Change Your Image
ssaftler
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Beekeeper (2024)
2020s version of Schwarzenegger actioners
With the body count and all of the shooting, I couldn't help but wonder if Jason Statham isn't turning into the British version of Arnold for the current generation.
The plot was simple. Scammers take someone's life savings, victim kills herself. Unfortunately for the scummers, this victim has a good friend who is an expert in hunting down and eliminating his prey. All while working around the edges of the law.
Statham somehow gets the lowdown on the scammers in no time when the FBI (with the victim's daughter working the case for them) appears to have had no luck tracking down the same group for many years. Once he gets to the bottom rung of the scam group, he continually works his way up until the final surprise when he discovers who's at the top of the hive.
Apiary puns abound throughout, and law enforcement, as usual, act like a bunch of clueless buffoons. (Well, I guess that's not too far-fetched nowadays.)
There was a lot of shooting, explosions and hand-to-hand fighting going on continually. What I couldn't believe is that, in all of that mayhem, there was little if any "collateral damage".
Eh, it was a good popcorn movie, I suppose.
The Hill (2023)
Decent family film with baseball too!
Much like "Field of Dreams", this movie was more about family dynamics with baseball as the underlying glue holding it together.
You can read the "reviews" here from the group of "any religious content in a movie makes it a bad movie" tools or you can read about what the movie is all about. Personally, I'm not terribly religious and not a Christian in any event. Still, being a contemporary of the main character, that portion of the story didn't bother me at all. I know many people in our age group (mid-60s to mid-70s) who grew up that way and some are still like that now.
Set in Texas in the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, it shows the church as the main center of his small town, much like many similar towns around the country then (and still now). Dad is a preacher, very into his religion. His son, who was born with skeletal problems requiring braces to walk and, serious maneuverability problems at an early age, lives and breathes baseball, when he isn't busy studying his Bible passages as demanded by Pastor Daddy. Doing his best to overcome his physical and parental problems, Rickey Hill surprises friends and scouts with his hitting prowess and is offered a contract with a major league organization.
He comes close to his MLB goal, but his talent, while good as a Texas high schooler isn't quite enough to get him to "the show" before age and health problems finally shut down his dream.
Mafia Mamma (2023)
Definitely not "The Godfather"
The premise of the movie was okay, I suppose. American born in Italy gets surprise inheritance from grandfather, goes there and decides to stay. However the inheritance is a "Mafia" family (do they even use that term in Italy?) under the guise of a winery. Toni Collette is the lead, something of a nebbish who is more concerned with everyone else at her expense. Going to Italy, she wants to do touristy things rather than deal with what she's been given. "Hilarity ensues."
The "mob" scenes are extremely over the top. Most of the shootouts reminded me of the old cops and robbers movie where hundreds of shots are fired and very few people are killed or seriously injured.
The couple things that bothered me the most:
- The Italian guy she met at the airport and with whom she has an affair has a perfect American accent. At least most of the other Italian characters spoke English with a decided European accent.
- As she and others are walking through the vineyards, she stops to pick some grapes from the vine that look more like standard table grapes than wine grapes. Maybe the small size of wine grapes doesn't show up well on camera? I'd guess that the average person watching this might not know the difference, but I most certainly did!
One scene really made my wife and I laugh out loud though, and made the movie sort of worth watching. When her new boyfriend's "Aunt Esmeralda" is feeding Toni Collette's "cousins" at dinner, she kept heaping more and more helpings of pasta on them. This reminded us both of our friend's late mother, who was known to get insulted with me and another friend if we took less than three helpings of her pasta at dinner. Of course, the pasta was usually served before the meat (and potatoes), the salad, the cheese and fruit, the dessert with espresso and about 6 bottles of wine and other spirits as you go!
Manifest: Final Boarding (2023)
Good ending, but semi-predictable
The final episode did an adequate job of wrapping up the mystery, we thought. I have to admit that I could see some of the "surprises" coming before they appeared, and I even predicted the basic ending about halfway through the episode. Still, the way they interspersed the passengers' "alternate lives" with the "real world" was well done. Almost makes you wish for a "follow-up" episode or movie set in 2018 to show how the passengers' lives turned out.
There were a few good twists and turns to keep you interested. I couldn't help but notice that the writers paid homage to some other films that I've enjoyed, from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to "Close Encounters", with a bit of a "Bob Newhart Show" thrown in for good measure.
I have to say that I was happy that Netflix chose to release all 10 episodes at once, instead of stretching them out over multiple weeks. By binge-watching them (4 one night, 6 the next), you get to follow the continuity much better.
You People (2023)
Unwatchable!
My wife and I just attempted to watch this tripe. The trailer looked like fun and their did appear to be a good number of stars in it. How bad could it be?
Basically, it's the story of a Jewish guy who wants to be "hip" by espousing the current multi-cultural clap trap, then accidentally meets, dates and falls in love with a Black woman who is Muslim. And both of their families appear to be quite prejudiced to "their" way of living and overbearing. Fun and frolic are supposed to ensue when they get married. At least that's what we got from the trailer.
I think we got through the first 15 minutes of it and decided that it is not something for our age group. We almost gave up after the first 5 minutes with the scene at Yom Kippur services. Won't spoil it but lets just say that the discussion in the middle of services was "inappropriate" for general public, let alone a Temple on the Holiest Day of the Jewish calendar.
And the next 10 minutes got no better, at which point it was on to something else.
I think I should have known better when I saw all of the well-known actors, young and old, at the start of the movie. At least it was part of our Netflix subscription, so no extra money out of pocket!
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
Good in parts, bad in others
I guess I should have expected a little stretching of the truth with this one. The Madonna arc was quite strange and a little too bizarre, even for Weird Al. The fact that much of the second half of the movie went long and hard into this at the expense, perhaps, of his continuing success in the 80s and 90s was a disappointment to be sure.
That said, I want to commend Daniel Radcliffe for his accurate portrayal of Weird Al. It was easy to see the Weird one in Radcliffe's performance. Also, Rainn Wilson was spot on as Dr. Demento. Having spent much time in the 70s and 80s listening to the his show, it was a fun remembrance of 10PM on Sunday nights at college, where many of us would gather around and "wind up our radio" to hear the latest wacky tunes from the good Doctor.
All in all, I'm happy that it was on free streaming. I would have been a little more disappointed if I'd gone to the theater to see it!
The Many Saints of Newark (2021)
I still want to know "who made Tony Soprano"!
I greatly anticipated the airing of this movie, especially given the good reviews on Gandolfini playing his dad as a teenager. Also, a chance to see how Tony made his way into the business from the start was intriguing.
A lot of the characters were well played as younger versions from the series. Livia was a nasty codger even as a young mother. And Silvio's rug was perfect, although I always thought he was closer to Tony's age.
The two things I found most disappointing were:
1) An over reliance on the whole black experience. Yes, I know that the Newark riots and the racial tensions as a result were pretty bad. My hometown got a champion boxer (Marvelous Marvin Hagler) as a result of his family's wish to escape the area. Still, Moltisanti and his gang seemed to pay nothing more than lip service to the problem, except when they were taking their money.
2) A noted lack of information about HOW Tony went from football hopeful to gang boss. Uncle Dickie was always there for him, especially when his father went to prison. But there was nothing on how Dickie or others influenced young Tony to "turn".
Maybe there's a second movie in the works from Dickie's murder to Tony's rise?
The Florida Project (2017)
A long "Little Rascals" episode
After some consideration, it occurs to me that this "project" was a 2-hour episode of the old "Little Rascals" show. Mooney plays the part of Spanky, while Scooty and later Jancey switch off as Alfalfa. And move the location from some nebulous Southern California town to the seedier parts of Orlando, Florida.
With the exception of Willem Dafoe, who plays the motel manager and, in some respects, the silent caretaker of the children, the adults were a bunch of unlikeable characters whose sole purpose in life seems to be to serve the tourists in the area, in one way or another. The kids were cute for about 10 minutes, but really grate on your nerves as the movie aimlessly continues, with little plot and no real drama or comedy to bind it together until the end.
Now, about the end... I was expecting a voice over to tell us that the kids just won some great sporting event (if you've seen the ads, you'll understand).
All in all, I felt at the end similarly to my response to "The Blair Witch" movie. A lot of hype from the critics with no real payoff.
Friends with Kids (2011)
Saw on Streaming Video, wish we hadn't!
We had the desire to watch a light-hearted romcom last night, so we decided on this, based on the cast.
Time to pull out the old guy card, but this "comedy" for today seemed anything but funny. About the only couple chuckles we got out of it were a couple references to trends from maybe 30 years ago. And the chuckles were wondering how many of the target audience for this movie would have gotten the references.
I'd like to say it was a mindless waste of a couple hours, but I'd leave the "mindless" term out of it. In general, I do not recommend it to anyone over the age of 50, childless or not.
Stowaway (2021)
Trailer: A space movie with some thought. Movie: A soppy tearjerker that happened in space
When we watched the trailer, I was fairly jazzed by it. Having grown up in the 1960s and early 1970s when NASA actually faced many basic challenges in their flights, I was happy to engage in a space movie that wasn't a Lucas fantasy. I've always loved the movie "Apollo 13" for its simple engineering fixes to the many problems that arose from the initial explosion, and I hoped that this movie might be something of an expansion of those real life events.
My disappointment started early enough during the initial launch, where the three astronauts were using cabin oxygen, instead of using their suit's life-support systems until they were safely into space. I'm not a space expert, but I'm reasonably sure that using their spacesuit's systems during launch is a fairly common procedure these days.
I continued to lose feeling for the technical "problems" when Michael was found in the CO2 scrubber, totally destroying the scrubber with no alternative but the small gap filling scrubbers that Daniel Kim deployed early. Actually, this was one of the few laughs I found in the movie, thinking back to the similar CO2 scrubbing problems on Apollo 13. Still, as others have noted here, a two-year mission with 3 people in what they later admitted was really a 2 person vehicle and no backup plans for simple parts that could and probably would break down over the course of the trip seemed really silly.
My final break with any technical reality came with the whole "we need extra oxygen" scenario. To begin with, why did they wait the 3 or 4 days between this realization and attempting to go to the Kingfisher to bleed off the oxygen instead of waiting until it was an emergency rush at the end? Also, the whole climbing of the masts hand over hand seemed odd to me, since NASA has been using powered transportation for space walks for at least 10-15 years, yet this mission had no such technology?
In the end, I had little problem with Anna Kendrick being the valiant one to sacrifice herself during the solar storm to get some oxygen to the crew. She struck me as the whiny crew member through much of the movie, so her self-serving finale made sense, I suppose. Still, I asked myself more than once how either she could have passed the psychological testing from the space program before being brought within 100 miles of this project. She seemed to have too much personal baggage to deal with the realities of such a demanding mission. And her handling of the Michael Adams "addition" followed right along with this baggage. Her role in the mission didn't seem as unique as Daniel Dae Kim's, so I would think that someone more space hardened would have gone in her place.
In the final analysis, I'd give Toni Colette a 5 for her effort, the Michael Adams character a 5 as well as someone who was clearly in a place he shouldn't or didn't want to be. Daniel Dae Kim gets a 3.5 from me, partly because he had the guts to tell Adams the situation. Anna Kendrick should really stick to college kid movies, though. She was, IMHO, badly miscast here, and earned maybe a 1.5 to 2 from me for the effort.
Knives Out (2019)
Fun, but sometime a little too clever for itself
The whole movie was quite good, and the premise with its odd twists and turns kept you guessing. It dragged a bit in spots, probably because they spent too much time working a twist that would be a dead end.
My biggest complaint, as with movies like this, are the maddening little things that they get inconsistent. As the goofs section noted, the geography was off, and timeline on the morphine injection that the housekeeper received didn't make sense with what had been discussed earlier between Christopher Plummer and his nurse. Come to think of it, the timeline they discussed didn't make sense when the nurse gave him an overdose. And what was with Daniel Craig's accent? It had its own set of twists and turns!
Okay, I do recommend it as 2 hours of inspired silliness and guessing who dunnit. And if you aren't the type like me that get frustrated by inconsistencies that don't really affect the plot, you can add a star or a star and a half to my rating.
The Mountain Between Us (2017)
Good premise, terrible execution
The premise of the movie, two ordinary people managing to survive in the Rockies in the middle of winter, seemed to be an engaging, potentially intriguing movie. Right from the start, however, the "what the heck" moments began to come at you faster than you could deal with them.
To begin with, you are at a large airport that is shutdown for weather, when the sky is still blue and the sun is out. Yes, a storm is approaching, but still. I've flown out of airports in much worse weather conditions before. Nevertheless, a twin engine private plane is allowed to take off with no flight plan, explained away by Beau Bridges since they were flying "VFR", meaning the skies were clear enough to navigate with no help. Huh??? Luckily for him, Beau Bridges' character dies in the crash so he's mercifully out of this hot mess at this point.
Once they crash on the mountain, the lead characters trudge through snow, ice and whatever in winter gear that magically appeared in the downed plane. They did this, apparently over a number of weeks, yet when they took off their coats, his hair and beard always appeared as well groomed as the day they left, and her hair always looked like it had been freshly washed and coiffed.
At this point, I kinda just went along for the ride, just to see who survived. That, and the dog, who was the real star of the show!
Can't recommend this movie. I don't know if the director of this had much (or any) previous experience, but the attention to detail is so bad I almost found myself laughing at the incongruities.
9JKL (2017)
A one-joke comedy. And the joke is pretty lame.
I really enjoyed Mark Feuerstein in "Royal Pains" and thought we was equally good in his "Prison Break" appearances. So I had some hope for his latest venture. Probably should have known better from watching the advertising for it!
After about 5 minutes of nothing but Mark trying to slip by Mom & Dad's front door to get to his own, it became apparent that this show isn't long for the air. Maybe it got better, but I wasn't waiting around to find out.
If anyone is still thinking about checking it out, make an appointment for a root canal instead. I think it would be less painful :D
The Guilt Trip (2012)
Outtakes were funniest parts of the movie
At the beginning of the movie, Seth Rogen uses the line "Bad Chemistry Alert" line in his presentation. I think he should have said "Bad Movie Alert" instead. The movie was cliché, cloying, and just plain idiotic from start to finish. Thank goodness we saw it on the super matinée pricing, about half the normal weekend price.
I have to wonder how much money Streisand owes and to whom. So far this year, we have been subjected to her 2012 Farewell Tour, which I understand had tickets STARTING at $100 in the SF area. The newspaper reviews made it sound like you got about 3 or 4 songs from Barbra and the rest was from the (admittedly good) warm-up group "Il Volo". Now along comes this poor excuse for a comedy, which our local theater on opening weekend had the good sense to relegate to the smallest screen in the building, and that was half full.
The two best parts of this movie were its brevity (90 minutes or so long) and some of the outtakes at the end were worth a chuckle.
Get Him to the Greek (2010)
"Fat, Drunk and Stupid is no way to go through life, son"
Apologies to the writers of "Animal House", but Dean Wormer's comment to Flounder is just so apropos to the character(?) played by Jonah Hill.
I tried to convince our friends to choose something else besides this, given all of the reviews I'd read and the trailers that I'd seen. But, someone else was paying, so I went along, figuring it couldn't be THAT bad. Well, a couple of our friends walked out within 10 minutes and saw a different movie. Wish I'd followed their lead.
This movie was vulgar for the sake of being vulgar and gross for the sake of being gross. If there was supposed to be a message, it was lost in the tsunami of bodily functions, profanity, drugs and alcohol that never stopped.
All in all, a waste of time and money to anyone outside the 13-25 demographic. Then again, that's where the cash must be nowadays, Hollywood keeps targeting them almost to the exclusion of the rest of us.
When in Rome (2010)
"When in Rome", throw this to the lions
The only positive I can think of regarding this movie is that I didn't have to pay full price for this "schtick dreck". Even our friend who claims to like ALL movies agreed this was, at best, a rental movie.
For a romantic comedy, the best parts were actually when they were trying to be neither romantic nor comedic. Unfortunately, that encompassed one or two scenes in the film. The jokes were forced, most of the "twists" were telegraphed well in advance, and, except for DeVito and Duhamel, the male "leads" were total losers. Then again, maybe the point was that only total losers would toss coins into the fountain looking for love.
I give it a 1.5 out of 10. It was a 2, but a funny twist at the end was worth a half a point. Then came the insipid scene as the credits began to roll, which took back a full point.
If anyone asks you to see this, follow the suggestion of Graham Chapman as King Arthur in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", 'RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!!!'
Changeling (2008)
Pretty good, but not Eastwood's best
On it's face, "Changeling" is a story well told and pretty well researched. Although based on fact, there are the obligatory "artistic licenses" taken. Until I did some research on the actual case, I didn't realize the changes, and when I did know, it didn't seem particularly detrimental to the overall story.
However, there were a lot of little nagging errors in perspective, time-line, etc. that I found annoying. Of course, my wife just rolls her eyes and tells me I'm WAY too critical in that perspective. Without trying to spoil it too bad, some of my nits were:
- At the beginning of the film, Christine & Walter are discussing what happened to his father, something that only the real kid could know. Never heard about it again.
- When she left for work the day he was kidnapped, she mentions that the neighbor would be checking in on him to make sure he was fine. Yet when she found him missing when returning home, the neighbor is never mentioned. I don't know about others, but the FIRST place I would go in that situation would be to that person to find out when (or if) she last saw the child.
- At the end, when the boy who escaped returns home in 1935, he looks no more than 14 or 15. HOWEVER, in the flashback to 1928 during the kidnapping, the boy looks about 10 or 11, clearly one of the older boys (who were shown as being 9 or 10). Unless he was extraordinarily big for his age at 10 and didn't continue to grow, he looked all wrong.
There were the usual goofs (Angelina Jolie sitting on one side of the street car then the next scene showing her face against the window on the OTHER side of the street car), but I found the unused clues to be sloppy film making.
Norbit (2007)
A waste of time and money
I knew we were in trouble when the previews came on for movies that I couldn't be PAID to see. As the previews are generally geared towards the audience of the movie, my stomach was churning, and not from the pancakes I'd had for breakfast!
The movie had one or two funny bits (the church scene was good for a few laughs), but aside from that, it was bad enough to make even the most ardent movie-goer want to gnaw off a body part or two. One of our movie gang, who usually comes up with SOMETHING positive to say about a movie, walked out of the theater, looked at me and said "That was bad!" (and she meant the Webster's Dictionary definition of bad, not the current slang definition).
I gotta hand it to Eddie Murphy, though. How many people can go from an Oscar to a Razzie in 3 months? It's too bad that this wasn't released in 2006, or Murphy could have had the trifecta: a Golden Globe, an Oscar and a Razzie all in one year!
The Boynton Beach Bereavement Club (2005)
Why is this not in general release?
I had the chance to see this in April with my father in, naturally, Boynton Beach. The matinée showing (with seniors as ushers) was sparsely populated with some of the local seniors and one or two middle-aged children (like myself) of those seniors on their annual Passover pilgrimage to see Mom and/or Dad and get away from the cold, rainy weather that was infesting much of the rest of the country.
The story is about loss and love in a community of seniors. As you would imagine in an area with retirees, people die, their widows/widowers have to pick themselves up and move on, and find new companionship and occasionally love as the process of life goes on.
It is a great ensemble comedy with many actors and actresses who were big names back about 20-30 years ago. It was quite interesting to see how many of these people whom I grew up watching at the theaters had aged.
What I fail to understand is why this movie has not been released outside Florida. The story is just as relevant in Phoenix, Palm Springs or anywhere senior citizens are dealing with the sometimes "golden" years.
Please, tell your local arts theaters to get this movie into their rotation. It is a pleasant film, and certainly more entertaining than horror movies such as the Gore harangue on alleged global warming looks to be.
Find Me Guilty (2006)
A "Fish Called Wanda" performance
Let me explain. Think back about 20 years ago, when Kevin Kline was a good, though fairly narrowly ranged actor. Then, along came "Wanda" and Kline blew everyone away with the breadth of his acting ability, not to mention a hitherto unknown knack for comedy. So much so that he won an Oscar over some heavyweight actors at the time (Alec Guiness and Martin Landau). Kline, of course, has since gone on to do a much more broad range of work in the subsequent years.
Diesel's performance in this movie was much the same. Up until now, he's been the muscle-bound, angry, action-flick type of anti-hero character in everything he's done. Here, however, he's forced to lose at least the muscle and the action, throw in a little humor and a little humanity. And he does it while being somewhat confined to material narrowly defined by real occurrences (the courtroom dialog, apparently, comes directly from the transcripts of the trial).
His performance as a New Jersey gangster was far better than that other New Jersey gangster over on HBO this week. But that's another story!
Everything Is Illuminated (2005)
Great story, why the "Kubricking"?
Saw a promo preview last night. I might have passed on the movie otherwise, which would have been quite a shame. As others have said, the story is about a quirky American trying to find his grandfather's shtetl (village) near Odessa in the Ukraine. The premise right there was worth 3 points to me, as my own grandfather is from that same part of the world.
The story went along quite well, and the family "secret" alluded to was quite interesting, though I sorta figured it out early on. The bittersweet ending tied things together quite nicely, though it did make you think for a bit. Another point for the subtlety there! My one gripe is that, every so often, the director would go off on a "Stanley Kubrick" moment, where the story is completely forgotten in favor of some ethereal scenery that added absolutely ZERO to the movie, except to break whatever tension might have been building up at the time. (See "2001" or "Barry Linden" or most any Kubrick movie to see what I mean.) It's an annoying device that I wish directors would have buried with Mr. Kubrick.
I honestly think that, without these throw-away scenes, this movie could be 2005's "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", a small-budget film that appeals to a broad audience beyond that portrayed in the movie and makes mega-bucks for all involved.
Fever Pitch (2005)
Nerdy Guy gets Nerdy Girl, Sox win Series. Details at 11
My wife (a mid-westerner who "tolerates" my Red Sox affliction) actually suggested the sneak preview this weekend over "Beauty Shop". Either she's planning a girls-night-out for that, or she thinks she owes me for other recent "chick flicks" (or both), who was I to argue? Sox Series cap firmly in place, on we went!
That said, this is not a full-on sports movie, nor is it a full-on romance. Jimmy Fallon, who, IMHO, was WELL CAST, plays a nerdy honors math teacher who takes his class to meet semi-nerdy lady who is making good use of math in the real world. Boy meets girl, boy woos girl, then the baseball season arrives.
She learns to love the Red Sox, thanks to books ("Red Sox for Dummies?") and the neighboring season ticket holders, who are as much Jimmy's family as anyone. The usual romantic entanglement ensue, she's "late", they break-up, they make-up and live happily ever after.
The Sox and the baseball season is used as a backdrop for timing more than anything, though it's always right at the surface without taking over the movie. The World Series is shown in a 2-minute wrap-up to end the show and explain that both of Jimmy Fallon's worlds turned out positive. There were enough Fenway scenes and Sox memories to keep this 40+ years Red Sox sufferer engaged. And a couple infusions of the Dropkick Murphy's "Tessie" was also welcome!
If you are going strictly for Farrely Brothers humor, or to see a rehash of the 2004 Red Sox season, you may be disappointed. This is not a typical Farrely Brothers flick. The humor is "mainstream", not over the top (like "There's Something About Mary") or super-subtle (like "Fargo").
Two Weeks Notice (2002)
In spite of itself, it works, sort of!
Hugh Grant plays his usual "more money than sense" British self. Sandra Bullock plays her usual "I'm too good looking to have such lousy luck with men, aren't I?" self. With the two leads locked tightly into typecast roles, I steeled myself going in for 90 minutes of serious "chick flick" agony.
However, I was quite surprised that, in spite of the above caveats, the film actually sort of worked. My biggest complaint, other than the too obvious ending, was that, although her character was born and brought up in Coney Island (except for schooling at Harvard) and his was born and brought up in the Manhattan, neither sounded remotely they were from the area. Unless there is a Coney Island in Kansas, and a London suburb called Manhattan.
Would I recommend it? If you need a break from the violence of "LotR" or "Gangs of New York", or if you owe your woman for making her sit through "Star Trek: Nemesis", it's probably not your worst move. At least I find Sandra Bullock easier to look at than Jennifer Lopez, IMHO!
Far from Heaven (2002)
Far from Heaven? Far from Great!
With all the hype in the papers and the comments here, you'd think this was the best movie since "American Beauty."
Ah, now I get it! The director obviously thinks this is what America was like in the 1950s. Well, there may have been pockets of people like this, but to make this out to be "typical" of the era is, on the face of it, completely absurd. Another movie in a similar vein was "The Royal Tennenbaums," which also deals with a family of whackos. Unlike these two favorites of the "intelligensia," "Tennenbaums" realized the absurdity of the characters it portrayed and made sure you knew that they knew.
As with "American Beauty," the performances were fairly good, but the subject matter was less than stellar.
Sorry gang, but this one rates a C- or a D+ in my book.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002)
My Big Fat (insert your ethnicity here) Wedding!
My wife and I have seen it a couple times, recommended it to many friends, and each one seems to say the same thing:
"That could've been MY family"
This, coming from a lot of Jewish-, Italian-, Polish- and Spanish- background people. Of course, our British friends related to Ian's family more than Toula's, but that's not surprising either, is it?
All-in-all, a good time will be had by all. What will be interesting is whether the pin-heads at the Academy will recognize it come Oscar time. If given the chance, I think it'll surprise more than "Life is Beautiful", IMHO.