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| Friends and Family
A delicious confection!
This movie is a delicious confection, all lightness and froth and bubbling high spirits. A gay couple work for the New York Mafia and their parents pay an unexpected visit. The guys have to enlist their mobster associates to pull off a charade to convince the parents that they're not mobsters.
Far from exploiting or trafficking in stereotypes, Friends ; Family skewers those characters who believe in stereotypes, most especially the goofy goombahs and the delightful but nitwitted Edward Hibbert character.P>The characterizations in the movie may be a little thin - although I see a lot of real feeling underneath - but it is a farce, after all, and that's the only way farces can work. Although some of the humor is a little over-the-top, there's a wonderful old-fashioned restraint, too.
I hope to see more work from this creative team.
A jewel of an old-fashioned comedy.
I loved this movie when I saw it at a comedy film festival a couple of years ago, and I love it even more on DVD, looking pristine and with an excellent set of "extras". I hope this wonderful film manages to find the audience that missed it in its apparently brief theatrical run.
Inexplicably dismissed by many - though I should add not all - critics that I read, this personal favorite of mine is finally being given a second chance on DVD. It's about a gay couple who are hit men for the Mafia, but that doesn't begin to convey the stylishness of the comedy and the tight structure of the story line(s). It's a genuine throwback to the old-fashioned farces of the golden age of Hollywood, with its giddy, improbable starting point, hilarious cast of stock characters and the overlapping stories. It's truly one of the few American film comedies in memory that gives you a laugh every minute or so, and that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as "Trouble in Paradise".
As a gay man, I was glad at last to see a movie in which the gay characters are in a long-term relationship, and aren't closeted, ambivalent about their sexualities, or drug addicts. Instead, despite the fantastic story line, they're actually presented in a fashion that is in some ways truer to life than most depictions of gay men in movies - as happy, confident and successful (and did I mention attractive?)
The cast is fully up to the level of the material. I especially liked Rebecca Creskoff - a delightful, lovely presence as the mob boss's daughter - and Beth Fowler, who in some ways is the motor that gets the plot going: perfection as the gay hero's unstoppable mother. And catch Anna Maria Alberghetti, of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" knock-knock joke, hilarious as Creskoff's mother.
Pounce on this one.
Bad
The movie never finds its tone. It's supossed to be funny but it isn't, mainly due to its unbelievavility. The director treats some scenes as if it were high-comedy, and others as pure caricature, and it doesn't work. The first ones end up as ridiculous and the second ones as tiresome. BR>Also this is one of those movies where the 2 main characters are a gay couple and they almost don't touch each other during the whole movie. And I think they don't kiss once.BR>The dvd has a full-screen transfer.
Buy Friends And Family at Amazon.com
Buy posters at Allposters.com
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