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Review: ‘Kids Are All Right’: A family film for modern times

Healthy Living — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:05:04 +0000

Definitions of family, love and friendship all get put to the test with wit and warmth in “The Kids Are All Right,” one of the year’s most honest and endearing films.

Blessed with a supremely talented and natural cast, director Lisa Cholodenko (“High Art”), writing along with Stuart Blumberg (“The Girl Next Door”), has fashioned a portrait of the modern family that manages to touch many buttons without hammering too hard on any one. You get a sense of the breadth of these people.

First there are the moms — longtime lesbian partners Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore). Nic is the responsible one, a physician who can turn to a few extra glasses of wine for strength. Jules is a dreamer, just now starting her latest career as a landscape designer. It helps the camera mightily that both women are beautiful.

And then there are their kids, the products of artificial insemination, both from the same anonymous donor.

Joni (Mia Wasikowska, far more impressive here than as Alice in “Alice in Wonderland”) has just graduated from high school and leaves for college at the summer’s end. Brooding jock Laser (Josh Hutcherson) seems a bit lost as the only male in the family, and he seems to want something more.

That something more, it turns out, is a father. Now that Joni’s 18, she can legally try to contact the sperm donor who contributed half their genetic makeup.

Prodded by Laser, she does just that, and the kids eventually meet up with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a freewheeling, motorcycle-riding, organic health food restaurant-owning guy who had no idea somebody actually used his essential juices for procreation.

Then comes the inevitably awkward lunch where the kids bring their newly discovered dad home to meet the moms. Nic’s feathers are ruffled and she’s wary of this sudden interloper, while Jules seems more open to extending the family. When Paul hires Jules to landscape his backyard, you know complications are looming.

While the moms’ lesbian relationship isn’t pushed full forward — this is a family, first and foremost — it is used to wonderfully funny and humanizing effect. Not even the moms can explain their love of hardcore gay male porn, and they do have a certain cluelessness when it comes to dealing with Laser, which they at least sense.

Cholodenko combines the many modern elements in play here — the sexuality; the breezy California life style; Paul’s organic holiness and Peter Pan tendencies — with a deft mix of insight and cheekiness. And yet when it comes to dramatic moments — when the fragile family extension falters — “Kids” is as taut, touching and real as you could want.

It helps that Bening and Moore work so easily off one another — they are your basic long-loving, long-bickering married couple, each balancing the other. Moore, in particular, lets loose in this role, throwing body and soul into a character who’s both lost and found.

It’s probably a bit early to muse on Oscar nominations, but “The Kids Are All Right” is certainly a worthy contender, especially in the Best Actress race. The film slips a bit toward the end — of course, so do its characters — but its faith in the power of family and love endures. In the truest sense, this is the best family film of the year.

Via: detnews.com

‘The Kids Are Alright’: The Adults Are Still Working Things Out

Healthy Living — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:04:43 +0000

‘The Kids Are Alright’ stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a married lesbian couple raising two teenagers. Their identity as a family unit is challenged when the kids contact and befriend their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), and then further challenged when Moore’s character starts humping him. This film has taken some criticism from both sides of the spectrum, with some charging that it is not a positive portrayal of lesbians, and others asserting that it glorifies the lifestyle. Both sides are wrong.

What makes this film good is that it provides the audience with a funny and sometimes moving portrait of what I think most people might consider an alternative lifestyle without pushing an agenda. It’s sad that many moviegoers want to simply have their own belief systems affirmed, rather than be presented with a complex portrayal that may challenge some of their beliefs and perhaps affirm others. Any movie that provides insight into how others live without forcing an agenda is worth seeing, so I recommend this film which is now playing at E Street Cinema.

One bit of insight I gleaned from this movie is the pressure on same-sex couples who are raising children. When a heterosexual couple raises a kid who turns out to be a complete mess, some blame the parents and some don’t. But if a same-sex couple has a kid who becomes a delinquent, it is an indictment on an entire lifestyle, and that’s not really fair. This movie demonstrates how both moms, Bening in particular, tend to overcompensate and smother, but essentially they are just both being motherly.

The film also bravely addresses the role of the sperm donor and takes on two important social issues. While a sperm donor can hardly be considered a parent, blood is blood, and kids are going to be curious about their blood ties and should be allowed to explore them. The second is what role a male should fill in this type of relationship. Moore’s affair with the sperm donor serves as a metaphor for the need of some kind of male presence within this family unit.

The issue of a male presence in the lives of children is hardly unique to lesbian couples, and there are plenty of examples where it does not seem to have much of an impact on a child. But there are some examples to the contrary, the best are from the world of sports. We see these incredibly strong, dynamic men like Terrell Owens and LeBron James, who on the surface epitomize classic manliness. Yet, their behavior, their need to be the center of attention and the belief that they can do no wrong, makes these men seem oddly effeminate. It’s not a pejorative, moms traditionally affirm how special and unique their child is. Dad is there to put a foot in your ass when you fail to meet an obligation, and these men never had that.

Overall, good movie and it does address these issues and others very well, and I think affirms the authenticity and legitimacy of a family with two moms.

Via: examiner.com

Want A Celebrity Look Alike Baby?

Healthy Living — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:24:59 +0000

CNN — First came naming babies after movie stars. Then there were copycats of celebrity outfits, Academy Award dresses and even nose jobs. Now, the celebrity chase is getting genetic.

A Los Angeles, California, sperm bank links to photos of celebrities who resemble existing donors in a Web feature called Donor Look-a-Likes. This attempts to give clients an idea of what the anonymous sperm donors look like.

Donor Look-a-Likes helps answer the would-be clients’ most frequently asked question about their donors, which is who do they look like, said California Cryobank’s communications manager, Scott Brown.

The site offers a search function with donors who sperm bank staff believe resemble actors such as Aaron Eckhart, Jake Gyllenhaal, Errol Flynn and a “young” Russell Crowe (versus the current Russell Crowe, who is 45). Donor Look-a-Likes are not limited to thespians — the sperm bank’s vast Web search includes Tom Brokaw, Tiger Woods, Stephen Colbert, Lance Bass and Adam Carolla.

California Cryobank’s employees spent months sifting through the existing donor list, subjectively matching them with celebrities. A sperm donor may have a chin, eyes or some physical similarity to stars and was given two to three celebrities he resembled. The sperm bank does not charge more for specimens from a celebrity look-alike, Brown said.

The cryobank accepts less than 1 percent of the donor applicants, who go through extensive screenings that include genetic testing, blood tests, a three-generation family medical history and a sperm count.

According to the Web site: “No celebrity is meant as an exact match for any donor, nor should you assume that your future children will look like any celebrity listed.” Forty percent of the sperm bank’s clients are heterosexual couples with infertility issues and 60 percent are single women or gay couples.

Selecting a sperm donor usually takes about four to six weeks for prospective parents. Since Donor Look-a-Likes launched two weeks ago, it’s unclear whether the feature has influenced decisions, Brown said.

The site does not contain photos, but instead links to Google images of celebrities. Ben Affleck has been the most searched celebrity since its launch.

Bioethicists are divided over the program. Sperm banks routinely allow clients to search based on ethnic background, hair color, eye color and skin tone. They offer extensive details such as donors’ height, weight and educational background.

Sperm banks do not need to identify celebrity resemblance to a male donor because it could create “unreasonable expectations” of the child, Rothstein said. “What would happen if the child [conceived from donated sperm] doesn’t look like a celebrity or that look-alike?” he asked. “Would the child be treated like a failure?”

An attractive man’s sperm does not guarantee that the offspring will look anything like him.

Brown said the database isn’t to give parents a way to give birth to mini-celebrity look-alikes.

Bonnie Steinbock, professor of philosophy who specializes in bioethics at the University at Albany in New York, said it magnifies the superficiality in society. “There’s something strange about a culture that has stratified rigid types of beauty where everyone looks alike. Now they’re trying to create children through who the [actor] of the moment is.”

Ronald Green, a professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, found Donor Look-a-Likes “silly, but not ethically serious.”

Green said choosing sperm based on celebrity look-alikes may seem superficial, but so are other aspects of social interactions.

Via: cnn.com

Sperm and the Single Girl

Healthy Living — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:23:21 +0000

Michelle Mobilia, a clinical researcher in Boston, Massachusetts, was contemplating grad school when she saw an episode of Lipstick Jungle that changed her life. “A woman was freezing her eggs, and it hit me: I’m 37, and I want to have children.” Within three months, Mobilia had purchased eight vials of sperm from a bank, an experience she likens to “match.com, because you’re looking for qualities in someone you’d want to date. I used Google for everything.”

Even more surprising is how Mobilia ultimately chose her donor. He met her criteria regarding education and medical history, and he was an open-identity donor, which meant he was willing to be contacted by his sperm-bank offspring when they turned 18 — a fast-growing phenomenon that is putting a new, and human, face on donor insemination (DI). But the clincher for Mobilia was an hour-long audio interview she downloaded from the bank’s Website. “His voice sounded warm and kind,” Mobilia recalls. “I listened to stories about his family, friends, wife, and life experiences. He said he became a donor not for the financial incentive, but to give an amazing gift to an individual or a couple, which was great news after hearing so many guys say flat-out they were doing it for the money. A donor can make up to $100 per sample. It was really moving. During the last minute, I had tears rolling down my face, and I knew this was right for me.”

All these choices can be paralyzing for a strong-minded, selective woman with money to spend and few compromises to make. (Some coveted sperm even have wait lists.) But experts suggest tuning out the bells and whistles. “Instead of trying to have the perfect designer baby, look for a donor who, if you met him and introduced him to your family, they’d feel comfortable with,” says Dr. Charles Sims, medical director of California Cryobank. Mattes, of Single Mothers by Choice, recommends using this filter: “Is he someone I would have happily dated?” And on a practical note, “Has this person had successful pregnancies?” (Yup, that’s in the profiles, too.)

Once a woman finds her dream sperm, there’s still the lengthy insemination process (which can run about $2,500) to consider. And with all those logistics and bills to keep track of, it’s easy to forget that DI is a deeply emotional undertaking. “It’s a big leap of faith to take biological material from someone you don’t know and put it in your body to make a baby,” says Alice Ruby, executive director of the Sperm Bank of California, which was founded in 1982 and pioneered the concept of open-identity donations with its Identity-Release program, started in 1983.

Via: marieclaire.com