The holidays are coming, and that either means spending time with your dysfunctional family or escaping them for the movies … where you’re likely to be met by other, fictional dysfunctional families. Already this season, Rachel Getting Marriedintroduced us to the f’ed up faux masala of the Buchman clan, and later this month we get to follow Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as they’re pulled into their separate quadrants of kin in Four Christmases. Also, for those who think dysfunction is an American tradition, this weekend sees the release of the French film A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), which unites the two major premises of dysfunctional family movies by being set during the holidays and involving an ill family member.
With two more weeks left until Thanksgiving, after which we might not want to think about another family, real or cinematic, for the rest of our lives, it’s a perfect time to celebrate those dysfunctional tribes we love the best. Literally thousands of movies feature such families, though, so we’re sure to have left out some of your favorites. Definitely chime in below, and/or join the discussion currently going on over in our Top 5 group.
Of the 8,500 or so filmmakers who receive an automated rejection email from Sundance’s Geoff Gilmore every year, usually the Tuesday or Wednesday after Thanksgiving, nearly none receive the sweet revenge Antonio Campos has been privy to. Both his 2005 NYU undergrad short Buy It Now and his 2008 debut feature Afterschool were rejected by the Redford Cabal. Both were accepted into Cannes however, the short making Campos the youngest man ever to win a prize on the Croisette, the feature cementing his reputation as one of the most promising young American directors of his generation. Hot off the heels of its American debut at the New York Film Festival, Afterschool still awaits stateside commercial distribution. I recently had the privilege, along with my colleagues at Filmmaker Magazine, of bestowing the film with a Gotham Award nomination for “The Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You”. It will wind its way back to New York screens fairly soon when it screens at MOMA as part of a program supporting the nominees. In the meantime, we caught up with Campos to discuss The Godfather, Steve Reich and why he isn’t reading nearly enough fiction. For more with Campos, check out this interview over at Cinema Echo Chamber. …Read more
Editor’s Note: The “official” AOL release of the trailer is not embeddable, and the MTV player isn’t working for us, so we’ve embedded a lesser quality version above with the first couple of shots missing. Watch the trailer full quality here.
After watching the new teaser for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I personally had no comment. Having stopped reading the series somewhere in the center of the previous book, I didn’t feel I had any authority on the matter. The only thing I thought while watching the clip was that it seemed more like one of those annoying prequels that comes after a series to humanize that series’ villain with an origin story (y’know, like the Star Warsprequels and Young Hott Hannibal(wait, that’s not what it was titled?). And until I read an interesting trailer analysis on MTV Movies Blog this morning, I thought that couldn’t actually be the case.
Actually, MTV’s look at the teaser began last night with a frame by frame analysis, in which Shawn Adler reveals his expert knowledge of J.K. Rowling’s text by pointing out the myriad ways that David Yates’ film is different from the book, from a previously reported added-in scene to little changes within adapted sequences. My favorite observation:
0:43: Our first glimpse at young Tom Riddle, the boy wizard who would grow up to be Voldemort. Surprisingly, I’m more interested here in Dumbledore, who is costumed differently than in the novel, where he was described as wearing “flamboyantly plum velvet.”
If there’s one thing I relate to on the big screen, it’s the depiction of fraternal relationships. I’m the middle of three brothers (excluding the half-brother I only knew as a toddler and the former stepbrother I only knew briefly as an adult), and at different points in my life I’ve either hated them or considered them my best friends. So, yeah, I can’t wait to see Step Brothers, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as new siblings who go from being enemies to BFFs when forced to live together.
Choosing a handful of favorite movies about brotherhood is really tough. After all, tales of brothers go all the way back to almost the beginning, with the story of Cain and Abel. And a number of favorites can’t exactly be discussed, because the revelation of brothers, especially twin brothers, is often the surprise twist in films. So, before you start naming a thousand other films about brothers that I’ve forgotten (such as The Brothers McMullen andLegends of the Fall), keep in mind that I’ve actually left out a whole pile of brother films, and this is more of a personal favorites list.
Coupe de Ville – If there’s one movie that seemed to define my brothers and I growing up, it’s this underrated road movie about three estranged siblings (played by Patrick Dempsey, Arye Gross and Daniel Stern) delivering the titular automobile to their father (Alan Arkin). As kids, my brothers and I couldn’t have been any more different, just like the guys in the movie. For at least half a decade, until he seemed to disappear after he left the sitcom Ellen, Gross was like my cinematic alter ego, just because I felt a kinship with his middle-brother character in Coupe de Ville so much. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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