Smash Cuts: The Descendants

It has been a while, friends. I have been watching a ton of films in preparation for awards season, and the hectic life of grad school has once again caught up with me. When you spend the majority of your day writing for pleasure, sometimes you need a break. But breaks are for pleasure too, right? So while I continue to go through films that I won't have the time to give proper reviews of, I figured I would test out some capsule reviews and thoughts about what I am watching. Starting off with the latest from Alexander Payne:

The Descendants (Payne, 2011)

Hawaii isn't just some paradise where we go to forget all of our troubles. It's a place with actual (beautiful) people with real world problems. Sometimes when we are looking down the gun we don't stop to consider that the gun might actually just be looking back at us. We can't run away from our problems, despite how goofy George Clooney may make that particular action seem. We have to actually run to the problems, face them head on. Sometimes it's hard to know whether we should care about our comatose wife who needs the plug pulled, our bratty kids, or that multi-million dollar land deal. See, we're not so different after all.

Manufacturing The Movie Star: Musings On Ryan Gosling

I like to imagine that somewhere in the annals of Hollywood exists a factory. In this factory the overlords/taskmasters/biological engineering geniuses have boxes stacked upon boxes of body parts waiting to be assembled and brought to life in some kind of insane ritual that straddles the line between heretical and miraculous. These Victor Frankensteins toil away all hours of the day mixing and matching parts until the day when the big studios of the world place an order for a superstar. An order was placed some years ago, and the latest creature to be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world was Ryan Gosling, star of Drive and The Ides of March. A man whose star has seemingly risen to insane amounts in the last few months that it has fallen into place, as Bob Dylan may say, so perfectly, it all seems so well timed. But, as a fan of Ryan Gosling's career thus far, I find myself slightly conflicted.