My wife and I went to see this movie at the third avenue theater in the east village. It was showing every half-hour and every show was sold out. The line to get in to the 6:00 was all the way down the block. There’s a reason for this: what the hell else is there to see? The A-Team? Cats and Dogs? Airbender? Twilight Eclipse?

The Kids are All Right is a solid little indie-type film. I enjoyed watching it. But it has no transcendent moments, and in retrospect is a bit dull. I doubt I would ever watch it again.

Mark Ruffalo carries the entire film. The guy is so warm on screen! Plus, his character is really cool and likable. I felt that Julianne Moore and Annette Bening were not believable as a lesbian couple, and I found both to be rather irritating – Julianne Moore less-so because she has many scenes with Ruffalo who props her up. The actors playing the kids are solid, and actually look and act like real kids (not a very common occurrence in films these days!)

My wife and I agreed that the problem with the film is the same problem that plagues so many other serious indie dramas over the past ten years or so. It has become very trendy to focus on capturing the awkward reality of social interaction, in other words capturing how inarticulate and boring people are in real life. Critics LOVE this shit – they eat it up. But I would argue that it doesn’t make for very good or interesting movies. Great movies have great dialog, period.

Consider the “Joni Michell dinner scene” in The Kids are All Right. It seems good at the time, but really the content of the scene is quiet boring and one would never really want to watch it again. Compare it to the memorable dinner scenes in Tumbleweeds, for example, and you will start to see how stunted this very literal approach to film making really is.

The Kids are All Right is probably one of the better things I’ve seen this year, and I would certainly recommend it, but in the end it really didn’t leave me with much.