DVD Voice

This Robert De Niro movie, Everybody’s Fine, might be the first De Niro movie I’ve seen without explosions or guns. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this one, especially given the title, but I was pleasantly surprised and thought it a good film. Touching. (Also, FYI, it’s a remake of Stanno tutti bene – an Italian film from 1990 by Giuseppe Tornatore).

This is a film about a retired man who has recently had his wife die and has invited each of his four kids to come and visit. They all cancel. So, next best thing he decides to go visit them. Only his first stop in New York to visit his son David but he’s not there. He then goes to Chicago to see Kate Beckinsale and is shuttled over quickly from her (she can’t let him stay, she has a business trip) to his other son Robert (Sam Rockwell). And after an afternoon he’s sent to Vegas because Robert can’t let him stay and he spends a day with his daughter Drew Barrymore.

It’s thought provoking. How everyone goes about saying they are “fine” when in reality things aren’t going as well as they should be. How we lie to each other and to the people in our lives (family) that mean the most instead of being accepting, sharing, and caring. How the kids, and this could be any of us, aren’t open and honest because we have been pressured to be the best we can be and not being “good enough” will disappoint them. It makes you sad how age catches up to us and there’s things we’ve never gotten to do. How kids treat their parents in this busy world and how parents assume sometimes instead of really listen.

In the end, how hard would it be to have a perfect family like that? Yes, people don’t get along and we have our differences, but family is family and that blood should be strong enough to make up for the differences and disputes and let everyone accept each other for who they really are, not who we thought they should be.

If we are honest and share the disappointments and the failures and support each other, even though maybe there isn’t anything we can “do” to help out everyone will still be pretty much fine.

Rated PG-13. 99 minutes (1 hour 39 minutes). A wee bit of profanity.

A sudden change from the violence of martial arts and murderers in the antartic, as tonight Netflix sends along Holes. This is a Walt Disney movie with Sigourney Weaver, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Henry Winkler, and Tim Blake Nelson. It’s about a camp for juvenile offenders, Camp Greenlake, in Texas on the site of a ghost town and large dried up lake. To teach the boys character they are required to dig a hole, 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide, everyday.

It becomes obvious that they are looking for something and while the movie unfolds it begins telling the back story of Stanley Yelnats’, Shia LaBeouf’s character, family and that of the townspeople of the lake. Not to try to give much away, but Stanley is from a family that has been cursed and is unlucky – part of why he’s in the camp to begin with, even if he is out of place.

The movie is just fun. It’s not an edge of your seat type of event, but a fun enjoyable way to spend the evening. Jon Voight is actually really entertaining as this wild-eyed guard at the camp munching on his sunflower seeds and always looking for the Yellow Spotted Lizards to shoot.

The movie is also full of great little lines, which the little kids will no doubt be repeating for you for days afterwards! It’s a great little feel good story. So stop thinking that you only should watch films for grown-ups, just enjoy it.

Rated PG. 117 minutes (1 hour 57 minutes).