Trailer Tuesday: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

[Video Link] Carla and I saw We Need to Talk About Kevin on Friday at Cinefamily in LA. It's an intense, beautifully shot movie about the relationship between a mother and her bad seed son.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb

Zombies are so 2010. Matricide is 2011. At least for a few more days.
taras

I’ve just been to see We Need to Speak About Cory, an intense steampunk thriller about a rag-tag band of cypherpunks who bring down multinational music corporations.
igpajo

Well that looks heartwarming. I remember seeing a teaser trailer for it and thought it looked like a comedy. Looks like anything but after that trailer. Definitley want to see it though.
SCAQTony

Been there, doing that! (I actually have physical injuries.)

If there is anybody else raising a “Satan’s Little Helper” Lots of “time-in” with the kid and team activities; (water polo/swimming raised her self esteem greatly), and she is getting good grades and is almost near normal. Your demon may vary.
hypersomniac

Tilda Swinton is amazing. Keep sending your finest exports this way UK and Oz.
mkultra

I would love to see a parody of this… “We Need to Talk About Calvin”, following Calvin Klein family from birth through the process of his mother discovering that he’s… stylish.
- Justin Burns
  
  Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” would be a great subject for this as well :)
millie fink

Hmm, most “bad seeds” are made, not born. I hope the surprise twist at the end of this one reveals the former, instead of continuing to depict (and reinforce fallacious notions of) the latter.
- phormula
  
  Sociopathy is most definitely inherited. Although not all bad seeds are sociopaths
  - blackbooks
    
    Sociopathy is a social construction. Relating it to heritability is a cry back to the bad old 1920s, and the ‘moral imbecile’. Sterilisation, anyone?
    - Mantissa128
      
      Holy cow. Google much? ASPD and psychopathy are hardly a social construction, they are brain disorders.
    - blueelm
      
      No, just no. Postmodern analysis works great for art, but some mental illnesses are real and some mental illnesses are more dangerous than others for the people around the mentally ill person.
    - blueelm
      
      By the way, lots of things are heritable. Deafness, certain types of cognitive delays, certain types of dementia, heart diseases, crushingly horrible diseases that kill slowly, hairlip, lots of freaking things are heritable. None of these things are excuses for sterilization though every single one has been broached that way in the past. The fact that some people believe in eugenics (typically people with very shallow understandings of genetics and evolution) means nothing. Some people are wrong, so what? It doesn’t change the evidence.
bbmcrae

Glad to see Tilda Swinton playing a glaring, gaunt, scarecrow-ish lady for once.
lknope

I definitely recommend the book this was based on by Lionel Shriver. As for the nature/nuture debate Shriver said in an interview that half of her readers seemed to think Kevin was born that way and half blamed it on his mother which made Shriver feel she had done her job as an author. I tend to think Kevin was born that way and his environment didn’t help which is probably closest to what happens in real life. People are born with whatever gene and that gene is or is not expressed based on their environment. It’s not really ever 100% nature or 100% nurture. In the book, the couple had a daughter as well and she was sweet as pie.

Anyway, it’s an excellent book and I’m glad Swinton is playing the mother. Slightly odd choice for the father but he was kind of a doofus in the book. Not exactly an idiot but more fully committed to a certain view of the world which did not include a psychopath son.
- blueelm
  
  It sounds like a good book. I find these kinds of things hard to deal with, but I think the test of good art is if people end up arguing about it.
greebo

It’s an absolutely incredible book. No idea what the movie is like, but I felt after reading the book that it’s basically unfilmable. The book is harrowing, evocative, and has an amazing (“I did not see that coming”) ending. Just read it.