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oceanpark55
Reviews
Drive, He Said (1971)
Disappointing, considering those involved.
Poorly developed and fragmented movie about a confused college basketball player with a host of predictably militant and/or cynically unhappy acquaintances characteristic of 1960s academia where the film is set. I'm not sure whether we are supposed to like or even care about the characters or not, but in any event I didn't feel much of either for any of them. Jack Nicholson directed this movie with a taste for profanity and nudity. I guess he thought he was being provocative and progressively mirroring the changing cultural mores of the time. He would have fared better by putting his energy into developing characterization and refining the script that he co-wrote instead. All in all a disappointing movie which left me with a feeling of indifference about it.
The Family Stone (2005)
Tolerence and acceptance portrayed in Stone
The acting is quite good. The story is about a guy who brings his fiancé who appears to be an understandably nervous, somewhat conservative, very polite, well bred young woman home to spend the Christmas holiday with his very liberal bohemian family. Nearly everything that is attractive about the young woman is repugnant to the family. Right off the bat, they ridicule her because she prefers and requests, out of a sense of propriety and respect to them, separate sleeping arrangements. Every innocent, well intentioned question, act, or gesture she makes is construed as an abomination of disrespect, bigotry, rudeness, callousness, and insensitivity on her part when in fact it is they who are so entrenched and blinded in an extreme, far left liberal agenda that they cannot accept or show the least sense of diplomatic respect to anyone who does not embrace their ways of thinking or behavior. The film is really unbelievable in that in expects you to believe that a family of worldly, educated people, regardless of political persuasions, would actually treat a guest in their home the way they do. Not only is this polite young woman an invited guest in their home but she is the person their son and brother, whom they love, has chosen to marry. Amid the unfolding amusement, I kept wondering if whether the young woman wants to attend a Christmas spiritual service, will they burn her at the stake on their front lawn. They seemingly only lighten up on her after they believe that the woman has spent the night with the brother of the man she was intending to marry and she gives them all a lovely and thoughtful Christmas gift of a portrait of the mean spirited matriarch pregnant with the equally mean spirited daughter. The predictable plot is mildly convoluted and clichéd but the film is highly recommended for hilarity. I don't know when I've ever enjoyed a movie more out of its sheer sense of absurdity. The Stones are caricatures of the family from hell.