Colibel Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

andrewfleming-57891 What a diasappointing film. Beginners has a lot going for it; its a comedy, highly rated and features an oscar winning performance. However, the film itself is notfunny at all. The only jokes are repeated many times - the childish voices and giving the dog subtitles. These jokes didnt make me smile even once and by the end they were just very annoying. The actors are also very disappointing and none of their characters are very memorable, inuding oscar winning Christopher Plummer. He is undeserving of the award and is defnitealy the weakest performance from any supporting winner I have seen. Perhaps Michael Sheen for Midnight in Paris or Kenneth Brannagh for My Week with Marilyn would be more deserving winners. The direction is very difficult to understand. There are regular montage shots during the film that seem to mostly feature US presidents. The introduction to Christopher Plummer is also a collection of about twenty shots of him in different outfits talking to the camera. Neither of these techniques are neccessary and instead they just confuse the viewer.All in all, a poor film. Not worth seeing for any reason.

Movie_Muse_Reviews Love, sadness, identity, grief, hope, generational divides, parent- child relationships – there are enough themes in Mike Mills' "Beginners" for a dozen films, yet they all sit in this one emotional, stirring story. Calling it messy would be accurate, but it's messy in the way life is messy.Although the sound bite summary/one-sentence pitch of this film is "a man learns that his 70-some-year-old father is gay and terminally ill," that's a somewhat gross over-simplification. The story isn't that linear, and the plot doesn't follow the son's challenges dealing with and accepting this information. Instead, it's about how a father's renaissance in the last years of his life impact a son who, at nearly 40, has yet to get a grip on his own life.Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver and Christopher Plummer as Hal, his father, who came out to Oliver after Oliver's mother passed away and started dating a younger man. Oliver, as narrator, reveals his father died four years later and the film interweaves a present day timeline following Oliver after Hal's death; memories from the four years before Hal died; and a few flashbacks to Oliver's relationship with his mother during childhood.In the present, Oliver meets a young woman named Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a party and throughout their courtship, lucid memories from timelines in the past slip in and out of Oliver's consciousness. His ability to trust and to love deeply are colored by how out of love his parents were yet also by how truly in love Hal was with his boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic).It is difficult to pull apart the tangled web of love and grief and all those other factors that create an emotional stranglehold on Oliver, which is simultaneously what's so beautiful about Mills' script and most difficult. The myriad moments that comprise "Beginners" so effortlessly connect with the viewer, but sequentially, as the memories cut in and out, it can be difficult to draw the thematic linkages between one timeline and another as it fits into the organizational structure of the film.What the mind may struggle to process the heart easily latches on to in "Beginners." The acting and the on-screen relationship between characters have a powerfully genuine feel to them. Although Plummer, McGregor and Laurent all bring something to the table, Mills intuits all the right camera angles and distances and pacing that firmly places the action or dialogue into a most convincing reality. In his script, he rarely resorts to outward conflict or drama; every tension felt comes from subtext or a sense of introspection. The resulting product is a film that's as genuine as they come.Mills also uses some unexpected narrative devices in the film, primarily in the form of Oliver's omniscient voiceovers set to various images. We enter deeper into his consciousness through the visual art that he creates in his day job. He talks a lot about history and what happiness and sadness looked like at different points over the last century. This drapes an additional layer of background around a story that feels timeless and not especially obligated to history. Yet there's something quite meaningful in the way Mills ties this story to context, letting us know in an overt but creative way that context does matter in understanding Oliver's and Hal's stories.At the same time, this is yet another component making synthesis of "Beginners" a tedious process. Mills' feature debut, "Thumbsucker," also struggled a bit with thematic identity and a cohesive through- line, so perhaps it's more of a conscious choice in his own presentation style, one that wishes to break us of the need for stories that hold our hand from point to point until we reach the waters of catharsis. In fact, at one point Oliver's mother (Mary Page Keller) tells young Oliver to go in his room and scream as a way of achieving "catharsis." Oliver comes out immediately saying he doesn't have to. While intended to show how all people process anger and grief differently, the same can be said of a film. Mills provides different ways for different people to process, and while it's messy and never hits the emotional swelling point of great films, it's sure to connect.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

ElMaruecan82 There is one truth that Mike Mills' "Beginners" quietly and patiently explores, which is that many people know exactly who they are, what they want and even what they need to be happy, and yet, for some reason, never try to fulfill these very needs, lacking courage, honesty or maybe is the act of recognition significant enough not to move forward? Either ways, they are their own collateral damages.Or maybe I'm looking at the half-empty glass, and the message of "Beginners" is that it's never too late to start a new life and make your dreams come true. But tone-wise, I'm not sure the film is an invitation for optimism, there are a few shades of happiness in a few episodes of the father's life but the main feeling is one of a big waste of time for pointless misunderstandings. Indeed, there are many moments in "Beginners" when you don't exactly know why things have escalated so negatively, except if you accept that some happy events can reveal sadder truths and vice versa.But I'm talking too abstractly and make the film sound like some philosophical essay. "Beginners" is actually based on Mike Mills' life, for what it's worth, but we're all free to tell our stories and this one has a catching set-up. Mills' parents were born in the 20's, they belonged to generation where family and love where conditioned by very strict and specific archetypes. After his mother's death in the 90's, his father revealed that he was gay ever since he was married, and the couple lived and built a family on that secret. The father lived a few years in an openly gay life before succumbing to cancer. Now, the question is why did he wait such a long time to come out of the closet?It is a legitimate question because in the 80's and 90's, people embraced homosexuality and let's face it, a man who's interested in men can never be a proper lover to his wife, so why preventing her from a satisfying sexual life? The movie doesn't give direct answers but we see the effects this life made of secrets and lies had on the son: Oliver (Ewan McGregor), a perpetually malcontent artist, incapable to live relationships to their terms. He doesn't drink or do drugs, he has a steady job and a nice apartment, but somewhat he seems incapable to get over a constant state of dissatisfaction. And the film is as much about his sadness (the word sad is quite recurring) than about his father's happiness."Beginners" is made of three intersected stories, one about Oliver's childhood where he spent most of the time with his mother, a free-spirited unconventional woman with some weird habits like pretending to shoot Oliver so he acts dead, Hal's cancer-stricken twilight of life, and his death's aftermath with Oliver trying to pull himself together and find a girl in his life. The only link to his father is his memories and a cute Jack Russell terrier named Arthur, a dog who talks in subtitles and seems to know the hidden truths about Oliver; a little gimmick not overused enough to undermine the film's realism.The story swings back and forth between these time-lines and the only real bits of happiness belong to Hal, this is a man who totally found himself at 75, and lived the last four years of his life to the fullest. Maybe it's because he knew more than anyone the burden of secrecy that he could finally implode all his repressed feelings and lived a life of joy. But again, why wait until you become a frail old man? Maybe it took the marriage to know exactly what went wrong and try to fix it, and maybe it's because Oliver doesn't know what's wrong with him that the situations seems more hopeless. The film is like a time travel in different societies, each one with its own approach to happiness, marriage and priorities. Oliver's parents belonged to a time where war was a priority, where having a house and a job wasn't to be taken for granted, where people fought for their rights. Oliver and Anna, his French love interest, played by Mélanie Laurent, had everything served on a silver platter, they're open-minded, but they never experienced privations and repressions, and perhaps, this is what goes wrong with our whole generation, if we knew what we were missing, we would know what we need.Oliver doesn't know how to be happy, but this isn't a caprice of some sort, it's a true disability to share and communicate. And I guess the point that "Beginners" tries to make is that we can't experience the exhilaration of something without having lived in its core its absence. When Oliver lives some joyful instants with his father, it's maybe to make up for the lack of warmth that structured his childhood, having a father that is finally true to himself, paved the way to a new life, even for him. Mike Mills would also reveal that his father's coming out opened a whole new perspective in his life and created an even richer relationship with his father.And without Hal, it's up to Oliver to find out what kind of life he wants to build, and the existential block he goes through is like suspending dots… we can provide answers but we know the right mindset to have. "Beginners" is an interesting existential movie that proves that sometimes, happiness is about filling gaps, but one must have to experience these gaps to identify them, that's the catch. The film's minimalist format and the great performances especially from Christopher Plummer makes it easier to follow, but sometimes, the film is victim of its tricky subject.Indeed, if the feeling of wasted time and boredom reflects the viewer's opinion, it might be because the film worked way too well for its own good.

cheergal The movie is not deep but touched the edges of stern issues in lives. It's not really what I thought would be before watched it. But it gave me some fresh air. The story is surrounding a supposing nice guy who has his own piques from his childhood and his parents' dysfunctional marriage. The ambiguities and clandestineness made him timid to his own relationship. His father was a closet gay who I feel his selfishness almost cost his son's well-deserved love relationship. I can see the director steered that part away and turn it into a positive enforcement.We often sympathized those married closet homosexual people. I think we blame the society doesn't accept them with open arms so they had to marry to hide their sexuality. Nevertheless, we rarely are at their spouses' points of views. You also could say they made their own bed so sleep on it. It might as well be true. But those unaware spouses and their children would become innocent victims under it. So by saying love conquers all which would be improbably applied in those cases.This is not a movie looking into deep issues by just brushing around lightly. It's fine when you are a bystander. However, I would like to see more insights if there would be some.