably never see again to let me know that while life is, in fact, organized by certain holidays and traditions that do happen over and over again, it's not the same year over and over.  Friendships start and end.  New hobbies are taken up.  Vacations are taken.  I move to different places and so do other people.  People are born and people die.  And some of the most important events aren't captured on film.

The experience of watching Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from six to eighteen, was similar to the experience of flipping through those old photo albums.  This is not because most of the events selected from Mason's life are ones that would be caught on film, but because of the things that change and the things that stay the same as he ages.  His parents and sister are consistently part of his life, and a few other people pop up again and again, but others-- neighbors, friends, stepfathers, and eventually girlfriends-- come and go.  He moves with his mom and sister  from a two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment to a house that his first stepfather owns to a house that his mom buys herself to his first dorm room.  He plays video games on systems that change over the years and becomes more and more interested in, and more and more skilled at, photography.  His father (Mason Sr., played by Ethan Hawke) spends a lot of Mason's life pulling up in a GTO to pick him and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) up for weekend visits, then eventually gets remarried and trades the GTO in for a mini-van.  His mother (Olivia, played by Patricia Arquette) earns her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, eventually begins teaching at the college level, and, along the way, marries and divorces men who seem great at first but turn out not to be.  The audience is reminded that time is moving forward not only by the ages of the characters, but by changes in technology, by current events (Mason Sr. rails against President George W. Bush early in the film and later takes his kids with him to campaign for Obama), and by pop culture (Olivia reads to Mason and Samantha from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone early in the film; later, Mason and Samantha dress up in costume to go get their copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

The film has a good heart.  There are some unpleasant and even terrifying moments in Mason's life (such as when Stepfather #1 drives him, Samantha, and his stepbrother and stepsister around drunk); he crosses paths with some bad people and even has experienced his first heartbreak by the end of the film.  Yet the core characters in the film-- Mason, Samantha, Mason Sr., and Olivia-- seem to be flawed but good people.  Olivia succeeds in her educational and professional goals but consistently falls for the wrong men.  Mason Sr. starts out roaring up in his GTO, taking the kids to do fun activities and forgetting not to swear around them, and then disappearing again, but eventually grows up, starts a second family, and becomes a more stable and consistent presence in the children's lives.  At one point, I was concerned that all of the men in Mason's life (which include his father, the two stepfathers he has over the years, a photography teacher, and a boss) seemed to be jerks, but then his father matures, and the teacher and boss wind up challenging him in ways that are good for him.  Again, Mason has some bad experiences and meets some bad people, but it's not a bad life, all in all. 

There are a few moments in the film that are just incredibly nice, moments when you are allowed to feel genuinely happy for the characters.  One of these is a section of the film in which Mason Sr., his wife, Annie (Jenni Tooley), and his infant son Cooper (Landon Collier) pick Samantha and Mason up and take them to visit Annie's parents.  The scene in which Mason Sr. and his new family pull up is the first in which the audience is introduced to Annie and Cooper, and we see immediately that Samantha and Mason are close with both of them.  It is Mason's fifteenth birthday, and Annie's parents proudly give Mason his first Bible and a shotgun that Annie's father tells him has been passed down in his family for generations.  The gifts aren't anything Mason would really want, but it's incredibly sweet how much Annie's parents want Mason Sr.'s kids to be included in their family.  Mason Sr.'s gifts are incredibly sweet and fatherly, too-- his first love is music (though he eventually gets a stable job in insurance), and he has painstakingly arranged all of the Beatles members' solo work into a "Black Album" for Mason, as well as bought him a shirt, tie, and jacket for things like school dances and job interviews.  It's just a really nice moment in the characters' lives-- Mason Sr. has clearly pulled himself together and is happy and surrounded by good people, and his kids are happy for him and accepting of the changes in his life. 

Olivia gets a nice moment, as well.  At one point, we see her tell a young man who is doing some work on her house that he is smart and should go to college.  A few years later, she runs into him again, and he greets her by telling her, "You probably don't remember me, but you changed my life."  He has finished community college and is working on his Bachelor's degree.  We see Olivia have a few "What am I doing?" or "Why does any of this matter?" moments over the course of the film, and even her own kids, who spend much more time with her than they do their father, are sometimes hard on her.  It's nice to see someone directly tell her that she's really done something right.

I really liked it.  The filming of the movie was spread out over twelve years, which gives it, for lack of a better word, a more genuine feel than the film might have if the same story was told with different actors playing the children over the years and the adults being made to look as if they were aging.  The pop culture, current events, and technology feel more authentic than they often do in movies set in the past, as well; some movies set in the past make such references in sort of a winky-winky way (again, for lack of a better term), like, "Oh, hey, remember when everyone was really into Harry Potter?  Remember when Facebook became a thing?  Remember when Obama was running for President?" Such references don't feel that way here; they seem like genuine reminders of what the world was like in 2002...and 2008...and so on.  I also like that we see some of the "big" moments in Mason's life (his graduation party, for example) but not all; we also see a fair number of days that are not necessarily ordinary, but that wouldn't necessarily appear in any photo album.  Because, after all, that's how most days are.