What’d you think of Junebug? I thought it was really good, but I’m a Chicagoan who has family in the South - so I don’t know if it was an accurate portrayal of a Southern family, or if it was an accurate representation of a Southern family as seen through the eyes of Northern family. But I thought it captured the pride, love, despair and even defensiveness in the presence of Northerners well.
But I’ll also note that my Kentucky family is totally different from my Georgia family, so some of the problem with finding a movie representative of “The Real South” is that there’s isn’t just one South. *Junebug *captured my Kentucky “type”, although it’s set in North Carolina.
Haven’t seen Junebug yet, but will make a point of it on your say-so. You hit the nail on the head about there being too many “Real Souths” to go after one representative version. Even regions within the same state (as can be seen easily in maps that show how folks voted!) can be at least as different from each other as the state is from the next one over. The urban vs. rural versions, the college-educated vs. trade-school-educated vs. high-school-educated vs. even-less-schooling sectors add to the difficulty.
Even though The Big Chill was filmed in Beaufort, SC, it’s hard to find anything exclusively Southern about it, and unless you knew it was filmed there you probably would be surprised to know that. It’s more about the times than the place, anyway. That tends to be the pattern I’ve observed: if it’s about the place, the stereotypes abound; and if it’s about the times, the places are blurred.
Perhaps The Last Picture Show bridges this gap as well as any, but not being a Texas small town boy, I can’t really judge that.
And if there’s a movie about Nashville that’s not bristling with Country Music, I don’t know about it.
And even To Kill A Mockingbird is overly stylized to be accepted by any true Southerner, even when you factor in the times, the acting styles, and the fact that it was written by one of the South’s favorite people.
He comes across as cheesy in America because no one can sound cool embracing MTV culture with a foreign accent. I haven’t been to any Russian country in a while, so I am not all that familiar with the youth culture there. But my guess is that Alex (Eugene Hutz) would not sound like an old ball using his native tongue.
BTW, in Ukraine they actually greet people coming into the country with a band playing music, which is why Alex had a band with him when he met with Jonathan.
Crooklyn nicely captures urban black American family life. I didn’t come from a huge family (just four siblings), but the dynamics between the kids and the parents seemed very real to me. The movie even gets the little details right, like the kids watching Soul Train and playing the dozens on the stoop, and the mother’s constant threats (the scene where the kids have to do the dishes at 3:00am in the morning…too real!)
Well…it was over the top. But there can be truth in caricature. If there isn’t it has no point. My grandfather was a erudite, intellectual (if somewhat irritating) man who was nothing like the Hutz character. But somehow I could see him coming out of that society.
Every time I watch Gummo I remember why I left home. If you ever want to see true redneck (not Southern. Straight-up redneck) culture, that’s the movie to watch. Even the houses remind me of my friends’ homes when I’d visit them what with all the junk everywhere.
LOL – same here. My mom’s Greek. Her parents owned a diner. I married a man of Irish extraction. I know exactly how Toula felt the first time she met her boyfriend’s parents :eek:
The major difference is that my mom’s family was very small, as most of her parents’ siblings stayed in the “old country”.
Grew up in suburban Long Island, NY with my pretty secular, libaral Jewish family. My parents were both born in Brooklyn, and their parents were immigrants from Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland. That said, I’ll put my votes in for:
Avalon, directed by Barry Levinson. Takes place in the suburbs of Baltimore, I believe, but the family dynamics are very accurate.
Crossing Delancy. Fluffy comedy with Amy Irving and Peter Riegert about the ambiguous feelings Irving’s uptown Manhattanite character has towards the more “old school” Jewishness represented by pickle-seller Riegert and Irving’s adorable “Bubby” (Yiddish for Grandma), played by Reizl Bozyk. Bubby’s apartment is so perfectly rendered I can practically smell the pot roast and plastic covering.
Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl, believe it or not. Of course they’re sometimes over-the-top in places – they’re musicals, after all – but the tight family ties, the respect for learning, and passionate arguing over fine minutia all remind me of many a Thanksgiving or Passover dinner with my extended family.
What worked so well about this film was that a spectrum of cultures could relate to most, if not all of it. I watched it in a cinema full of Dominicans, who were clearly identifying, with an Ashkenazi Jewish friend who (together with me, a Sephardi) was also chortling and cringing with recognition.
The bit where “Bubby” folded the wrapping paper was what got to me.
Ordinary People nailed my background–except no boating for us! But the atmosphere, the constrained marriage, the huge boundaries and silences…yep, that is upper middle class Midwest living at its finest.
As a WASP whose family has been here since the founding of Rhode Island Colony, I can say that I see my heritage everywhere and nowhere. When told to celebrate my ethnic roots at holiday time, I have to scratch my head…we already do. Then again, it is the background all other groups feel free to mock (and sometimes with good reason), so perhaps it all evens out in the end.
