'Sister' screened at the Traverse City Film Festival this summer. I've only walked out of two films in my life: 'The Passion of the Christ' and this one (Tommy Wiseau's 'The Room' is freakishly riveting by comparison). The topic - our culture's over-reliance on prescription drugs to medicate children - is long overdue for a serious film treatment. However, the script is so heavy handed (and, at times, tone deaf) that the actors have little room to become plausible characters. There's a rather familiar gallery of movie tropes here: the man-child with the stalled acting career and the loitering drinking buddies, the nagging but gorgeous striver-wife (whose prolonged swimming pool exit feels entirely pointless and gratuitous), the sullen teenage sister whose only apparent direction for the first half of the film was to pout and drop profanities (though I sense Grace Kaufman has some serious acting chops that will emerge with a better script). Overall, I'm still a bit baffled that the TCFF screening committee thought this was worthy of the Festival's tenth anniversary.
Review of My Sister
