Anyone seen this movie? I did a search and couldn’t find a thread on it already so here it is.
Anyway, my wife and I watched this thing the other night and I’m telling you, I am tired of seeing these Norman Rockwell families in the movies. These families don’t exist. Are there really families out there who own a giant lakeside cabin and have family gathering week every summer where they play touch football, do morning calesthenics in the yard together, put on skits and family talent shows and have girls-vs-boys competitions etc…? I’m probably just jaded because my family life was dull and boring without lots of family cohesivness but these types of movies seem way over the top. I remember as a kid watching these types of tv families and feeling bad because my family barely spoke to each other over the roar of the TV.
Also, Carrell needs to get a new character going because he’s played the lovable loser in every film he’s been in so far. He’s going to turn into aanother Ben Stiller if he’s not careful.
All in all this movie had no surprises and didn’t impress me. My wife wanted a feel good movie and this wasn’t it. It was very depressing to watch so don’t get it if you are looking for chuckles.
I felt the same way until I met my fiance. Her family is like this (sort of). They have a cabin in the mountains in arizona. They call it a cabin, it is…large. Two stroys 5 bedrooms with an enclosed porch that has been turned into a dorm area. The place comfortably sleeps 30. It is in amazinly beautiful country. I just got back from one of these.
They meet every 2 years in the summer and spend about a week up there.
Her family is more build it/fix it, than sports oriented. So there is rock climbing and construction of zip lines and treehouses and marshmallow guns (including a powered one!) There is also a lot of drinking (we usually started as soon as we got tired of coffee.) a lot of food (group breakfast/lunch/dinner everyday, with each family/person/couple taking a different assigned meal), no talent shows but the place was full of musical instruments and there was a group sinalong one night.
All age ranges, the youngest kid was 2 1/2 the oldest person was 86. They have been doing this for as long as anyone in the house (including the 86 year old) can remember. Going to the same cabin and spending time together.
It was really cool actually.
That being said, I didn’t really care for the movie Dan in Real Life. I found it to be a tad formulaic and predictable.
I am not really a fan of Carrell, his shtick just isn’t that funny to me.
As far as your question about the cabin: Well, someone in the family did have a cabin in the woods. It wasn’t by a lake, but we did gather there some summers and play volleyball and sometimes cards and often it would be men vs. women.
Yeah, my family had something similar when I was growing up, a farmhouse with cots and trundle beds in every possible space. No organized calisthenics, but there were lots of other whole family activities including plays and skits and dramatic readings. People were there all summer but the peak surrounded 4th of July, when there’d be 25 to 30 of us.
It kind of started to unravel when my generation started getting summer jobs or being involved in activities with schedule conflicts.
Now that we’re older we recapture some of the same feeling with a 1 week shared beach rental, and someone else deals with the upkeep and taxes.
I think it shows up in movies because it isn’t quite real life anymore, but the filmmakers have fond memories. Why would I pay $10 to watch what I already have?
That said, Dan in Real Life left me sort of flat. I like a lot of the actors and wanted to like it, but couldn’t quite buy everything that happened in the amount of time that was supposed to have passed.
While my family does not own a huge lake house we do have sports (kickball, wiffle ball) and gambling (poker, bingo) events during our get togethers. Whatever we can manage to do without spilling our drinks.
Saw it in a plane. Turned the sound off after twenty minutes and just watched. Started reading the in-flight magazine after thirty minutes.
Not only am I tired of these movie families with the huge house, but I think that every TV sitcom family has had a bigger house/apartment than I’ve ever had. Even sitcoms about “working class” dudes always feature a huge house. Roseanne and Dan Conner – hell, Dan could run across the living room of his house. A man that size tries to run across my living room and there’s an instant Dan-size hole in the wall.
Growing up in my family we had a huge house (four stories, including the basement - 6 bedrooms, two living rooms, formal diningroom, huge kitchen but only 1 1/2 baths) with a wraparound porch and two-story carriage house on half a city block. And we had a smaller lakeside cottage. We weren’t much into calesthenics, but we’d play poker and board games and yahtzee and watch old family slides. When we had company (which was frequently), we kids would get kicked out of our rooms and sleep on the floor. We weren’t rich folks, but we had plenty of room. So yeah, people really do live like that.
I would just like to add that the poster for this movie - the one that show Dan with his head resting on syrupy pancakes - really grosses me out because I have a huge aversion to sticky things and to have syrup in my hair and face would really ick me out.
Not the only one. I liked it, too, mainly because Steve Carell is flippin’ awesome. I didn’t think the plot was particularly great, though. And I agree that the family style it presents is extremely sappy (maybe that’s the reason behind the sticky pancakes on the poster), but I’m sure some people do live like that. It would have been fun to be best friends with a kid who had a family like that and to tag along on their trips to the cabin - and then go back to reality (shouting matches with parents, physical fights with siblings, unfun chores, etc.).