The Family Stone (Thomas Bezucha 2005)
Posted on January 30 at 12.35, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
It all makes sense now. Thank you to the people behind this film for clarifying to me how life unfolds in your typical liberal American family. Thank you for showing that clichés are stronger than reality and that continuing to believe in the power of stereotypes will help us reach happiness. Thank you for showing us the way.
Everybody in this film is so perfect, I almost started feeling guilty about my own imperfect nature and condition. The characters do suffer from the occasional shortcoming but these are quickly taken care of through, I suppose that’s what they are trying to tell us, the latent perfection that is in all of us. The message could be coming from a US Army advert: be all that you can be….The only thing that puzzles me is why the film was not shot in Switzerland. At least, the extraordinary amount of cheese we are subjected to when watching this tripe could perhaps be more easily explained.
I did not study psychology but I would venture to state that any patient subjected repeatedly and from a very young age to this kind of fake reality let’s-all-be-perfect rubbish would develop a feeling of inadequacy, a psychotic and distorted view of the world that, in an effort to imitate the inimitable, would itself in turn lead to extreme and disconnected actions. Get my drift?
Thought bubble forming over head of screenplay writer:
Let’s have a teddy bear liberal father who is happy to let his strong and sick wife dominate the household. Except when he is really angry. Then everyone listens. Let’s have the difficult and attractive young daughter. Hmm, let’s also have the attractive successful son. Why don’t we add another son, who is very attractive, but kind of a troublemaker, except that he really isn’t and his quirkiness consists mostly of being slightly less successful than his brother, or something like that? Here comes the best part: let’s have a gay son with a speech disability whose partner is black and is like a second son to the mother? Wooohouh, that’s really good…i am so good. My mother must have ingested a lot of Omega 3 when she was pregnant with me for me to come up with such brilliant thoughts. Ok, enough for this evening. I will continue tomorrow in my efforts to come up with more brilliant clichés and to make this family as real as possible!
Thought bubble burst.
Thought bubble reopens briefly: and i think i will have a tight ass play the role of the nobody-loves-me-because-i-am-such-a-tight-ass. That way maybe people will think she is not such a tight ass afterall in real life if she can ‘make fun’ of herself in the film.
Whatever.
You: 
Loading ...
| Me: 
|
|
One Response to “The Family Stone”
-
Little Miss Sunshine - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
April 14, 2007 at 17.16[...] What was all that fuss about? Little Miss Sunshine being nominated for Best Picture? Winning for best original screenplay? I am confused. Not that LMS is a bad film. It’s cute, entertaining, and a bit funny. But it also feels so much like recycled material, developed at the American ‘indie’ (indie as in the indie divisions of the big studios) film school for moderately gifted youngsters. If we believe Peter Biskind, the death of the American independent film, if there really ever was such a thing as an independent film outside of the work of a few directors from the 50s to the 80s, happened already several years ago. Little Miss Sunshine certainly would seem to corroborate this view. Me, you and Everyone we know, Napoleon Dynamite, The Squid and the Whale, The Station Agent, Little Children, You Can’t Take it with You, The Family Stone, American Beauty…the more of these films come out, the more they resemble each other. We are quite far from the days of Cassavetes, Jarmush, Haines, Solondz and even of Payne and the early work of O. Russell. Whatever freshness and originality some of the ‘indie’ films of the 90s promised have been swallowed by a new mainstream… [...]