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    The Family Stone

    Reviewed by
    adamwatchesmovies@

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    I might be in the minority here, but to me, “The Family Stone” felt like someone injected “Meet the Parents” with a whole lot of cheesy drama and then sucked out all of the funny. It’s a confused mess of a movie that doesn’t know where it wants to go or what it wants to say. It’s the Christmas holiday and the Stone family is gathering to celebrate together. Dian Keaton plays the overbearing mother; Craig T. Nelson plays her more relaxed husband. Luke Wilson plays their stoner son; Elizabeth Reaser plays Susannah, the pregnant daughter; Tyrone Giordano plays the youngest son, who is deaf and gay and lives with his partner Patrick (Brian J. White); Rachel McAdams plays Amy, the youngest sibling. The main characters are Dermot Mulroney as Everett, the straight-laced, kind of boring son that dreams of exploring the world. He is bringing his long time girlfriend, Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) to the reunion so he can introduce her to the family and ask his mom for the family ring in order to propose. Unfortunately, Meredith is an uptight career woman and not only doesn’t she fit in with the family, but they all instantly dislike her. Would-be wackiness ensues among the family drama so Meredith invites her younger sister Claire (Julie Morton) to help her out.

    This movie doesn’t know what it wants to do. It’s supposed to be a mix of a comedy and a drama, but despite the talented cast that all give solid performances; it’s a dog’s breakfast. I found that I didn’t like any of the characters, at all. Meredith is the female equivalent of Jason Biggs’ character from American Pie in this movie and she proves herself to be so cringe-inducing and so stupid that you end up wanting to dunk your head in a pool of hungry piranha fish just to get away. She constantly says things that are misinterpreted in a way that’s downright cartoonish. Her character is so dumb, and so careless with her words that she ends up putting both of her feet in her mouth in a way that’s not even believable. If she’s a high-powered businesswoman in New York, how come she hasn’t learned a thing about handling situations like an adult and can’t keep trap shut? I’d go into more details about the other characters, but we’ve got a lot of material to cover and not all that much time to do so. Let’s just say that they range from irrationally bitchy (Amy, mother Sybill) to delightfully bland (pregnant sister Susannah) and none of them are really fun to follow.

    The irritating thing I found watching the film is that I saw all of these talented people being given a script that feels like the embellished whines of a lonely, middle-aged woman. The film is filled with groan-worthy drama. In another movie it would mean that there’s a ton of stuff to look forward to, but here it simply feels bloated. We’ve got distrust in relationships, the fear of abandonment, the fear of death, sadness at the thought of not being accepted because of one’s sexual orientation, regret over missed opportunities, sibling betrayal, anxiety over not being a good enough son, marriage proposals, lost love and we’ve even got a baby on the way and the chance that Christmas will be ruined. Some of these are hard-hitting issues, so what are they doing in a movie where a woman accidentally puts her car in reverse and crashes it, people get into brawls set to “The Nutcracker Suite”, people are ruining their outfits by dropping food all over themselves and misunderstandings about who is sleeping with who? Just when the movie was starting to get to me on an emotional level, here comes the unfunny comedy totally out of left field! What we’ve got here is a comedy-drama where the comedy is never funny, and where the drama is undermined by an avalanche of clichéd developments. This movie even has a scene where a character, having fallen in love, has to chase down the guy/girl of their dreams before they leave town forever. Come on, I thought we were done with that been-there, done-that trope!

    While I didn’t actually like the characters in the movie, I did feel like they were well developed and they felt (for the most part) like real people. Unfortunately, they frequently act in ways that make you question whether or not they’ve ever been around other human beings. You’re telling me that Everett never gave the woman he wants to propose to a brief introduction about what some of his family’s beliefs are and yet he choose the annual Christmas get-together to introduce his girlfriend to the entire them? As for Meredith, there’s a scene where she ends up in a dire need of a change of clothes... and yet she doesn’t ask any of the 4 women staying in the house for a new shirt? Even the little girl in the movie I found to be unbelievable. When you’re 10, or however old she is, you’re up at 6 in the morning to open up your presents, you’re not sitting idly by while the adult’s drama plays out. Everyone in this movie has at least one scene that will make you wonder what the writer was thinking when they were developing the characters.

    The fact that it’s a comedy that is never funny should be enough. In this case, “The Family stone” is an increasingly irritating Christmas movie with a completely preposterous ending that’s supposed to mean who knows what. It also has the gall to have genuinely good moments blended in with clichés you would expect to see in daytime soap operas. I know this movie has its fans out there, so I hope someone can explain to me what they see in this film, because I thought even the title was a lame joke. (Fullscreen version on Dvd, December 23, 2014)

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    adamwatchesmovies@  25.12.2014 age: 26-35 2,867 reviews

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