The Kids Are All Right. And so is the film.

Tolstoy said that happy families are all alike, while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. After watching "The Kids Are All Right", one gets the complete opposite impression, that no matter how strange families might seem, a family's problems are all alike.
After all, even in 2010, lesbian couples with artificial insemination kids still look weird, but their problems don't. A daughter who is going to college and wants to be independent, a teenage boy with an inconvenient friend, a busy control-freak who likes wine a bit too much, the “soft” mom who wants to start a business to feel more successful and a (the) relationship strained by routine which results in a love triangle. Were it not for the fact that the lover is the sperm-donor, it would almost seem too much of a cliché. And more than original, that seemed unrealistic, because I don’t think lifelong lesbians become straight that easily (if at all).
Anyway, this creation of Lisa Cholodenko is funny and witty, and I would say that it is quite a decent movie (especially if you’re a liberal), but you won’t remember it a couple of years from now.

New York is the best city in the world. I sincerely believe that. If I lived there, not only would I have a wonderful mass transit system and an enormous veggie dietary offer that would allow me to live more sustainably, along with an incredibly rich cultural offer and job opportunities for virtually every career I can imagine, but I would also live in a city which is wonderful for many non-practical reasons. Let me explain:

First, the landscape:

New York Harbor, by itself, is a natural wonder to behold.

Second, The layout:

Manhattan is the best hippodamian plan ever!

And third and last, but not least, the symbolism: New York City is a metaphor of the modern world, as it was built on stealing from and slaughtering the natives, exploiting the masses on an industrial scale and polluting without control. But also on liberty, tolerance, science and technology. On material and social progress and on hope for a better future.
Being the holy city of the world's most important religion, global capitalism, and with its many museums, intellectuals and universities both in the city itself and in the surrounding Northeast, as well as with its unending portrayal in movies and TV series, New York's economical, scientific and cultural influence far surpasses any other city in the USA or the rest of the world.
New York also represents better than anything the power (and arrogance) of humanity, being built on thousands of chopped down, leveled, dried, paved and drilled square kilometers which sneeringly look down on Central Park and the Hudson and East rivers, seemingly unaware that nature may reclaim its sovereignity over them unless it is treated with more respect, and where the city's steel and concrete colossi almost reach the fabric of heaven, only to be brought down by the barbarians of the XXI century and be reborn like a phoenix in the form of projected glass towers of Babel.

Truly the greatest city in the world.