Raymond De Felitta
City Island

THE REVIEW

American cinema has produced, especially in recent years, films that talk about the contradictions of the family middle class, a topic that's been done to death, with an attitude that is more or less comedic or sarcastic, cynical, or melodramatic (American Beauty).

This film says nothing new. The content: family secrets and accepting one’s own nature.

A yawn-inducing plot: father prison guard with dreams of being an actor, lies to his wife who, out of jealousy, sleeps with the parolee (who is actually the husband’s secret son), while the kids are an annoying nihilist obsessed with obese women and a diligent student who, brace yourselves... is actually a striptease artist at a nightclub!

The style: pseudo-independent winking at an audience that wants to keep watching the usual stuff while pretending to embrace the "alternative scene"... meaning, "I watch low-budget films because they represent reality" but are actually waiting to sit in a theater to watch Prince Of Persia.

The characters are really excessive, the parolee with a tough exterior but looking for a father figure, the unsatisfied wife... characters added just to give some eccentricity... only Andy Garcia is natural and convincing, like in the audition scene (for a Scorsese film..).

It should be the classic "comedy-that-makes-you-think" but it doesn’t even make you laugh a little.

Particularly bad music, omnipresent and insipid, the kind that makes you feel like you're playing a video game, not watching a movie.

It's a film that could easily be presented at Sundance; in the same comedy genre as "Little Miss Sunshine" or the recent "Sunshine Cleaning" (coincidentally with the same name, all films seem alike) and "500 Days of Summer"... which tackle predictable themes always in the same "quirky" but harmless style, cute films in short but overrated and worse, of fake denunciation and underlying mediocrity, increasingly evident to the critics who now regularly target this festival.