mavvymoo
I can't believe the hate or just non-watching of this gem! From the great actors to the funniness, it should be on everyone's holiday watch list!
Robert D. Ruplenas
This effort from director Jodie Foster is more disastrous than the family gathering it portrays. The premise - a Thanksgiving get together of a family which is 'dysfunctional' in all the clichéd Hollywood ways - holds ample opportunity for natural comedy, but in this movie every ounce of humor is contrived and forced. And half of it misses the mark because the characters involved are either so pitiful or so unpleasant that we feel no desire to laugh (laughter in the showing my wife and I saw was decidedly spare).The movie goes on and on. My wife caught a much-needed nap in the middle; I thought my watch had broken. "Lawrence of Arabia", at four hours, passes faster than this dog at two.Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning, Bancroft especially, put in heroic efforts and come closest to rising above the material (but not quite).If you're looking for a funny movie about family get togethers, rent National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation". Yes, the humor in that movie is contrived, but it never pretends to be anything else, unlike Foster's effort which aspires toward 'realistic' humor and ends up being more contrived than the Griswold family.An unquestioned flop.
csimpkins53
I can't stand the character of Tommy in this movie. He is just a total a*****e. This dislike of him has nothing to do with the fact that Tommy is gay (I am male but I am not gay by the way). He treats everyone like s**t! The mean spirited things he says about the down-on-his-luck character portrayed by David Strathairn is just so extremely cruel and heartless! Tommy is just a very selfish, cruel, immature bastard! All he cares about is himself and as far as he is concerned everyone else can go to hell. Claudia tries to be kind to him but he is even cruel to her. He tells her to get in his car and then repeatedly screeches away from her leaving her on the sidewalk. Also, he intrudes on her in a very disrespectful, infantile way when she is showering, what a piece of s**t he is! To paraphrase Joanne: "Even if I just met him on the street and he gave me his phone number...I'd throw it away"! I wouldn't want to have anything to do with this reject! All the way through the movie I just want to punch his lights out! What an ass!! I believe that the proper term for a person who behaves in this manner is that he is a narcissist, and in the worst possible way!
ww7872-572-188638
Take two hip, sophisticated siblings from their creative lives in the city and send them home to their family in the suburbs. Make sure they spend their entire visit letting everyone know how superior they are to the ones left behind. This can be done through eye rolls, snide remarks, snickers and mean spirited comments.While it's true the home town folk were sometimes odd, self-centered, grudge carrying, or shallow, none of them deserved to be treated like dirt beneath the two protagonist's feet.Not funny, and lacking any of the warmth we might expect from holiday movies.
AD
