BLUE VALENTINE
3 out of 5 stars

WOW, there are no words to describe this! this was one intense movie about a broken relationship that’s beyond salvation, and we get a chance to see how it began/how it evolved...

this movie begins with a couple, living in rural pennsylvania, with their little girl, and it looks like the little girl is looking for her lost dog, megan. dean (ryan gosling), her father, consoles her, and they go wake up “mommy” AKA cindy. (a very slim michelle williams) turns out, mommy is a nurse at the local doctor’s office, and daddy is a house painter. from then, there’s flashbacks to their past when dean gets his first job as a mover, when dean and cindy first meet, when cindy finds out she’s pregnant, when cindy marries dean, etc. as you begin to notice from the very get-go, cindy and dean have fallen out of love, and both are equally unhappy with the way their lives have turned out... there’s no spark, no sex, the constant arguing, the bickering, and eventually it escalates into a really BAD situation at cindy’s workplace. if you like fluffy rom coms, you’ll hate this because there is no “happily ever after”... :(

stylistically, i thought it would have been better if the director just stuck with a style and stayed with it... i mean, was this suppose to be more of a "mockumentary" with lots of ad-libbing and filming the true/raw emotions of his co-stars? or was this suppose to be fictionalized, thus a movie-movie? it’s a mix of both, and i found that to be a bit off for me... both actors are truly wonderful in this, and their “chemistry” is really good/convincing. both are intense and in each other’s faces as well as tender and loving when their relationship first starts. a bit slow-paced but an overall good story about how a relationship deteriorates over time. however, if you think about it and end up watching this, you’ll realize that dean and cindy were together for the wrong reasons. did they realize that at the time? no, so i guess that’s why people say that you shouldn’t rush into something when you’re not 100% certain... ;)