Winter’s Bone ☕ d. Debra Granik, 2010

I’m not the first person to make this observation, but it bears repeating – Winter’s Bone does for the Ozarks what The Wire did for Baltimore: illustrate a deep-seated web of corruption and moral ambivalence so pervasive that the usual notions of right, wrong, and legal are subordinated to the oldest law in the universe — survival.  Cowriter/director Debra Granik doesn’t waste time decrying how broken the law enforcement system is; she doesn’t really even waste her breath on condemning the criminals and villains of this backwoods jungle.  Instead, the film is a passive feat of empathy extended toward a single individual who has no chance of escaping this hellish muck.

The Kids Are All Right ☕ d. Lisa Cholodenko, 2010

Tranquil blue contentedness permeates Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right.  The characters’ home is blue; there are numerous shots in which the California haze is absent, as are rain clouds; the people dress in calm colors that blend in with the white, blue, and greenish surroundings.  At times, I was tempted to think that I’d somehow stumbled into a shelved Desperate Housewives B-story.  Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another prime time show with a more developed — and overt — sense of suburban color coordination.  Other critics have pejoratively compared Cholodenko’s style to the ramshackle efficiency of television.  That’s fair enough, but the banality of the style isn’t really aesthetically offensive; it is succinct, and less intrusive than the hand-held lens flares of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek, which didn’t even have the common sense to linger on its own futuristic production design.  The Kids Are All Right feels homey, and the “TV-ness” of its aesthetic approach dovetails neatly with its thematic concerns.