SnoopyStyle
Adam (Jeremy Piven) and Joanne Fiedler (Jami Gertz) have their son Benjamin (Daryl Sabara)'s bar mitzvah coming up. They attend Adam's former best friend and Hollywood agent partner Arnie Stein (Larry Miller)'s son Zachary's grand bar mitzvah. It's Brentwood and the Fiedlers decide to top it. Casey Nudelman (Cheryl Hines) is the planner. Benjamin has a crush on Ashley Grunwald and Karen Sussman is his know-it-all classmate. Rose (Doris Roberts) is his grandmother. He doesn't like his parents' outlandish plans and invites his wacky estranged grandfather Irwin (Garry Marshall) who is living with Sacred Feather (Daryl Hannah) on an Indian reservation.This dysfunctional family is wacky. Their problems are not that relatable or actually that funny. It's broadly sit-comish. For example, it isn't enough for Irwin and Sacred Feather to be hippies but they have to live on an Indian reservation. Everybody has to be wacky on the next level. I would also like to like Daryl Sabara more but he doesn't have quite the right adorable loveability. There is a nice message in the end but I would have preferred better laughs.
Melanie Lee (mnl_1221)
You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this heartwarming, funny movie about a Hollywood agent Adam Fiedler and his nearly-13-year-old son Benjamin. When their neighbors, the Steins, throw an over-the-top Bar Mitzvah party with the theme the movie Titanic, Adam plans to top the Steins with a baseball blast at Dodger Stadium. Benjamin, not sure what he really wants but resentful of his father's bluster, secretly invites his grandfather to come to the party--two weeks early. Grandpa Irwin arrives in his RV with his New Age girlfriend in tow. Trouble is, Irwin is estranged from son Adam, having left Adam's mother Rose decades ago. Can Irwin's visit somehow shed some light on the true meaning of Bar Mitzvah? One benefit of the movies is getting a peek into worlds otherwise shut off from you. As a Gentile, I haven't yet had the privilege of attending anyone's Bar or Bat Mitzvah yet. I'm sure am glad to be "invited" to this one! Although the religious discussions aren't as deep as, say, The Chosen, you do get glimpses into a Bar/Bat Mitvzah class and conversations with a rabbi. You see familiar faces such as Doris Roberts, Garry Marshall, Richard Benjamin, Darryl Hannah, and Larry Miller, as well as Jeremy Piven, Jami Gertz, and Daryl Sabara as Adam, Joanne, and Benjamin Fiedler. You get to ponder such themes as spirituality, materialism, and adult responsibility. And you get to have a funny good time!
verbusen
I actually watched this movie on a plane flight. So? you may be asking yourself "What's the big deal about that?" Well this flight was on an Arab plane! I was flying on Gulf Air from London to Kuwait, and the flight was pretty full (aren't they all nowadays?). And they had just shown X Men 3 (its a 6 hour flight) and up pops the Jewish kid talking about his Bar Mitzvah, MAN! I started looking around to see if anyone was like gonna freak out because this movie is unmistakably Jewish! Luckily no incidents involved and I got home to Kuwait safe. I just had to tell that story, to me if they can show a movie about Jews on an Arab flight there may be hope in the world after all. About the movie, I once converted to Reform Jewish to marry a Jewish girl when I was much younger, that didn't work out and I didn't keep up with it, but growing up with a lot of Jews in New York I did find it humorous at times. I would only see Reform Jews truly enjoying this movie because the characters don't strike me as very conservative. It's no American Pie because the kid is only 13 and its really not for kids, so this movie is really hard to like a whole lot, but I did watch it through because I was on a flight and I chuckled a little. All light weight in the end though, there was little resolution done with the Grandfather and the relationships he left behind (like his Wife).
LigiaMontoya
What bothers me about this movie is that it SHOULD have been better: there's real potential. The characters were enjoyable, the idea was good, the acting was excellent. But the whole things was very unconvincing. It was a common plot: a total idiot has a conversion and sees the light. But for that to work, it has to be at least a LITTLE convincing. In this case, the "conversion" was entirely off-screen, probably because they realized that it was just too extreme to make work on screen. Everything was all solved at the end, in a way that was too pat, too sudden and too simple. So it comes across like a long sitcom instead of a movie.
AD
