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?
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.