Devran ikiz "Manchester by the Sea" is a sensational drama that was nominated for 6 Academy Awards including the Best Motion Picture of the Year, and won two of them; Best Original Screenplay, Kenneth Lonergan, and Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, Casey Affleck. When I start watching the film, I had no information about it, I didn't know what the story is about, I didn't even know there is a place called "Manchester by the Sea," in Massachusetts. After a couple of scenes, there was one thing I was sure of, Casey Affleck has won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his exceptional role as Lee Chandler. His performance is one of the best performances of the 21th Century, and "Manchester by the Sea" is one of the best films of the year 2016. It is so annoying that I came across this beautiful film accidentally. I haven't seen any commercials about it, I haven't heard anyone talking about it. I was making a list of Oscar Nominated films, and there I found it. "Manchester by the Sea" was written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan. It has 137 minutes of runtime and grossed over $77 Million against a budget of $8 Million. This film is a slap in the face for the critics who claim cinema can't produce any more original stories. It is also a strong proof of the fact that you don't need big budgets to make beautiful films.In the first 10 minutes, the director helps you sympathize with the main character of the film, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck). You get the feeling that even you meet him in real life, he is not going to be your friend. He doesn't care anything else other than his business. You can see the constant sorrow in his eyes, and sadness is all over him. Immediately you get to think that, there is something wrong with this man, something has happened in his past. This intense description of the protagonist in the early scenes of the film indicates that his emotional self is going to set the limits for the "Manchester by the Sea." The more you understand, the more you relate to the story. That's why director pays special attention to the character details. After this intense visual description, director starts to reveal the mystery over Lee, by showing us flashbacks from his past. After this point, story evolves with two directions, present and past. Everything starts to make sense about Lee's inner self. This storytelling technique is one of the reasons why "Manchester by the Sea" is nominated for The Best Motion Picture of the Year. A similar storytelling technique is used in Christopher Nolan's Memento.Lee works as a janitor and a handyman in a different part of Massachusetts. He receives a phone call about his brother who has a heart condition. When he reaches the hospital, which is 90 minutes away from where Lee lives, he finds out that his brother has passed away. In his will, he assigns Lee as the legal guardian for his teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Through the flashbacks, we understand the relations and life of Lee. He used to be married with three kids. One evening, after intense drinking with his friends in his place, he goes out to buy more beer and forgets to put the screen protection for the fire place which he just lighted up to heat the house for his kids. House burns down and all his three kids die. During this scene, there is almost no talking and if I am not mistaken, in the background Bach's Air is playing. Such a tragedy was shown with a relaxing and equally emotional classical music. Throughout the film, there are other scenes accompanied by classical music.Imagine yourself as Lee, your life is destroyed. You kill your three kids by burning the house by mistake. Your brother dies, your wife divorces you, when you can barely take care of yourself, you are asked to take care of another human being. No one wants you in the town you used to live and, under these circumstances, Lee manages to survive. His soul is damaged, he doesn't feel humane feelings anymore, but he manages to survive. This is one of the most realistic films about people who survive through such tragedies in life. It is a beautifully made true drama. With exceptional performances and cold atmosphere that suits the progression of the story, "Manchester by the Sea" is one of the best films of 2016 and it is not going to be easily forgotten once watched.

James Kenneth Lonergan's award-showered offering from 2016 perhaps once does enough to justify all the praise, in a scene of almost vomited-out guilt, love, sadness and forgiveness between the formerly-married Randi and Lee Chandler (Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck). But 137 minutes is a lot of time to include just a couple of minutes of brilliance. And it is brilliance diluted by plenty of film-making arrogance, given the way most audience members will become quite lost at the start, before beginning to pick up what is going on at some later point.The Casey Affleck part is the key one here, but boy do circumstances conspire to make it hard to feel anything at all for his erratic, mostly diffident, though regularly violent character. So a tragedy has irrevocably messed up his life, but it is one he contributed to, even if the police refuse to pin anything on him, as no offence has really been committed. The worst thing Lee does is take drink and drugs and revel in a foul-mouthed manner with a party of his equally-intoxicated mates, thereby preventing his (equally foul-mouthed) mother-of-three wife from getting the sleep she needs. And then, when he finally waves his guests off home in he small hours, his first thought is obviously not to go to bed, or to clean up, or to tuck in his kids, but rather to buzz off to the all-night store to get more provisions, thereby abandoning the rest of his family to their fate.I've got problems of my own, without devoting too much sympathy to this guy... Roll forward to the present day, and suddenly Lee is left with responsibility for his brother's now-fatherless boy, as rather well-played by Lucas Hedges.At first glance, you may think this is all Oscar fare because it takes a heavier-than-heavy serious story and features a host of dysfunctional characters, as well as including **ck in almost every sentence, in the midst of mostly-dull-as-ditchwater dialogue. But the truth here is worse, for - read and presented in another way - this could indeed have been a moving film about one brother who would like to live on but has his life cut short by disease thinking up a perfect if risky strategy by which to give his tragedy-struck brother a chance to emerge from his zombie-like state and start again. That's actually a great story which deserved better highlighting than it got.For out here among we real-life watchers, the film - associated with simply atrocious soundtrack choices culled from classical music - can be seen to wander on in incoherence and misery, with limited plot input and confusing story-telling, and a main message that reads that some tragedies (aka self-inflicted screwups) can't ever be overcome. Well, thanks a lot for that!

daoldiges I didn't really know anything about this film when I went to see it other than that Casey Affleck was supposed to have given a really good performance. I think he did a decent job in portraying this troubled character. It was one of those kind of quiet, brooding characters that doesn't really say much, which to me explains why so many reviewers on here criticized his performance. To me at least it seems many viewers need lots of dialogue and action for it to be considered 'real acting'. This type of performance is literally always lost on viewers with those type of expectations. Michelle Williams also gives a strong performance, although she had deceptively little screen time. I will say that some of the 'pop' classical music choices chosen as part of the score did kind of throw off the film's rhythm for me. While there wasn't any new territory covered or introduced here I still enjoyed it enough that I felt good about having seen it.

Edgar Soberon Torchia The appropriate use of music in films is one of the crucial problems of current cinema, especially in American movies. It is a formula inherited from Tiomkin, Steiner, Waxman, Korngold and Herrmann, and the filmmakers for whom they musicalized: together they packed the complete product (as in "Gone with the Wind"), without knowing when to stop the music. However, almost a century has passed, sound has made great advances and the effect of omnipresent music has become obnoxious. Was it necessary to punctuate the tragedy of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) for eight endless minutes, since the moment he goes out to the store one fatidic night, until the scene when he leaves the office of the lawyer who has read his brother's will, with cloying adagio by Albinoni or whoever composed it? For me, the music selection is the detrimental aspect of the film: it has nothing to do with the history, but with the unrestrained sentimentality of director Kenneth Lonergan. I liked the uncle-nephew interplay and all the great drama about pain and death ... The excellent performances by the whole cast are enough to transmit everything! Lee's silences and fists of anger, the panic attack of his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges), the dialogue of guilt and forgiveness between Lee and his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams), the loneliness of Sandy's mother, Jill (Heather Burns)... The inclusion of classics is redundant and mawkish (and the "house composer", Lesley Barber, was caught up, judging from his title chorale), gaining more presence than such an adequate soundtrack as the voices of Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald or The Ink Spots. The director did not contain himself. The classics were good for "Barry Lyndon." Kubrick excelled at that. Even the hyper-contrast between "The Blue Danube" and the spacecraft in "2001, a Space Odyssey" was a brilliant move. But Mr. Lonergan is no Kubrick. With 10 or 15 minutes less, a selection of the American songbook and the classics saved for when he drives his car down the road, Kenneth Lonergan would have made a perfect film.