I’ve been watching in horror and disgust and (especially) disappointment as lesbians all over the web have excoriated this exceptional film because it has a “lesbian-sleeps-with-a-man” storyline.

The film does not have that storyline.

It has that plot point, but it does not tell that story. Its stories are much bigger than that.

The Kids Are All Right is about family, love, honesty, parents, children, failure, dreams, freedom, responsibility, now, then. It’s about growing old, growing up, reaching out, turning in, having courage, having issues, taking a risk, taking stock, making babies, making speeches, moving on, moving closer, exploring, retreating, eating, drinking, having sex, having a fit, freaking out, calming down, going too far, going home, kissing well, kissing awkwardly, wearing sweater vests, wearing tennis shoes, wearing hats, telling the truth, telling a fib, hoping for the best, fearing for the worst, saying goodbye, saying you’re sorry, confronting your fears, avoiding your neuroses, singing Joni Mitchell songs, laughing at Joni Mitchell songs, riding motorcycles, driving trucks, driving each other crazy, forgetting your principles, remembering what you love, watching porn, watching your children become adults, tending the earth, neglecting your own, rising above, going down, going to Home Depot, going off the rails. It’s about lesbians, Californians, hippies, skater dudes, composters, perfectionists, drinkers, landscapers, Mexicans, Americans, moms, dads, kids, friends, enemies, frenemies, lovers, posers, flirters, partners. It showcases flaws, talents, fun, pain, hopes, disappointments, commitment, roaming, steadiness, flakiness, distrust, acceptance, promises, lies, sincerity, hypocrisy. It knows how people love, what people think, why people fuck up, what makes adolescence amazing, what makes adults lovable, who knows best, who’s on first, what is sexy, who holds the cards, how to make you look, what will make you cry, why you should bow before Annette Bening, why you should worship Julianne Moore, how to spell “all right,” who you were as a kid, who you’ve become, what you missed, what you feel, what you need, why you try, why you can’t, how you can, who you wish you could be. It matters because life is hard, love is precious, kids are tricky, parents are important, women are strong, men are beautiful, people are strange, families are fragile, time is fleeting, and love is everything. It is funny, sad, smart, universal, careful, carefree, pure, inspired, real.

It’s about life. It’s about women. It’s decidedly not even a little bit about penises.

If you have seen the film, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, you cannot possibly know what I mean. So stop jerking your knees and belittling a bigger-than-that movie and GO SEE IT. Keep your mind and your heart open. Listen to what the characters say, watch what they do, and understand who they are.

Don’t cheat yourself. Lisa Cholodenko has a brilliant vision and a giant heart. It saddens me to think that someone might miss out on that by favoring petty politics over transcendent truth.

I hate, hate, hate storylines in which lesbians sleep with men. And I love, love, love this movie. Oxymoron? Or revelation?

All I am saying is give TKAAR a chance.

Peace!

In times of such upheaval, I find myself turning to movies for comfort and commiseration (this is also true in times of joy and times of boredom and … just all the time). But guess what? They don’t really make movies about moving, or about the other mundane things that have been consuming my energy. I had to think long and hard to come up with this handful of pictures of the prosaic.

1. Packing/organizing: Housekeeping captures the futility of tidying up when you yourself are a bit of a mess. I mean that in a good way; as Sylvie the itinerant, Christine Lahti is delightfully chaotic. But she’s certainly no Martha Stewart: when her stodgy neighbors disapprove of the state of her heaven-for-hoarders house, the best Sylvie can do is stack up the crush of newspapers and scrub out the clatter of tin cans. She ends up torching the whole damn thing, which sounded like a fine idea to me the night before the movers arrived.

By the way, the "trestling" scene in Sunshine Cleaning was totally stolen from Housekeeping.

2. Movers and moving yourself: When I was younger and cheap(er), I insisted on moving my own stuff, like Alice in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Get outta my way!

But now I’m a big fan of the big men with trucks, even when they scratch the edges of my pristine LCD TV (dammit). Next time I’m going to let movers actually pack up my stuff, too — or maybe I’ll use elephants and trains, like Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. She had more (and finer) stuff, and it all survived the trip.

3. Dog trauma: I think my pup is fine now, but for the first few days in his new home, he growled and barked at everything that twitched. And who would make a movie about canine neuroses? There’s The Dog Problem, but the problem (loving a rascally mutt) turns out to be no problem at all.

And there’s Pink Flamingos, which I mention only for that scene in which Divine devours a doodie sandwich (because it came to mind the day after the move, when my dog took an anxious dump on the doormat).

Oh, wait — how could I forget about The Year of the Dog? Dogs and trauma to the max. Poor Pencil the pup.

4. Back pain: Nobody wants to hear about, let alone watch a movie about, the aches and pains of lifting boxes and hefting furniture and flaying your own finger with a pliers. And the pain of moving is like the pain of childbirth: a few years later, you’re certain it couldn’t have been that bad and you’re ready to try again. So all I can think of for this category is Fast Food Nation, which portrays a workplace back injury (and which we happened to catch on IFC shortly after moving). But that’s not really a film: it’s more of an extended bit of vegetarian propaganda (I can say that because I too am a vegetarian), and Richard Linklater should be ashamed of himself. (But look: Chrissy Seaver is all grown up!)

5. Second-guessing your moving plans: We didn’t seriously reconsider our move, but we did have a few outbursts like “How can anything be worth all this effort?!” And then, while happily doing laundry for the first time in our new building, we saw a few minutes of the best movie ever in which people spend the whole time planning to move and then, at the last minute, decide to stay put: Meet Me in St. Louis.

It’s cloying at times (like, every time that little kid speaks), but Judy Garland is gorgeous and in very fine voice. Just be prepared to have "The Trolley Song" in your head for a few days or weeks afterward.

6. Apartments and elevators: I’ll end on a high note: The Apartment, in which Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine fall in love amidst misunderstandings. I’ve always run hot and cold about Ms. MacLaine (I’m sure she’d like to forget those crystal/chakra/psycho years too), but her savvy-yet-goofy elevator operator is delicious.

Pitch-perfect comedy and a flawless script make The Apartment a must-see even if you’re not moving to an apartment on the Upper West Side (ah, if only I could claim a fantastic brownstone like the one in the movie). And the story follows an immensely satisfying arc: life takes a strange turn, then flies completely off the rails, and ultimately lands you exactly where you want to be. If only every apartment tale — and every life event in general — could turn out so sweet.

Postscript: IMDb tells me there really is a movie about moving, and it’s even called Moving. It doesn’t sound great, though. Some things just aren’t cinematic.

As The New York Times notes, the photo was risky:

[Alberto Pizzoli] gambled that a radical crop … showing hips and hands (and nothing else), a confident posture and subtle folds of fabric, black on black on red, could summon a whole personality. … Since he had his match in the subject, Meryl Streep, Mr. Pizzoli’s gamble paid off.

It also brings to mind a phrase from the pen of Maya Angelou:

It’s in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Streep did a Julie and Julia press conference while she was in Rome. Here she is talking about the pressures on young actresses — skip to 1:04 if you don’t speak Italian:

(Part 1 and part 2 are on YouTube — in part 1, she uses the word "encomia." Be still my vocabulary-loving heart!)

Rome certainly does love Meryl. She was lauded and laureled at every turn. She even got a literary award (for what, I’m not quite sure) at the Rome Center for American Studies. Here she is at the Film Fest’s breathtakingly grand venue (the Auditorium Parco della Musica):

But in all the swooning over Meryl (which I completely understand, of course), another honoree has been somewhat overlooked: Helen Mirren won Best Actress for the film The Last Station, in which she plays Leo Tolstoy’s wife.

I’ll look forward to that. I did finally see State of Play, and although I didn’t love the movie overall, I enjoyed Mirren as usual. And her glasses!

I just wish her role had been bigger. Way too much Russell Crowe; not enough Mirren and Rachel McAdams. Mirren plays the frosty, fiery editor in chief of a newspaper. Why can’t I work for someone like her?

Once when I was singing Mirren’s praises, a witty friend teased me about my “old lady fetish.” But what’s not to love about "old ladies" like Mirren and Streep? I’m glad Rome agrees with me.

But I promise you this: you’ve never seen anything like Jane Campion’s Bright Star. It is unique. Full stop.

The film is ostensibly about John Keats: his work, his poverty, and his love — not at all in that order. But what it’s really about is poetry, and I didn’t think film could truly capture that. Early on in the film, Keats says that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," and that’s the entire point of Bright Star. It is natural. Is that possible? It’s a movie about Romantic English folk, about Romantic English folk obsessed with poetry, and yet it’s fully natural, organic, and raw.

That’s largely because of Abbie Cornish, who (despite her fondness for the poseur Ryan Phillippe) seems to have sprung from ripe, ready earth. She is honest and pure; not innocent in the least, but instinctive and guileless. And she’ll make you want to be true to yourself, against all odds and all tuberculotic twists of fate. She finds and embraces the center that can and will hold. She yearns, in the best possible way.

(The New York Times calls Cornish "as good as Kate Winslet, which is about as good as it’s possible to be." Amen to that!)

And director Jane Campion is even more visceral than her star. She amplifies the burgeoning spaces in poetic lines, and she pauses on the fullness of the all-too-human. She sees a breeze floating through a casement and sends it up the skirt of an uncertain, hungry young woman. She waits — as long as she must, which is sometimes intolerably long — for a word and a look to land exactly where they are meant to settle and thrive. She shows us love, of words and people and life.

I’ve effused too much already, but I can’t help myself: this is the glory of poetry on film. Few films have conveyed the seductive pull of the written word — An Angel at My Table, The Hours, and Out of Africa come to mind — and even fewer make you want to dedicate your days to a steadfast pursuit of nature and rhyme and rhythm and breath. Who can claim to be like Keats, happy to lend himself to a poem at the expense of everything else — even his own heart?

I wish we all could. So in honor of National Poetry Day UK (I’m off by two days), I had to pen an ode to Bright Star. I intend to study, savor, and emulate it, because it knows how we should shine.

I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.

But I’d like to live in these two trailers! Ba-dum-bum.

The Young Victoria

Just the other day I was saying that I wish Emily Blunt could find some roles worthy of her talent. (I’m looking at you, Sunshine Cleaning.) And that’s why I’m already grateful for The Young Victoria.

She is stunning. And it will be so nice to hear her speak in her native tongue!

Bonus: Rachael Stirling (Nan from Tipping the Velvet) is in it, though probably not in drag. Pity. And a side note: Sarah Ferguson is the producer? Really? So meta.

Nine

No, not 9, nor District 9, but the new musical-turned-movie from Chicago director Rob Marshall.

I. Cannot. Wait! Goosebumps.