At the outset "The Descendants" is a movie based on two, maybe three thin threads of stories with common characters.

The first one deals with Matt King who is the Managing Trustee of a trust which controls 25000 acres of virgin untouched land in the island of Ka'aui in Hawaii. King and his family members (read cousins, extended cousins, etc) are in the process of finalizing a deal to sell off the land and make a fortune.

The second thread deals with how Elizabeth King, Matt's wife has met with a boating accident and has gone into a coma. The doctors declare that she is not going to come out of the coma and as per Elizabeth's 'living will' she must be disconnected from life support and allowed to die. Matt, who all this time has only been a 'backup parent' to his daughters must now figure out how to reconcile to Elizabeth's death, bring up his teenage daughters who he barely even knows well enough while dealing with the entire Trust dealings.

As if these weren't enough, Matt's elder daughter Alexandra reveals to him that Elizabeth had been having an affair with another person behind Matt's back. This all but completely drains Matt's patience and tests him to the extreme.

The beauty of this movie is the fact that all 3 of these threads have been so nicely interwoven and despite the fact that each one of these is big enough for individual movies by themselves, the fact that they have been dealt with extremely matter of factly without too much of drama thrown in is what takes the cake. Each one of the characters, Matt King, his daughters Alexandra and Scottie, Scottie's friend Sid, Elizabeth's old father, the real estate agent with whom Elizabeth was having an affair, have been well written and do complete justice to their roles.

George Clooney, as Matt King, who is torn between anger at his wife for her affair, sorrow for losing his wife, utter confusion and despair as to how to be a good father to his daughters, plays the role of a lifetime in this movie. I personally thought Clooney touched new heights in his roles in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air, but with The Descendants he takes it a couple of notches higher. Now I really have to watch The Ides of March in which he is once again said to have done an awesome job. That probably is going to be watched and reviewed sometime soon.

Roger Ebert who in my opinion is probably one of the best movie reviewers around gave The Descendants a 4 Star Rating and goes on to say - "What happens is that we get vested in the lives of these characters. That's rare in a lot of movies. We come to understand how they think and care about what they decide." Now if that isn't reason enough to watch this movie, what else is?

Related links

Wikipedia link to the movie  
Roger Ebert's review of the movie  
My review of Michael Clayton    
My review of Up in the Air  

Trailer



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Labels: English Movies Movie Review Movies
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  1. A wonderful movie about grief. Excellent performance from George Clooney and a well written review.

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  2. One of Clooney's best movies.
    Loved it.

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  3. Nothin gr8 about this movie & nothing gr8 about Ebert too. He has changed his ratings many times to satisfy viewers opinion.one classic example is "The Shining".
    descendants - a big no

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  4. A great review. i had the chance to see this movie and George as always an excellent actor that know how to deliver.

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A couple of reasons why I watched ‘Before the Rains’ were Santosh Sivan, its director and Nandita Das, its lead character. While I am a huge fan of Santosh Sivan’s cinematography in almost all of the movies in which he collaborated with Mani Ratnam (Roja, Iruvar, Dil Se, Raavanan, need I say more), the fact that I had seen quite a few interviews of his and he came across as this amazingly imaginative person who knows how to get the maximum detail in each and every frame of his piqued my interest in him. Santosh Sivan is almost like an university of cinematography and the script that he picked up for this movie lent itself to be filmed extraordinarily beautifully.

The second reason that I watched this movie was Nandita Das.
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These days Tamil cinema is in the middle of a silent revolution. While movies continue being made with big budgets, big stars (such as Singam 2, poised to release on 5th July), there is this entire other stream of movies being made with smaller budgets, smaller ‘stars’ which give much more weightage to crisp scripts, taut screenplays, and an overall appreciation to the different facets of film-making.
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I don't remember when I first heard of this movie, but for whatever reason it eluded me until Asianet finally decided to play it again (or was it the first time on TV?) on Sunday, Jan 6th. I guess the fact that this was one of the legendary Thilakan's last movies or this was one of Dulquer Salman's (Mammootty's son) first few movies played large in keeping the name 'Ustad Hotel' right on the top of my 'to watch list' of Malayalam movies.
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"Unknown" was just that, an unknown choice of a movie to watch on a Sunday afternoon. When the Missus, my cousin and me decided to sit down to watch some nice movie, the onus of choice of the movie was left to me. Browsing through my cousin's collection of movies, I happened to come across "Unknown". Not knowing anything else about the movie other than the fact that Liam Neeson starred in it, the three of us sat down to watch it.

In a departure from normal protocol, Agent Ethan Hunt is not necessarily given a choice to accept the mission in this instalment of Mission Impossible.
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At the outset "The Descendants" is a movie based on two, maybe three thin threads of stories with common characters.

The first one deals with Matt King who is the Managing Trustee of a trust which controls 25000 acres of virgin untouched land in the island of Ka'aui in Hawaii. King and his family members (read cousins, extended cousins, etc) are in the process of finalizing a deal to sell off the land and make a fortune.
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If any of the readers of this post have read the book 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' and intend to watch the movie sometime soon (albeit not in Indian theatres given that the Indian Govt has decided to ban its release in India, will soon write a separate post on that topic), request you folks to read this review with great caution as there are quite a few spoilers ahead which might end up ruining the entire movie watching experience for you.
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Now if you are a book lover and a regular reader of the thriller action genre of books there's no way that you could have missed reading "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson. This book made the literary circles and the bestseller lists of the world go ga-ga sometime ago.

The plot deals with the case of a young girl who has been missing for 30+ years and how the girl's grandfather hires an investigative journalist to trace the girl.
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You know you are in for a ride when the movie begins with a panoramic view of the Earth from the other side, the dark side of the Moon.
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While the posters of Vaanam bandied around Anushka dressed glamorously, Bharath posing with a guitar and Simbu in various poses, it gave me the impression that this was a run of the mill masala movie with the usual mass elements such as songs, dances, fights, glamour, etc etc. However, people who actually went to the theatre and watched the movie gave quite decent reviews and asked me to watch it at least once due to the fact that it was quite a different movie, in a nice way.
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