Simply A Masterpiece

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Now, you might say many things about this film. It's an Annette Bening film that just makes you want to get high. It's a coming of age film, with a boy that lives with his single and lonely mother. It's a feminist film. It's an era film. It's a tribute from the writer/director to his mother. It's a movie made by a guy from Berkeley. Yet for me it was a movie about open minded people, a little too ideal to be believed, but interesting to watch. It's a typical life movie, where the characters are more interesting than the story, if there is one.I like how the actors played, the direction was good. There were moments that I felt were real, maybe too real to enjoy - I got that speech with "you love the image of me, not me", too. I can't recommend it to everyone and you definitely need to be in the mood to enjoy it: a quiet evening with the spouse maybe. Young people have so many things to learn from it, yet they won't and it's just sad. Watch it. You might like it as much as I did.

You have seen films like this often. This is where a chick film meets art. Art means not the flick full of inspiration, message, awareness. But the presentation was so pleasant. The screenplay carefully picked the right events, and the dialogues were good. The book fanatics would go and look for the original source it was adapted from. But the truth is it was an originally written screenplay, and that's why it got a nomination at the recent Oscars. Another way to say, it inspired by the director's own childhood life, being raised by his mother and sister.This is the story of a single mother, whose teenage son is struggling to blend with the world. Then they have two roommates, one a woman in her 20s and a middle aged man. Beside a girl of her son's age visits regularly and sometimes secretly. So how all these people influence in the boy's life is the story that revealed. His mother being from different generation and not understanding the present world, which was the year 1979, where the film sets in.From the director of 'Beginners', yet another unique film. Thematically there's nothing special, though it was carved with the excellent bunch of actors made the difference. I'm not sure the title was perfect for what the film narrated. Yes, if it was Annette Bening's Dorothea's story, then it justifies. But the story does not have one perspective of narration. All the main characters like Bening, Elle, Greta, Crudup and Zumann, shared screen equally. So, instead I would have preferred the title, '20th Century Tale'.Greta kind of reminded me Kristen Stewart with the hair like that. Two hours long drama with some funs. Really a good film. The topics it brings in for discussion were interesting, especially which is in the current era. Films like this should be watching. It is about the life, people with different characters and ambitions.7/10

American filmmaker Mike Mills' third feature film, 20th CENTURY WOMEN is a semi- autobiographical treatment thrives for encapsulating the zeitgeist of its time through the eyes of his alter ego Jamie (Zumann), a 15-year-older living in Santa Barbara in 1979, and those who are involved in his life at that stage, including his single mother Dorothea (Bening), Julie (Fanning), the girl-next-door he cottons to, and two tenants sharing the same roof with the mother-son pair: a free-wheeling cinematographer Abbie (Gerwig) and William (Crudup), an ex-hippie-turned- mechanic, that's the central quintet.Each character is given a magnanimous character arc to lay bare their problems and quirks, Dorothea is concerned with the communication blockage caused when Jamie reaching adolescence and asks both Julie and Abbie for help, to infuse their feminine wisdom to ease the process, but the mirror has two faces, in Jamie's book, it is her who has drifted away from him, emotionally speaking, her ingrained sadness and loneliness has hog-tied her from even attempting to seek a new lease on her life. Bening puts a defiant face to sort out a mother's indefatigable stamina conjoined with hapless frustration, whenever the camera leveling at her, she radiates with élan and candid, no matter how platitudinous her lines are, her masterclass delivery is the ballast of this snappy but also self-indulging reflection of an ineffectual Bidungsroman, interlaced with lengthy voice-over and token signs-of-the-times. As a patent feminist manifesto indicated by its name, Mills makes heavy plays of its female characters, Abbie, stricken by cervical cancer and runs the risk of forfeiting motherhood, is the most sympathetic character and a ginger Gerwig is perfectly cast, she is tasked with the "menstruation" oration, because of her time-tested screen persona: she can be radical, quirky, but simultaneously vulnerable and self-effacing, a quality so unique that often errs on the side of being typecast. Elle Fanning's Julie, on the other hand, tiptoes between adolescence and adulthood, dangles Jamie with her dalliance with others yet maintains a chaste relationship with him (he has been entrapped in the friends zone for too long), but that's what is part and parcel to be an impressionable young girl, especially a pretty one and those equally impressionable young boys need to respect that! From that viewpoint, we might find the film tends to be a tad didactic and patronizing since the story chiefly sets the main key on the more conventional "the kid is alright" arc of a cisgender boy, who has grown up in a household peopled with women who are much more interesting than him, even the undervalued William, who is not exactly a conventional father figure, but Crudup is in one of his most relaxed and unassuming forms, somewhat inward-looking but alternately exuberantly charming. While one might feel underwhelmed by its self-referential narrative and jarring by its often clunky dialogue, at the very least, the film has a congenial flair of communion among its main characters, and from the opening aerial shot introducing its locale to its eye-soothing vintage production, to the time-lapsed novelty of automobiles in motion, 20TH CENTURY WOMEN proves that it has enough ammo in the cartridge, but the shooter himself is not a dead-eye.

Mike Mills has done a pretty good life drama here as this work "20TH Century Women" is one interesting journey of life, love and how it's a tough journey of gender and culture issues as the time passes. Set in 1979 in Santa Barbara, California Dorothea Fields(Annette Bening)is a single mother who's tough and old school and she wants some help and wants to try some different methods in raising her only child a son named Jamie in what's a free spirited time.So enter her best female friends two young ladies named Abbie(Greta Gerwig)a punk rock artist type who boards in the Fields home, then next door neighbor the sexy Julie(Elle Fanning)who's a provocative sexy colored bra wearing girl who likes to explore sex and wonder about love. So will this be the answer? A makeshift family is all of a sudden formed and yes the drama and struggles of everyday life is present and common.Thru it all love, and lessons of life are learned and this film is a good showcase of gender connection and learning how to cope with culture as it affects society and as the time passes leaves it's mark on everyone. Overall good touching film to watch it just feels like so much togetherness.