How "American Hustle" Got Me to Root for the Bad Guy and Love Jennifer Lawrence Even More

The first rule of American Hustle: We all do very bad things. Sometimes it's for a good cause (or one that we convince ourselves to believe is good), but does using suspect means to noble ends still not taint your soul, if not your conscience?

That was the big question facing the five main characters in American Hustle, though only four of them probably would be self-aware enough to admit it. That Rosalyn Rosenfeld, played with housewife-of-New Jersey gusto by Jennifer Lawrence, was really only out for herself. I mean, would any good mother outside of a daytime soap opera actually use her own kid to keep a man? It's a testament to Lawrence's acting skill and appeal (though she still looks way too young to have a toddler son with a man she's been with "for years") that Rosalyn is the kind of girl with whom I'd love to spend a New Year's Eve knocking back tequila shots.

Even Sydney Prosser aka "Lady Edith Greensly" (Amy Adams), Rosalyn's rival for the affections of Rosalyn's husband Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), couldn't help but show a flicker of intrigue through her haze of disgust for Rosalyn. That was one of my take-aways from the Amy Adams-Jennifer Lawrence showdown (featuring a totally unexpected denouement). The other was that Jefferson Airplane's 1967 classic "White Rabbit" sure sounds great being sung in Arabic.

Amy Adams' career trajectory continues to confound me: Why are so many hip and happening directors still tripping over themselves to cast her? She's certainly a capable actress, and my God, what a killer body! But there's something generically appealing about her. She's alluring enough in the moment that I can see why she'd catch the eye of both Irving and Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper, who costarred with Lawrence in Russell's last film, 2013's Silver Lining Playbook, but shares no screen time with her here), but unlike women according to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, she doesn't leave much of a trace.

That's the difference between her and Lawrence. I could imagine a number of actresses successfully inhabiting Sydney (and nailing Edith's British accent better than Adams does, though the cartoonish Britishness might be the character's, not Adams'), while Lawrence completely owned Rosalyn. Adams was merely leasing Sydney.

I'm not sure if it was due to the script or Adams' performance (which mixed elements of her spunky girlfriend in The Fighter and the title character's stern wife in The Master, the two roles that brought the actress the second half of her four Best Supporting Actress nominations to date), but I wasn't sure whether we were supposed to love her, lust after her, admire her or despise her. In the end, I felt none of the above but rather, a twinge of indifference. Frankly, had her fate not been linked to that of Irving's, I wouldn't have cared what happened to her, and that was the great beauty of Christian Bale's performance.

When a movie begins with a pudgy man applying his toupee in a hotel suite overlooking Central Park to the strains of America's "A Horse With No Name," a No. 1 hit six years before the movie's 1978 setting, it's pretty apparent that you're not supposed to like him. (He looks like a '70s antecedent to Tom Cruise's smarmy film executive in Tropic Thunder in a tacky velvet suit.) And by the time Irving's story unfolded (he was a grifter since the day he picked up his first brick as a tyke to drum up customers for his dad's glass-installation business), he was established as the supposed primary villain of the piece. His heart was sometimes in the right place, whether it was leading him to adopt Rosalyn's young son and give him his surname or trying to keep Sydney out of prison, but how can you stomach someone who bilks innocent people out of thousands of dollars?

I still find the rip-off scheme to be somewhat unfathomable. Are people really that stupid? Well, don't answer that, but nonetheless, it would have been nice if director David O. Russell had included a short scene of one of the duped customers reacting to being duped, if only to convince me that at least one of them wouldn't have investigated the shady couple who refused to refund the $5,000 they had paid in order to secure a loan from a non-existent London-based banking establishment.

Somewhere along the way, I actually found myself sympathizing with director Russell's second character played by Bale, whose career calling seems to be making Russell lowlifes sympathetic. Russell has come a long way from the existential pretension of 2004's I Heart Huckabees, the director's only film that I hated, to Hustle, a movie in which each member of the ensemble got to play out a complete and satisfying character arc onscreen.

I won't pretend to understand what Sydney or Rosalyn saw in Irving sexually (not even those beautiful, intense Christian Bale eyes peering out from underneath the damp scraggly hair of his toupee/combover combo could make me want him), and I wouldn't necessarily have any desire to spend New Year's Eve doing tequila shots with him. But I completely got his overjoyed reaction to Duke Ellington ("Who starts a song like that?" -- it's exactly what I say every time I hear the fade-in intro to Rufus featuring Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody"), which made me start to get him. (I loved Sydney's take on the Duke Ellington intro, too: "It's magic" -- not magical -- which is exactly how I like to describe Cambodia.) At some point in the film, around when Irving began to grow a conscience due to his objections to the FBI-assisted scheme to bring down Camden, New Jersey Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), I started seeing the action through his eyes (not just his voiceover) and inching toward his corner.

Carmine may have been the film's one true victim, a nice guy making stupid moves, and even with a less likable actor than Renner in the role, he might have elicited my compassion because his sympathetic quality was built into the script, right down to the black child he and his wife (Elizabeth Rohm, making me want to see more of her) adopted. But if I had had to choose between Carmine's and Irving's happily ever after, I would have secretly rooted for Irving's.

Which brings me to Bradly Cooper's Richie. My what a long way Cooper has come from his days as Carrie Bradshaw's several-hours-one-night stand on Sex and the City, or even the hot Wolfpacker in The Hangover films. His capacity for embodying relatively decent guys with a cocky streak continues to suit him well, and he gives Richie all of the suitable shades of gray with those piercing baby blues. I swear, I could spend hours staring at his face, and it still wouldn't be time enough to take it all in. Only a brave actor would go onscreen wearing a head full of curlers, and Cooper brings a certain smarminess to his courage, underscoring Richie's douchiness without turning him into a full-on asshole.

Like most everyone else in Hustle, he was doing good things and bad thing for good and bad reasons. In fact, good and/vs. bad were recurring themes of Hustle, from the Led Zeppelin song that was used in the film's first trailer, 1969's "Good Times Bad Times," to Rosalyn's nail polish, which she described as "sweet and sour, rotten and delicious, like flowers, but with garbage." (Russell and Eric Warren Singer deserve Oscar nominations for their screenplay, which, at times, is almost poetic. Exhibit B, Sydney to Irving: "You're nothing to me until you're everything.")

Irving and Sydney were driven by greed while Richie was motivated by ego. The couple wanted to get money then get out of a legal jam, while Richie craved admiration and recognition for bringing down the bad guys more than he did the satisfaction of bringing down the bad guys. The two factions were digging in the dirt, motivated by vanity (Richie) and the love of money (Irving and Sydney) -- both of which are really the root of all evil -- but none of them were completely evil.

Nobody in Hustle (with the possible exception of crime lord Victor Tellegio, played by Robert DeNiro, looking at least a decade older than he did in Silver Linings Playbook) was, but the one who ended up being capable of the most good was the one that we were probably initially supposed to hate. Bale made his acts of contrition/quest for redemption one of the most intriguing aspects in a film that was full of them.

Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou?: Siblings in Hollywood

The other day, my friend Nancy made an interesting request: "I'd like to get your take on cinematic sibling relationships -- who's convincing and who's not." What followed was several days of emails in which we explored Hollywood's representation of brothers and sisters, past and present.

Over the course of our siblings revelry, I made a few surprising discoveries. The first one was personal: When Nancy introduced the topic of celluloid brothers and sisters, the one that immediately came to mind was You Can Count on Me. Really? Is the 2000 drama that made Laura Linney Oscar bait and launched countless Mark Ruffalo fantasies (many of them mine) actually the quintessential film for me about sibling relationships? I suppose that it is. When I think of people with the same parents being depicted onscreen, it's always the first movie that comes to mind.

It's a curious realization because the brother-sister dynamic is not one in which I'm naturally emotionally invested nor one that I'm particularly drawn to in story (unless there's a hint or more of incestuousness a la The Cement Garden and The Dreamers). In my own life, my relationships with my two older brothers growing up shaped me as a person more than the one I had with my big sister. I saw my brothers somewhat as alternate versions of myself (and to some degree, still do), what I could or couldn't be, while my sister, whom I didn't love any less, was a completely separate entity in my eyes. I couldn't relate to her in the same way.

Based on what I've seen and experienced in real life -- including observing several boyfriends who had particularly powerful bonds with their sisters -- brother/sister relationships just don't have the inherent drama and complexity of brother/brother and sister/sister ones. There may be a sweet, touching protective element to them (think Richie Cunningham rushing to Joanie's rescue -- with Fonzie in tow, natch! -- on the Happy Days episode in which her date was being bullied by a tough-talking thug), but there's rarely the same competitive spirit that often drives relationships between siblings of the same gender.

When it comes to the sister-sister bond/divide, Hollywood has tackled the topic with gusto over the years and done a pretty good job in the process. Great films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Georgia, Hilary and Jackie, Rachel Getting Married and Melancholia all approach biological sisterhood from different angles, as do okay ones like Little Women and Marvin's Room, not-so-good ones like Hanging Up and In Her Shoes, and ones I've yet to watch, like Margot at the Wedding, The Other Boleyn Girl and My Sister's Keeper. They're enemies and best friends, confidants and competition, essential to each other's well being and hazardous to each other's mental health.

Indeed, one of Hollywood's all-time great sibling rivalries is the decades-long one between Oscar-winning sisters Olivia DeHavilland and Joan Fontaine. It's a far more compelling story than anything I've read on the Baldwin brothers, or the Bridges, or the Fiennes, or the Coens, Farrellys and Wachowskis. (Bring on those movies about the Marx Brothers, or Cain and Abel, ironically, possibly the most famous sibling pair of all!)

The second thing that surprised me during my email discussion with Nancy was how many more movies I was able to think of that feature sisters as the central characters than ones with brothers in the middle, and how much more quickly they came to mind. Since introducing The Godfather's Corleones, perhaps the ultimate Hollywood representation of brotherhood, rather than offering more of the same (brothers in arms, armed), cinema has placed its dramatic familial emphasis on sisters.

Hollywood continues to thrive on buddy movies, as Nancy mentioned, to the point that an alien studying film to learn about human gender dynamics might assume (perhaps correctly) that the strongest connection between men come from comedy and adventure. Indeed, when I did a Google search for brothers in film, I came across several Top 10 lists that were dominated by comedic siblings like the ones in Twins, Trading Places, Strange Brew, Step Brothers and The Blues Brothers.

When I started thinking about cinematic brothers, the first ones that came to mind -- those in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Sabrina, East of Eden, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Legends of the Fall, Dan in Real Life, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and, of course, Brothers (the 2009 remake of the 2004 Danish film Brødre, starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and a pre-Oscar Natalie Portman) -- often seemed to have a woman/women at the center, or threatening to come between them. It's like filmmakers think brothers are most interesting when one of them is obsessing over a woman or coveting thy brother's wife.

Nancy, who is working on a creative project about brothers not based on personal experience (her lone sibling is a sister), made the excellent point that TV has always gotten the brother relationship better than film, citing Ray and Robert Barone on Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier and Niles Crane on Frasier, and the brothers played by Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss in the '70s miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. I'd add the Waters on the '80s Showtime series Brothers, the Harpers on Two and a Half Men (sorry, I was a fan of its Charlie Sheen years, and the sitcom feels pointless without Charlie and Alan at its center), and the Buchanans on One Life to Live to that list.

"There are so many other things to fight over, like money or ethics," Nancy wrote. "This is why I think television shows got it better. J.R. and Bobby [on Dallas] fought over power, and winning daddy's respect. Even the Hardy boys didn't fight over women. It was about protecting and supporting each other." True. Just last night I was watching the most recent episode of Nashville, thinking that Gunnar and his ex-con brother had all the ingredients of an intriguing sibling duo, with elements of jealousy, guilt, regret, resentment and a little bit of hero worship, without the brother ever once making a pass at Scarlett. It's a shame he was killed off before things had a chance to fully develop, though we did get one telling explosive argument.

Personally, I find brothers far more interesting when they're fighting, which might be why I wasn't so crazy about The Fighter. Micky and Dicky (played, respectively, by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale) fought more with others than with each other. There was the obligatory conflict between them (Micky's gratitude and guilt, Dicky's sense of entitlement), but it felt half-cooked in the movie. There should have been more fiery intensity between them. Confrontation is the foundation for iconic screen siblings. But I remember Bale's and Melissa Leo's Oscar-winning performances more than anything that happened between Micky and Dicky. On the plus side, at least they weren't fighting over Amy Adams!

Perhaps this is stereotypical thinking on my part from too many years spent watching daytime soaps, but aren't women more likely to fight over a man than men are to go to war over a woman, no matter what the Greek myth about Helen of Troy and the Trojan War tells us? Speaking of Troy, there's another film (2004's Troy) featuring actors above the title playing brothers (Eric Bana as Hector and Orlando Bloom as Paris), with a woman (Diane Kruger as Helen) in the mix, though not coming between them. But anyone well versed in Greek mythology who has read the Illiad, the Homer classic on which Troy is based, knows that the homoerotic bromance between Achilles and Patroclus is far more interesting than the brotherly bond between Hector and Paris.

Just when I was about to give up on finding a great recent dramatic presentation of screen brothers unburdened by a female interloper, I remembered a movie that was one of my favorite films of 2011: Warrior, whose brother-brother relationship contained echoes of the one in The Fighter, only far messier. Warrior was as much about the brotherly love/hate between Tom Hardy's and Joel Edgerton's characters (younger brother Tommy and big brother Brendan, respectively) as it was about Tommy's relationship with their dad, played by a deservedly Oscar-nominated Nick Nolte.

As touching as the father-son story arc was, the classic older brother vs. younger brother rivalry was the truly moving one. It resisted all of those perfect-brother/fuck-up brother cliches and presented two flawed guys who each had to battle their own personal demons. When I watched Warrior, it was hard for me to take sides because both brothers were right and wrong (I did find myself rooting for Brendan during their climactic bout, but mostly because he needed the money more), which is so often how familial conflict plays out in real life.

And best of all, when they got into the ring, figuratively and literally, it was never about a girl. If Tommy and Brendan aren't going to inspire Hollywood to do brothers better, I hope it inspires Nancy to write a great story.

The Best Thing About 'Warrior' (Besides Tom Hardy!)

There are a lot of things that I loved about Warrior, which I popped into the DVD player last night with no small amount of trepidation. It's a film about mixed martial arts, for God's sake. I knew I was in for more than a few rounds of extreme violence.

And then there was the sports angle. As I said in my previous post, sports movies generally just don't do it for me. I have a hard time getting involved unless there is compelling human drama anchoring the sports drama.

Both The Wrestler and The Fighter had plenty of compelling human drama, and I still didn't love them as much as everyone else did. In the end, I think Warrior's perfect storm of family conflict -- son vs. father, brother vs. brother, son/father/brother vs. himself, three battles I can fully relate to, having waged them in my own life -- helped make it a true rarity: a sports-themed movie that held my attention for the entire two-hour-plus running time. I swear, when the final punch was finally thrown, I was ready to check online to see where I could find the nearest mixed martial arts tournament. One more for the bucket list!

Tom Hardy was certainly Warrior's MVP. (I know I'm using a metaphor from the wrong sport, but bear with me.) Although Joel Edgerton's Brendan, older brother to Hardy's Tommy, was the more sympathetic character, when I found myself rooting for him, it was mostly because he had the most to lose. Tommy ended up in that ring by accident; Brendan out of desperation -- he needed to keep a roof over his family's collective head.

But as much as I found myself caring about what happened to Brendan, I couldn't take my eyes off of Tommy. Hardy's performance was a marvel of physical bravado. I could spend hours just watching him flex and strut and staring down the enemy. I'd never thought much about him as an actor before, but after watching Warrior, I'm excited to see his next film, This Means War. That one's got Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine ahead of him in the credits, but after watching Warrior, Hardy is the one I'll be going to see.

Nick Nolte, as the abusive-alcoholic-dad-turned-born-again-Christian, was equally impressive, and he's collecting deserved Oscar buzz. Has Nolte really become so old and broken down over the last decade, or was that just part of the performance? As I watched, I couldn't help but think of James Coburn's similar, Oscar-winning turn as Nolte's dad in Affliction, the 1997 film for which Nolte received his last invitation to the Academy Awards as a nominee. I don't expect Nolte to be as lucky as Coburn was, not with Drive's Albert Brooks and Beginners' Christopher Plummer in the running, but it's nice that the Best Supporting Actor race, for once, is shaping up to be nearly as interesting as Best Actor.

As impressive as Hardy and Nolte were, the song that was playing during the film's closing sequence -- "About Today" by the National, a track from the band's 2004 Cherry Tree EP -- left an equally indelible imprint. It struck the perfect elegiac counterpoint tone to the loud, violent sequences that preceded it, as brother faced brother in the mixed martial arts ring. Halfway through the climactic fight, it no longer mattered to me who won or lost (okay, I was still kind of rooting for Brendan). What mattered most was that two estranged brothers finally mend their fractured relationship while pummeling each other to near-death.

When it was all over, it wasn't Brendan nor Tommy but the National that delivered the knockout punch.

The other upset I'm hoping for on Oscar night

By now, it's probably a done deal: Natalie Portman will win the Best Actress Oscar on February 27 for portraying a ballerina's descent into madness with such exacting skill. While I loved Black Swan and Portman's performance, it wasn't my favorite of 2010. That honor would go to Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole. I suffered right along with her grieving mom, and Kidman never once resorted to shameless hysteria.

Despite my love for Kidman and my admiration of Portman's dedication to character and craft, like so many people who have deemed Annette Bening overdue for years, true Hollywood royalty (whatever that is), I'm rooting for her to pull an upset. Not because I thought she was any better than usual in "The Kids Are All Right," or because it was a particularly Oscar-worthy role, but because if Bening wins, we finally can leave her in peace and focus on far more overdue actresses (Glenn Close? Sigourney Weaver? Michelle Pfieffer? Hel-LO?!).

For once, though, Best Actress isn't the most exciting acting race. This year, it shares that distinction with Best Supporting Actress. The Fighter's Melissa Leo is clearly the frontrunner, in spite of the recent backlash over her financing of her own For Your Consideration ad, with True Grit's 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld nipping at her knock-off heels. This is generally the category where upsets are most likely (Marisa Tomei's 1993 win for My Cousin Vinny is still deemed one of the Academy's great blunders, though the actress has more than proven herself worthy of the "Oscar winner" title in the years since), and a win by any of the 2011 nominees is a more-than-remote possibility.

That said, Melissa Leo probably will take it, but if she does, it will be going to the wrong mother from hell. As impressed as I was with her mama bear in The Fighter, as I watched her, I couldn't help but feel that I'd seen her somewhere before. It wasn't until near the end that I realized where: Angelica Huston played a very similar type in The Grifters (and received her only Best Actress nomination in the process). Now that I think of it, the similarities are glaring: same frosted hair, same perfectly mix-and-matched tailored outfits, same prickly disposition, same disdain for the object of their beloved baby boy's affection. If Leo wins, it won't be a travesty, but we've seen it all before.

For your consideration: Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom. I just saw this Melbourne-based crime drama, and I am convinced that had it received a wider release in the U.S., Weaver would be a shoo-in for the grand prize. Her monster mom is a monster grandma, too, who hovers over her criminal brood like Mother Nature, kissing her grown boys on the lips and ordering a hit on her grandson. At the beginning of the film, when she found out that her estranged daughter had died of a drug overdose, and she didn't even flinch, I knew she was going to be a piece of work.

What I loved about Weaver's performance is that hers is a completely unique creation, even more loathsome than her murderous sons for so blindly enabling them. Despite the slightly sinister twinkle in her eye, she looks the granny part. There is not a single moment of her performance that seems over-the-top or tailored for awards-season attention. She deserves the acclaim she's gotten -- and all of the work she'll hopefully get going forward -- and she deserves to take Oscar home, too.

May the baddest mama win.

For your consideration: My last-minute predictions for the 2011 Oscar nominations

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the nominees for the 2011 Oscars on Tuesday morning, and it just dawned on me that I've yet to compile my list of predictions. Best Supporting Actress aside, I think that on February 27, we'll see the same people at the podium that we've been seeing all Oscar season so far, but that doesn't mean the Academy won't throw us some curve balls come tomorrow. I'll be waiting, hand in glove, ready to catch them.

Best Actress
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Julianne Moore, The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

Note that Julianne Moore has stolen the spot that's usually reserved for Winter's Bone's Jennifer Lawrence. Here's why: The wildly overrated film has lost much of its early season buzz in recent weeks, and I just don't see Oscar flirting with two underage actresses -- Steinfeld, 14, and Lawrence, 20 -- in the same year. One of them will be out, and I suspect it will be Lawrence. Ellen Page and Carey Mulligan she is not. She'll be this year's Sally Hawkins, a precursor darling who doesn't make the final cut.

Best Actor
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, 127 Hours
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Javier Bardem, Biutiful

Ryan Gosling would be a shoo-in if Blue Valentine weren't so fringey, and if the category, usually reserved for actors in their mid-thirties and older, weren't already so loaded with young actors. Jeff Bridges will get the old-coot slot (sorry, Bobby Duvall), and Javier Bardem, who recently got a big plug from his Eat, Pray, Love costar Julia Roberts, will sneak in over Gosling and The Fighter's Mark Wahlberg.

Best Supporting Actress
Amy Adams, The Fighter
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech
Mila Kunis, Black Swan
Jackie Weaver, Animal Kingdom

This is by far the most volatile category. Barbara Hershey could possibly steal Mila Kunis's thunder and end up representing Black Swan here, but I think her role might have been too small and the performance too subtle to ultimately register with the academy (see Rachel Getting Married's snubbed monster of a mother Debra Winger -- the Academy likes its horror moms loud and loudly dressed, like The Fighter's Melissa Leo and last year's winner, Mo´Nique from Precious). As for Another Year's Lesley Manville, who has been collecting accolades for months, category confusion will lead to her getting the snub, as Mike Leigh's last leading lady, Happy Go Lucky's aforementioned Hawkins, unfairly did two years ago.

Best Supporting Actor
Christian Bale, The Fighter
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech
Andrew Garfield, The Social Network
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Jeremy Renner, The Town

If the Academy is in a sentimental mood -- and when is it not? -- look for the dearly and recently departed Pete Postlethwaite to take his The Town costar Jeremy Renner's spot. The other four feel like locks to me.

Best Director
David Fincher, The Social Network
Christopher Nolan, Inception
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David O. Russell, The Fighter


Best Picture
The Social Network
The King's Speech
Black Swan
Inception
The Fighter
Toy Story 3
The Kids Are All Right
True Grit
The Town
The Ghost Writer

There's a chance that 127 Hours could sneak in here, but for some reason, James Franco aside, the movie doesn't seem to be on many radars, which is strange, considering that Danny Boyle's last film, 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, won both Best Picture and Best Director.

Perhaps the biggest curve ball that the Academy could toss our way would be to nominate someone of color in one of the acting categories. The cast of frontrunners is alarmingly white. Was 2010 such a terrible year for black actors? Come to think of it, it was, but did any of the best supporting actress candidates do a better job than Kerry Washington or Shereeka Epps in Mother and Child. When the most prominently featured black person in a Best Picture contender is Sugar Ray Leonard in The Fighter, Hollywood, we've got a very big problem.

The one thing in "Blue Valentine" that I just can't shake (and no, it's not the sex!)

Like too many of 2010's critically acclaimed Oscar hopefuls (including The Fighter, Winter's Bone, Get Low, The Kids Are All Right and frontrunner The Social Network), Blue Valentine underwhelmed me. Though it's superior to much of what passes for cinema these days, unlike Rabbit Hole (another drama about love on the rocks, though for entirely different reasons), it failed to move me. It's hard to get invested in a couple when you don't understand why they're together in the first place.

Well, that's only half true. I totally got why Michelle Williams's character, Cindy, would fall for Ryan Gosling's Dean, though neither Williams nor the screenplay completely sold me on the fall (a bit more on that later). He was sweet, charming, funny, and, being played by Gosling, all kinds of sexy. I'm still not sure how he turned into such a balding loser in the space of the six or so years covered by the movie, but I guess viewers, who probably were supposed to identify more with Cindy, wouldn't have bought that she wouldn't want to have sex with a guy who looked like Gosling.

As for Cindy's appeal, it remains a mystery to me. I still haven't figured out why a total of three men in Blue Valentine were crazy for her. To me, she was a lot like Jen Lindley, the charcter Williams used to play on Dawson's Creek -- kind of slutty, kind of smart, kind of bitchy and kind of dull. Normally, I cringe at the threat of onscreen violence, but I was almost relieved when Dean finally lost it near the end because Cindy, and by extension Williams, finally started to come alive. I wouldn't complain if either or both actors received Oscar nominations on Tuesday, but I think Gosling and Williams have done and will do more impressive work in other films.

What really stood out in Blue Valentine for me, though, was neither the performances nor that weird little jig that Cindy did during the courtship scenes. (Though I loved the song Dean was singing, whatever it was.) It was something Dean said early on. He told his colleague at the moving company that he believes guys are more romantic than girls are. At first, I laughed and wondered how he could dare to make such a bold, erroneous comment, but when he explained himself, he actually made a lot of sense.

The gist of what he said was this: Guys spend their lives fooling around until they find the perfect girl, the one they can't live without, and they settle down with her -- or at least try to. Meanwhile, women start out looking for the the same perfect mate, the one they can't live without, and when they don't find him, they settle for the best of whatever options they have. I don't know if that makes them less romantic, which has as much to do with ideals as it does with actions, but it's one of the more interesting observations I've heard in a while.

I won't make any real-life generalizations here (though I feel that he made a valid point), but I did like the way the eventual arc of Cindy and Dean's romance supported Dean's theory. Dean's feelings for Cindy were palpable from beginning to end, but I never noted any real sparks on her side. It seemed to me that he won her over because he was in the right place at the right time, and he was persistent. She was settling. Her parents knew it, Dean knew it, and she knew it.

Dean's idea, so casually presented, leaves me wondering about the dynamic of straight relationships nearly a week after seeing the film. I often hear people say that it's impossible for straight men and straight women to be platonic friends because sex eventually gets in the way. (Hell, that was the entire premise of When Harry Met Sally...!) If this were true (and I believe such friendships are hard, if not impossible, to establish), that would make sexual attraction the defining element of relationships between heterosexual men and women, the strongest bond. That would certainly be the case for the typical male (lover of sports and action, the realist) and the typical female (lover of beauty and romance, the idealist), which might be why when they stop having sex, much of the time, they stop communicating, too.

For gay partners, both male and female, one might expect there to be more common psychological ground if gender does indeed play the prominent role in our overall identities, which I think it does. That might be why gay couples -- male ones, in particular -- can more or less fall in and out of lust, go outside of the relationship for sexual gratification, and still remain happy together. It's interesting that a lack of sex played a large role in widening the chasm between the warring couples in Rabbit Hole and Blue Valentine, while the lesbian pair in The Kids Are All Right, for all of their problems, sexual and otherwise, still seemed to be more in sync.

Straight relationships, of course, are more complicated than just sex. But if that is the primary glue that brings two people together, sticks them together and keeps them together (and there really wasn't any other glue in evidence in Blue Valentine), then when sexual desire dims (as it invariably tends to do for most couples, regardless of sexual orientation), when the romance is gone, what else is there? For many real-life pairs, kids and bills, which probably keep the divorce rate from closing in on around 90 per cent. For Cindy and Dean, a lot of resentment and angry sex. I wouldn't want to deal with that in real life, and I surely don't want to sit through two hours of it onscreen.

Has anyone had a stranger, better 2010 than James Franco?

What a difference 12 months can make? Last year around this time, James Franco, snubbed by Oscar in early 2009 after charming the pants off of Sean Penn's Harvey Milk in Milk, was starring on General Hospital. Everyone watching in Hollywood or at home either seemed to be asking "Why?" or screaming "Career suicide!"

I still haven't figured out what net effect GH has had on Franco's career, or what he was doing in Date Night (or totally lacking any apparent chemistry with Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray; Love, for that matter). For a while, I wondered what had happened to the leading-man-in-the-making who won a Golden Globe for portraying James Dean on TV, starred in three Spider-Man blockbusters and took a well-received detour into comedy with 2008's Pineapple Express. The GH thing did little more than enhance Franco's reputation for being a bit of an unpredictable nutjob, but that didn't stop him from giving GH another shot midway through 2010 and signing up for a third run as serial killer Franco early next year. That's just around the time that Franco the actor will be cohosting the Oscar's with Anne Hathaway.

That's nice work if you can get it, and even if Franco hadn't, he probably still would be invited to the Academy Awards as a nominee. He's practically guaranteed a nod for his one-man show as a trapped mountain climber forced to amputate his own arm in 127 Hours. If former All My Children star Melissa Leo gets her expected nod for her supporting performance in The Fighter, that will be one former soap star and one current soap star nominated in the same year, no doubt an Academy first. Add to that one ex-prime-time TV star: Mila Kunis (That '70s Show), Franco's cameo scene partner in Date Night, is also a likely nominee for Black Swan.

Although some are probably still scratching their heads and asking, "Why?," about Franco's GH return engagement, who's talking "career suicide" now?