DEATH OF TRADITIONAL CINEMA

It is one of the serious contenders for basically any category this year at the 84th Academy Awards (it has five nominations) and the kind of film that Oscar voters usually root for, but awards or no awards, THE DESCENDANTS is an undeniably poignant and often humorous exploration of family, life, and death, and about things entrusted to us. George Clooney gives a quiet performance as Matt King, the workaholic father and husband who has to deal with his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) succumbing into comatose after a boating accident.  As the trailer would tell you, Matt learns that his wife was having an affair, and the treatment of that subject is neither complacent nor judgmental; Matt seeks out the "other guy" for answers, and yet he admits later in the movie his own shortcomings that led to his wife's unhappiness.  Also, he would have to deal with taking care of his two daughters, which he has never done fully before since his wife was around to do that. An uneas...

*may contain a little bit of spoiler Politics is a dirty game. If you want to preserve your conscience, integrity, and/or whatever values you may have left in your body, do not enter it at all costs. In order to succeed in a political career, it seems that the accepted practice is to get results no matter the consequence. In fact there is no arena more brutal in human existence than a political arena because the players are all under the guise of fancy suits and fake smiles.  Clooney's latest turn as a director (and co-writer) dabbles into politics with the premise of idealism, as embodied by the story's protagonist Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling), a young, driven, and brilliant deputy campaign manager to Governor Mike Morris (Clooney) who's in it to become the next United States president. In fact this is nothing new, since the case of the young idealist losing his innocence to the unforgiving social and political system is inevitable, and such is exactly what happens her...