Cedar Rapids

I saw this film at an art house theater so it will not have a wide release, but instead will come to an HBO or Showtime near you very soon. John C. Reilly  continues to impress me with his range. He plays a loveable flawed goofball, but with a layered complexity that gives the audience a glimpse of the pain behind his crude facade.
I first noticed his ability as an actor in "Chicago," and since then, no matter what the role, he has done a great job of character interpretation.
The lead actor here is a face I've seen somewhere before (the kind of face we like, but really don't take much notice of) but can't place. His unassuming name, Ed Helms, does not ring with movie lead heft, yet his performance as a naive rube going to the city for a convention for the first time, is entirely believable and engaging, and not at all a caricature, as it could have been in less capable hands.
Anne Heche is well cast as the small town insurance agent in real life/brittle party girl of "what happens in Cedar Rapids, stays in Cedar Rapids" lore. Confronted with the unaffected innocence of Helms' character, her hard shell begins to crack.
But the most interesting thing about this movie is its setting at a mid-level insurance convention which recognition most participants see as the pinnacle of their success. Everything about the settings-- (the faintly seedy yet still respectable mid-level hotel with its out-of-date furniture and bland expanses of carpet), the costumes (the lower middle class take on "business attire"), the color palate (beige, taupe, touches of orange, brown and more brown)--adds to the sense of futility the film seems to have about these people's lives.
This is a comedy, but a comedy that lets the audience see the tragedy at its core.
The plot is completely pedestrian and we see its resolution coming right away, and, as a comedy is wont to deliver, there is a happy ending.  All of these unhappy people come together and make something out of their friendship, something that even improves their industry, even if on a very small, very personal, level. And isn't that the meaning we all search for in our lives? Something on which to hang a little hope?

Blue Valentine

When my son saw that I had watched this on PPV, he groaned, "Oh Mom, you've got to stop watching movies like this!" Yes, it is a movie about the dissolution of a marriage (a particular hot button of mine), but more than that, it is a view of a particular blue collar dead end life that somehow contributes to the end of the relationship as much as do its inherent problems--one-sided love, thwarted ambition, anger issues, unresolved jealousy.
Michelle Williams plays a woman who is born to be used by men, to be attracted to those with that proclivity. To her earnest, uncomprehending husband she feels little love and much resentment. Circumstances have conspired to keep her from what she thinks she wants, but she has been a willing co-conspirator in the downward spiral of her existence. She does not, however, have the insight to realize this.
When her work life and her home life and perhaps her dream life all come tumbling down at once, she is ill-equipped to understand why, and so opts to end her marriage as some kind of proactive response to the chaos.
Everyone here has no anchor, no stability, even of the mental or spritual variety. These are lives lived wholly without examination. And let me say that perhaps there is no ability to examine or critically evaluate. Ryan Gosling plays the husband with just the right degree of hapless ignorance and nervous striving. We know, as we watch the trickling down of their lives, that everything will go downhill from here.
We can see the future--her dates with men who will use her, her gradual fade into hardness and bitterness; his aimless drift from job to job, fighting when he can't deal with his fate; the child's (the child!) unmoored life mourning her once-upon-a-time little family, prey to the same yearning for love that seized her mother. It is a sad, but terribly truthful, tale.
The loss and eventual death of the dog in the first scene is a metaphor for this marriage. Bad things happen to unattended beings.