Blue Valentine - 6 stars out of 10

Blue Valentine - 6 stars out of 10

"Blue Valentine" is the anti-chick flick.  Instead of showing a fantasy love story, it explores a torn American marriage and the emotional implications on all who are involved.  The story is told out of sequence (mixing the start of the relationship with its current state) to impressivey show how the relationship has changed and even more impressively shows the acting diversity of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling.  It's incredibly frustrating as Gosling tries so hard and Williams just won't have it, resigned to her fate of a doomed marriage.  The unsteady camera gives the film an effective realistic sensation of watching the lives of these two characters unfold in the first person.  The film contains several controversial scenes.  The abortion scene was incredibly uncomfortable, in that it is a subject matter which really has not been shown on screen in this way.  I applaud the directors for being so brave to show the emotional toll of an abortion on screen.  While this film deserves a decent rating for its acting, I would not recommend it due to its upsetting content - it is the ultimate downer.

On another note, there has been a great deal of controversy over the initial NC-17 rating of the film due to an intense no-nudity sex scene, bringing the question "What warrants an NC-17 rating?"  The question was raised "How can this film receive that rating while movies like The Human Centipede are rated 'R'?"  I agree that this scene is not nearly as bad as "The Human Centipede"; however, instead of allowing every intensely disturbing scene pass with an R-rating, perhaps we should be stricter with what constitutes an R-rating and hand out more NC-17 ratings.  The rating system is designed to protect children from movie content and I believe that it is a crime for any child to see a movie like the aforementioned ones.