I am Kyle's self-indulgence

With the kids taking up a lot more time in the evening, Erika and I got out of the habit of watching movies in the last couple of years. Since Daniel quit taking a three-hour nap every day, though, he's been going to bed much more easily, and Eva somehow became the world's greatest sleeper, so we've had much more time in the evenings. Lately we've taken advantage of this change to catch up on some recent DVD releases.

First up is (500) Days of Summer, an indie-romance-comedy about two hip young people who begin an awkward and uncertain relationship. I felt like the movie tries to be very clever with its nonlinear structure, occasional split-screen tricks, and quirky characters. Beneath the surface, though, the story is fairly ordinary: couple meets, begins dating, has conflicts, and breaks up. The nonlinear style doesn't really do anything interesting with this premise, aside from a brief aside about looking back at a relationship and trying to find the moment things turned sour. Ultimately, though, there's just not enough here to distinguish the film from others of its type.

Interestingly, I have nearly identical complaints about District 9. I had heard a lot about this movie and had high expectations going in. I knew it was made by a South African director and is a story about aliens landing on Earth that is an allegory for Apartheid. I expected the film to explore numerous sociopolitical implications of a segregated alien race living on Earth, which the film delivers somewhat in the first 20-30 minutes in a realistic documentary style. After that, though, the film transforms into a very typical action movie: a human and an alien must break into a government facility to retrieve a vial of fluid that will enable the alien to return in the mothership to his home planet. From there it's just a long shoot-em-up sequence until the resolution. It's disappointing to see a movie with such a uniquely promising premise resort to tired old cliches (it even has the "You go ahead--I'll stay here and hold them off"--"No, I'm not going to leave you!" scene that has appeared in every bad action movie ever).

Finally (and just in time for Valentine's Day), Erika and I watched Away We Go. I didn't know anything about this movie except that it's directed by Sam Mendes and stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. I didn't even know it was written by the husband-wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida until the closing credits rolled, although I definitely got the sense that it must have been written by a new parent: the movie is filled with anxieties over pregnancy and child-rearing that ring so very true that they must have come from someone who has experienced them recently. Krasinski and Rudolph play a young couple expecting their first baby who are in search of a place they can move to and raise their daughter. They visit friends and relatives all over America and Canada, scouting not just locations, but different parenting styles. This setup becomes the stage for a string of characters who represent a gamut of familiar parent types. These visits are sometimes comic and sometimes tragic; and between them, the expecting couple struggle with how they're going to be good parents in a world in which good parenting seems so rare. There's a fine line between sincere sentiment and manipulative sentimentality, and this script manages to walk right up to that line without crossing over. It's a refreshing film that can be genuinely funny and heartfelt without being either too sappy or too cynical.