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Resurrecting the Movies thread...

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Lynne:

--- Quote from: ineedcrayons on October 28, 2007, 04:40:24 pm ---Whatever I pick, I'll report back here afterward. That is, unless I have become an obsessive devotee of the Michael Clayton or Dan in Real Life message boards  ;D (highly doubtful)!
--- End quote ---

 :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
Have fun!

serious crayons:
I wound up going to Dan in Real Life, and I can report that it was cute, light, mildly funny, gently touching. It's what The Family Stone would have been if TFS hadn't sucked (the two have almost identical plots, only from different characters' POV).

Steve Carrel isn't my idea of a romantic lead, but he's very likable and, as called for in this role, very much a regular-guy type. And he has interesting ways of reading lines, some unexpected rhythms in his speech. The only problem is that from time to time I get a disconcerting flash of Michael Scott. Which I suppose is just an indication of how good he is in that role.

Juliet Binoche, for some reason, got on my nerves. Maybe because she was playing The Most Perfect Woman of All Time. Couldn't Dan have fallen for someone who was just pretty cool, instead of unbelievably amazingly fantastic? Dane Cook was actually fairly appealing.

OK, that's the latest from the critic's corner.

MaineWriter:
I hated The Family Stone. Did Dan in Real Life have the "horrible nasty mother who was dying from cancer and everyone thought she was wonderful character" (ie, Diane Keaton in TFS)? I hope not. How about the obligatory perfect gay couple with their adopted child?

What an awful movie that was. Ugh. It gives me creeps just thinking about it. And I wasted money to see this in a theater! Ack!

L

serious crayons:

--- Quote from: MaineWriter on October 29, 2007, 07:03:29 am ---I hated The Family Stone. Did Dan in Real Life have the "horrible nasty mother who was dying from cancer and everyone thought she was wonderful character" (ie, Diane Keaton in TFS)? I hope not. How about the obligatory perfect gay couple with their adopted child?
--- End quote ---

Yes, TFS was really, really awful. I wouldn't feel so bad about having wasted money on it -- God knows I've wasted money on other bad movies -- but I dragged my SONS to it with me. They wouldn't even have liked Dan in Real Life, let alone TFS. Poor kids. We had just moved -- no wonder they hate it here! Plus, I wasted money on three tickets, and it wasn't even a matinee!

Whenever I think of how much I hated TFS, I remember the very worst scene in that terrible movie, the one where Sarah Jessica Parker asks Diane Keaton, "Don't you wish your son had been normal?" No high-powered Manhattan career gal, as she was supposed to be, would say something that stupid. Even if she thought it, she wouldn't say it, especially right in front of the son.

Anyway, no. DiRL didn't have an obnoxious, horrible, much-beloved, tragically dying Diane Keaton. Just a sweetly authoritative Diane Wiest. No gay couple at all, I'm afraid. And instead of screechy irritating SJP, there's beatific saintly Juliet Binoche. And instead of Dermot Mulroney there's Dane Cook who -- in this particular role, anyway -- is an improvement.

But if you imagine TFS told through the eyes of Luke Wilson, only instead of a stoned slacker he's a regular guy with three daughters, that's DiRL. Both feature a big, close-knit, rollicking, matriarch-headed, upper-middle-class family that plays games together and gets into each other's business. Both feature a new girlfriend brought to the party by one son who winds up with another. And so on.

MaineWriter:
I remember some critic--maybe Roger Ebert--said TFS is going to become "the next Christmas tradition, like 'A Wonderful Life'." Yeah, in which dysfunctional universe?

Speaking of the Wilson brothers, my husband and daughter saw "The Darjeeling Limited" yesterday (I had a prior commitment). They both gave it two thumbs up and my husband said, unlike other Wes Anderson movies, this one actually had an ending.

L

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