The Kids Are So-So

Harry and I saw "The Kids are All Right" because we were both pretty sure it was impossible to make a bad movie with EITHER Annette Bening or Juliane Moore in it; together (we thought) had to mean golden, right?

Wrong. It's actually pretty awful. Go figure. What were they thinking?

After a first half that is fun and charming; a nicely light handed comic romp about (gay) marriage, california-speak, teenagers and midlife crises, the plot takes an inexplicable and unmotivated left into soap-opera-style melodrama. Bening, who is sort of Felix Unger-ish odd up to that point, turns into an emotional Creature from the Black Lagoon and the whole second half is devoted to Geraldo Rivera-style emotional purging which, even performed as it is with finesse by Julianne Moore, (who cries beautifully) had me doing so much eye rolling my forehead was sore.

Of course nobody's asking us, but Harry and I can fix it. All it would take is re-editing. We thought it should have been a comedy throughout. The melodrama (Juliane has an affair with the sperm donor of their children and gets caught when Annette finds red hair on the SD's pillow) should be confined to fantasies (hers, his or both) - that way we get to keep the sexy scenes - and in the end the children (and everybody else) realize that parenting is care-giving and history, not biology. THE END.