I don’t think it was meant to be a real colorblindness test, but something dummied up so the letter A would be obvious to anyone watching the movie, and the kid’s inability to see it was clear.
I had one question about the VW minibus. When they arrived at the hotel, as the uncle jumped out the door of the bus fell out but then later it was intact in its track. So were VW buses designed so the door could be easily rehung?
I saw this movie in the theater twice; once by myself, and again with my sister. We both agreed that the little girls who were heavily made up could have been mistaken for 45 year old former dwarf beauty queens.
Rather scary. :eek:
Here’s what I posetd in a previous thread on the topic; this still pretty much sums up my feelings on the movie:
The film felt like someone had sat down to adhere as closely as possible to an emerging genre of “fun family dysfunction.” Every character in the picture was a tried-and-true cliche of “quirky” movies: the sullen high-schooler (are we really supposed to believe that a kid with a gigantic portrait of Nietzche on his wall plans to join the Air Force?); the profane but good-hearted grandpa; the hyper-positive go-getter Dad who’s actually a failure; the depressed, anomic academic; etc.
More than that, though, there was a weird disconnect between the characters and the plot. We’re supposed at times to take these characters seriously in their pathos: Steve Carell’s being just off a suicide attempt, the sullen brother’s awful realization that he’s colorblind, dad’s shame and near-panic after the meeting with his “publisher.” So far so good.
At the same time, though, we’re supposed to accept that these characters, whom we presumably care about as actual human beings, are going to steal grandpa’s dead body out the hospital window? Granted, that’s a funny scene, but we have to jump up to a far more detached level of appreciation for that kind of schtick to work. The film kept see-sawing on how deeply involved with the characters we are.
Basically, there are a lot of scenes that attempt to set the cast up as real, believable individuals, and then there are a lot of scenes that casually throw that trust away in the service of cheap and easy gags. Arkin’s character, for example, was funny with his profane mouth and loud opinions, but I didn’t believe for a moment that he was a heroin junkie.
The beauty pageant for little girls is ripe comic ground, but (a) it’s a satire-target that’s been done over and over, and (b) again, I simply didn’t believe that these characters would jump up on stage and steal the show that way.
There’s a common notion in bad movies that love and a roadtrip is all it takes to cure someone of neurosis. The high-school brother has his little fit of angst, but then a conversation with Steve Carell helps him feel again, and presto, this until-recently anxiety-riddled kid realizes his love for his family, breaks out of his shell, learns to live a little, wakes up and smells the coffee, and all that stuff. I just couldn’t buy it.
As others have stated, the cast was uniformly terrific. But the writing was as lame as a “Facts of Life” episode.
No offense to those who liked it; but it felt contrived and unconvincing to me.
There are different kinds of colorblindness. That’s why they have a battery of different tests to test for all of them. Your friend might not have had the type of colorblindness that this board was testing for. AFAIK that test was real, I’ve had to take them myself and they look basically just like that. Now, when Olive announced that he had 20/20 vision from holding a board up 2 feet from his face - *that * I’d have to question.
As far as the OP is concerned, it sounds to me like he went in expecting Napoleon Dynamite, didn’t get it and was predicatably disappointed. The movie is understated - and the moments that are funniest are those where you’ve been drawn into the pathos first - so if the whole time you’re waiting for a laugh-riot to commence, it’s just not going to move you.
I liked your analysis very much – superb acting, some weak spots in the script. I still loved the movie. I guess I was conscious of the problems on some level but able to appreciate it for what it was.
Yep. Ever read Nietzche? If you believe in the ubermensch, isn’t “fighter pilot” a valid career path (especially for a teenage boy?)
That’s really not fair - they did care about their kids, especially the mom. The dad was a little self-centered, but he didn’t neglect his kids or not care about them. The mom knew all about her son, he just was a normal resentful teenager.
It left a little smile on my face, but it was indeed cliched and predictable and not really that funny. I would say I liked it, and it was better than the average movie, but I did not love it.
I did have a weird experience while watching this movie and I’ve thought about posting about it here but I couldn’t decide if it deserved its own thread. In the movie, they drove right past the theatre I was sitting in, by the same route I took to get there.
Probably common to those who live in NY, LA, etc., not so for the rest of us.
I just saw this and loved it. The characters were real-they even argued realistically. They were a very believable married couple, stressing about common problems and doing the best they can to get through.
I loved the emo son-having two teens right now (neither of whom are in the least like him)-I could identify with his intensity and desire to commit to something bigger than himself. I don’t think the big news was the he was color blind-it was the he could not fly jets.
I liked the characters and the writing-all of these people have had their dreams crushed -except mom who is so busy trying to hold everything together that we never really learn hers (again, VERY true to life). I found Grandpa to be very vibrant and eccentric and funny-yes, the taking the body with him was a bit over the top, but it added to the zaniness.
The whole ice cream scene has so much to say about our culture and how we view women, as well as self esteem and body image issues.
I also love the scene at the end of the pier-the “fuck beauty pageants” scene.
I went into this thinking it would be a laugh a minute, Stripes type thing–I am so glad it wasn’t. It was bittersweet, intelligent and biting.
Saw this in the theater with my wife, and over the weekend rented it to watch with my 3 teens. Was it a great movie? Probably not, but I don’t really know what constitutes a great movie. But I do know that all five of us really enjoyed it. Every one of us laughed out loud at one thing or another - which is somewhat unusual for movies.
You forgot to mention the beeping horn - surely that has been done countless times before. But it still made me laugh.
My favorite parts were grandpa’s advice “Fuck a lot of girls!” And Olive’s response to the uber-creepy emcee’s asking “Where is your grandpa?” “He’s in the trunk of our car.”
I thought the characters did a pretty good job of being believable family members. Sure countless aspects of their personalities and experiences were exaggerated (A best-seller about Proust?). But I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t pay to see a movie that realistically portrayed me or just about anyone I know.
The OP reminds me of the folks who debate whether there are only 7 or so kinds of stories and they’ve all been told before. Either that or someone who seeks something quite different than I out of his movies. I mean, I can enjoy a standard high school romance chick flick if it is well done - some attractive characters, a few clevel lines of dialogue, some good music - even though the whole story is predictable from beginning to end.
For the dad the ice cream incident sticks out in my mind. Plus, Olive was so afriad of ‘not being a winner’. That came straight from dad. Mom and dad both had no clue of what to do with the son when he freaked out. They were going to leave him there. Only Olive knew how to get him back into the van.
If she knew all about her son, then why didn’t she point out that his colorblindness would be a problem in being a pilot? She may have not known it would be a problem, but I doubt that both her and dad didn’t know.
I guess I think there is a difference between being a sometimes clueless parent (absorbed by the day-to-day necessities of running a household, succeeding in one’s job, etc) and an out-and-out selfish or abusive parent—a large portion of the plot centers on Dad’s redemption in the end, and while he certainly goes overboard with the “ice cream lecture”, I wouldn’t call that necessarily selfish, he appears to me to believe (incorrectly of course) that he is lecturing about fat content in ice cream as “advice” to Olive. None of the rest of the family challenges him in a direct manner (as you would think they might if actual abuse were occurring), instead choosing to demonstrate to both Olive and Dad that it’s possible that Dad is just being kind of a dipshit at the moment (by each taking bites of her ice cream). Also, Olive is self-assured enough to ask Miss California for a 2nd opinion on the “evils” of beautiful women & ice cream, and while she does suffer a few doubts as to her father’s opinions of her (don’t we all?), overall she is a fairly well-adjusted child, and it wouldn’t seem to me to be possible in a household where true abuse were occurring. I hope I am not oversimplifying, but I’ve seen my share of extreme parental selfishness & abuse. This wasn’t it.
I have two teenage sons. At many times, I have felt powerless to help them in the face of their biggest disappointments, which doesn’t mean I didn’t try (as did Collette’s character, with Dwayne). Sometimes, no matter how well I feel that I know them, I am just not the right person to comfort them. I try not to take it personally. I would hope that a failed attempt to advise or even comfort my sons wouldn’t count as complete cluelessness or selfishness on my part, although they themselves have sometimes lashed out at me as Dwayne did. Seems like normal family life to me.
But I am a bit torn about the color-blindness or the piloting of jets piece…my kids were tested frequently for eye problems at all levels of public school, why wouldn’t Dwayne have been tested before now, and it does seem unreasonable that at least one parent wouldn’t think that MAYBE perfect vision would be needed to become a pilot, particularly in the service. It wasn’t a distracting enough issue to prevent my throrough enjoyment of the movie, however.
–Beck
My history buff son felt everyone should know that at some point back who knows when in the earlier days of aviation, someone - maybe Britain or France, specifically solicited colorblind individuals as pilots or bombers …
I think that is what he was nattering on about, but sometimes I kinda tune him out when he starts pontificating on military history. (But I let him eat all the ice cream he wants!)
One of the funniest parts for me was when the uncle was explaining “a la mode” and the father says “Shut up Frank.”
As Roger Ebert says, a movie is not what it is about, but rather how it is about it. For me, these gags didn’t work in hacky National Lampoon movies and John Candy movies and Everyone Loves Raymond (blech!). They worked in Little Miss Sunshine, however.
My daughter rented this for us to watch on Christmas Day with my 22-year-old son, who really hates touchy-feely movies. He laughed through the whole thing, and I overheard him telling his new girlfriend all about it on the phone. This is very rare!
I really liked the movie, for the small moments as well as the over-the-top gags. The way Toni Collette glares at her husband as she walks around the van just before they leave Olive behind. The almost-smile on Dwayne’s face when they are pushing the car and he sucessfully leaps into the van…in fact, all the car-pushing moments were great bonding moments. The way Olive just hunkers down next to the despondent Dwayne and puts her head on his shoulder to comfort him, and the way Dwayne picks her up to help her up the hill.
There were so many opportunities to go cliched, over-the-top, and they stopped short and kept it believable. Even the whole family getting up on stage was fine with me…after all the stress they’d been under, and given the fact that by this point they really didn’t care about the pageant any more, I really enjoyed it! And the faded beauty queen was just faded enough…not over-the -top dolled up like a Suzanne Sugarbaker clone. Oh, and I loved how much Miss California liked Olive’s routine! The other contestants were quite scary with all the make-up, but they still ran around the halls like little girls.
All in all, it’s a movie I would buy.
Haven’t I already read this sentence in another thread somewhere?
Seriously. We’re all human, we all have our neuroses and preoccupations, and as parents, we all fuck our kids up just a little bit every day. The ice cream scene paints Greg Kinnear’s character as an asshole (and he kind of is), but it’s pretty true to life. At least it was a straight up and honest approach, and certainly no more screwed up than what I see every day, which is parents *telling * their children that they’re beautiful no matter what, and then demonstrating through their own behavior their belief that it really takes fourteen hours a week at the gym and thousands of dollars worth of beauty products to make us even marginally acceptable.
As for the son’s nervous breakdown on the side of the road, as the parent of a teenager I’ve got to tell you, lots of times, you have no idea what to do with or say to them, and sometimes you just plain lose patience with self-involved teen angst drama. I’m neither proud nor ashamed to admit that a few weeks ago, while I was going through a very stressful situation, I got a call from my daughter’s school that prompted me to call her and immediately start with “Do I need this shit from you right now?”
*That’s * what the movie is about, in my opinon. In real life, families are collections of individuals, each with their own agendas, thrown together by blood ties no more inherently binding than a lottery. Sometimes, the really lucky ones achieve moments of transcendence through the sheer will to love and support each other.
I actually just saw the movie Christmas morning (my daughter asked for it as a gift), and I floved it. It’s definitely not about the gags. For me, the single funniest moment was Frank seeing the ad describing his nemesis as “America’s #1 Proust scholar”. Yeowch. For poor Frank, there was always a lower place. (And is it just me, or is raggedy depressed Steve Carrell kind of hot? Hard to believe it’s the same guy who played the 40 year old virgin.)
I saw this movie in the theater originally, but it was only upon reviewing it on Christmas Day that I found Carrell’s character suddenly exceptionally attractive—his scruffy, “who cares what the hell I look like?” appearance was VERY sexy, I agree. When he tells Dwayne that he wouldn’t dare kill himself “on Dwayne’s watch”, the sardonic but sympathetic expression on Carrell’s face made me just desperately want to jump his bones. The guy has amazing acting range, no doubt about it!
For those of you who would like to contrast the parents in this movie with a set of truly selfish, disturbed parents who ARE obliviously causing great ruination in their children, see Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney in “The Squid and the Whale”. Collette and Linnear look like Ma and Pa in “Little House on the Prairie” by comparison.
–Beck
We just watched this last night and I just have to say I loved it. My husband liked it too but not quite as much as I did. Though I think he liked it more the more he thought about it. Definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. Certainly better than Pirates of the Caribbean 2 which we watched Monday night. What a terrible mess that was.
I saw it last night and was expecting some kind of comedy. Something about the scenes where Toni Collette’s character meets then takes her brother home from the hosiptal made it have more of a Magnolia or *Punch Drunk Love * feel to it. The following dinner scene reinforced this for me. I still enjoyed the movie, but viewed it through a Paul Thomas Anderson “filter” and watched it as a sometimes-funny drama instead of a dry/black comedy. *Boogey Nights * has some very funny moments, but it’s overall one of my favorite dramas, not a comedy. The scripting, cinematography, pacing even the score reminded me of the above films, but not in a “oh, he’s just ripping PTA off” way. I hope this makes sense.
I laughed a lot during the “Superfreak” dance and it was good to see Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette play a married couple again. It hit me during the gas station scene that I had seen them play a married-then-divorced couple in the TV movie Dinner with Friends, which was good, but definately not as funny as LMS.