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Amazon.co.uk Review
Love blooms and dies at the same time in the delicate dance between Oscar nominees Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain). Gosling's Dean, a high-school dropout, works for a New York moving company. While relocating a frail widower into a retirement home, he spots Cindy, a nursing student who's visiting her grandmother, but the film actually begins six years later. Married with a daughter, they live in rural Pennsylvania. Heavy drinker Dean's looks are fading, while Cindy still turns heads. In his elegantly constructed second feature, writer-director Derek Cianfrance pirouettes between past and present, with each scene commenting on the next (set to the bittersweet tones of Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear). The Dean of the early years pursues Cindy, who resists at first, but a spontaneous date ends with her tap dancing (badly) and him singing (not so badly). She leaves her domineering boyfriend (Mike Vogel) for this attentive stranger, leading to scenes of intimacy that are far more suggestive than pornographic--even if the MPAA briefly rated the film NC-17. Later, when the family dog goes missing, the cracks in their marriage intensify, so Dean arranges for a night of romance, which plays out like a negative image of their first date. If the two actors, who are very good, are meant to carry equal weight, Gosling has the more difficult task. It's harder to like the clingy, insecure Dean, who loves more intensely and less wisely, but that makes Gosling's the braver performance. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Product Description
Blue Valentine is an intimate, shattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage.
On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, when they met and fell in love—full of life and hope.
Moving fluidly between these two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go?
Special Features include:
On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, when they met and fell in love—full of life and hope.
Moving fluidly between these two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go?
Special Features include:
- Deleted Scenes
- Q&A
- Making Of
- Home Movies
- Director and Editor's Commentary
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This is an emotionally engaging film study of two characters who have both suffered some childhood trauma and fall in love. The male has had maternal abandonement and it has left him seeking love and family - he is an 'unfinished' person, with a massively kind and loving heart but an inability to connect to his identity and build on it within a relationship. He is needy, emotionally fragile, and in his need for love he leaves himself wide open to a kind of emotional abuse that invariably he sets up in his behaviour. A child within a man. The girl has a bully of a father and it seems she has been quite promiscuous - not able to emotionally engage with men until she meets the young man who decides to marry her and accept her pregnancy. She is very intelligent and her choices are not often with her whole heart - she loves the young man but not enough because she is also not a complete person; she has too many conditions in her love and the young man is unable to live up to them or able to achieve his own potential. The story unfolds and is dramatic and deeply sad. Their young love was full of promise but the film shows that often love is not enough - human beings carry burdens and trauma from breakdowns in family relationships and this can effect their ability to build loving adult relationships later. Blue Valentine is an incredible film - it leaves you to do a lot of work and yet provides all the beautiful imagery and superb acting to see a marvellous human story unfold.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Absolutely mesmerising, incredibly heartbreaking, and strangely haunting. This film stayed with me for days. I think what puts people off this film is its resistance to resolution, and its unsettlingly real performances. Gosling and Williams manage to incite feelings of discomfort in the audience similar to watching a fight between a married couple at a dinner party. Love and hate go hand in hand here, as do overwhelming lust and intense emptiness. Perhaps this is what scares the reviewers who give one stars - that this film examines love and its inability to remain constant against its biggest enemy: time.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
i'm a wreck. some films you can talk about everything that worked and everything that didn't, and some films just duck under your guard and knee you in the balls. this hit me on every primal level. it is a true, beautiful, awful, horrendously, tremendously accurate portrayal of relationships. possibly more so than any film i've ever seen. i cried at least twice, which kind of freaked me out.
this is the third ryan gosling film i've seen, and that was one of the reasons it sat on my shelf for a while. the first was the notebook. pile of crap. but i'm blaming the film for that - there was no saving it. the second was drive. pile of crap. and for that i at least partly blame gosling. his performance, for me, was utterly terrible.
this was different class. he was amazing. part of the problem is that he was best as the aged gosling. the flashbacks, where he's the gosling of now, weren't as good as the later gosling. i think he's gonna come into his own in about fifteen years. i know it's only about seven or eight in the film, but they aged him at least fifteen... anyway, he was superb, just superb, as was michelle williams. i get the feeling you're meant to split the blame equally, or not at all, but i definitely sided with him. but i think that's the problem. i think most of my exes would side with the girl. it rang very true, unfortunately. as a workshy immature drunk, i have everything gosling had here, except for the looks and charisma. lots and lots of flashbacks all the way through - it was a painfully true film, especially as i have a kid with my ex, and when he walked away, pushing the kid back towards the mum, it was a bit too close to home.
i enjoyed them getting together. all films that have to show couples getting together either have to do it the hollywood "too good to be true" route, or it's sometimes painful to watch, in that they're not good enough - it's not real enough. it was just right here.
i haven't really structured this review, haven't really made much of it at all, but it's a fantastic film. not one i'll watch again in a hurry, but one i'm glad i've watched.
it's got the same name as one of my favourite tom waits songs. glad to see they didn't screw it up :) worthy of the name.
this is the third ryan gosling film i've seen, and that was one of the reasons it sat on my shelf for a while. the first was the notebook. pile of crap. but i'm blaming the film for that - there was no saving it. the second was drive. pile of crap. and for that i at least partly blame gosling. his performance, for me, was utterly terrible.
this was different class. he was amazing. part of the problem is that he was best as the aged gosling. the flashbacks, where he's the gosling of now, weren't as good as the later gosling. i think he's gonna come into his own in about fifteen years. i know it's only about seven or eight in the film, but they aged him at least fifteen... anyway, he was superb, just superb, as was michelle williams. i get the feeling you're meant to split the blame equally, or not at all, but i definitely sided with him. but i think that's the problem. i think most of my exes would side with the girl. it rang very true, unfortunately. as a workshy immature drunk, i have everything gosling had here, except for the looks and charisma. lots and lots of flashbacks all the way through - it was a painfully true film, especially as i have a kid with my ex, and when he walked away, pushing the kid back towards the mum, it was a bit too close to home.
i enjoyed them getting together. all films that have to show couples getting together either have to do it the hollywood "too good to be true" route, or it's sometimes painful to watch, in that they're not good enough - it's not real enough. it was just right here.
i haven't really structured this review, haven't really made much of it at all, but it's a fantastic film. not one i'll watch again in a hurry, but one i'm glad i've watched.
it's got the same name as one of my favourite tom waits songs. glad to see they didn't screw it up :) worthy of the name.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Love Gosling...
Ryan Gosling is a very good actor. He brings a great realism to every film I've seen him in, including this one. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Petal
Deep and troubling real-life drama
This film is unusual in its realistic depiction of a couple slowly falling out of love. It is very touching and feels very real, as if you were not watching actors on a screen, but... Read more
Published 2 months ago by F. L. P. Souza
Beautiful movie, great blu-ray.
The movie was as good the second time as the first time at the cinema!
Most of the four deleted scenes are long takes, and good ones too ; there is also a press conference, as... Read more
Most of the four deleted scenes are long takes, and good ones too ; there is also a press conference, as... Read more
Published 2 months ago by B. Lucie
What a gorgeous movie!
Beautifully written, wonderfully acted, directed with great confidence, highly personal, true to life, moving, beautiful, painful, in short: a magnificent film.
Published 2 months ago by bl
beautiful
This is one of the best films I have ever seen. It is a quiet, subtle movie and left me absolutely heartbroken by the end. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Caitlyn
Very Blue, not for Valentines
This is a depressing film but contains powerful performances and issues. It stars Gosling (who I would argue is not at his best) and story which really represents a relationship... Read more
Published 3 months ago by T. BROOKES
If your having relationship issues this makes you think deep!
Loved the movie. 1 & 2 bits were confusing to me however the plot of the movie and the story were great. Read more
Published 4 months ago by pshiks2010
Quality.
Highly recommend this film, it's the jaws of all romance films. So grim, yet so good. Service was brilliant, received within 3 days, no need for contact. Reliable.
Published 4 months ago by Mr. Alexander G. Cropper
'A love story for anyone that's ever been in love'.
'A Love Story For Anyone That's Ever Been in Love', the tagline clearly indicates the dreary and realistic tone of the film, before you have even had a chance to learn anything... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Midori Bear
Not your typical love story - but that is why it is so good
This is such a good film - although not a date movie. It is complex and uncomfortable to watch at times as the two characters work out their relationship and their feelings for... Read more
Published 5 months ago by D. Winters
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