EVERYBODY'S FINE... NOT!

Doddering widower, Frank Goode, (Robert De Niro) plans a gala party for his adult children and everybody cancels. Did he offend? No. He's too clueless to offend. His children are all talking to each other, but nobody is talking to him. So, get goes on the road to make a personal visit to each one of his ungrateful too-busy-with-life-to-talk-to-dad spawn.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE IS

Carol: We were gonna make a whole world like this. Now, everyone used to come here, but you know... you know what it feels like when all your teeth are falling out really slowly and you don't realize and then you notice that, well, they're really far apart.

And then one day... you don't have any teeth anymore.

Max: Yeah.

Carol: Well it was like that.

Childhood can be a fatal condition. It's amazing that anyone ever grows up. Like many others I anticipated this film, dreaming of the magical kingdom that would emerge from Spike Jonze fertile imagination. Unlike many others, I was disappointed in the result. The story is an adaptation of the children's book by Maurice Sendak where a naughty boy gets sent to bed without his supper (by his mother Catherine Keener) and creates a magical world where he can be "wild".

THE SAVAGES

THE SAVAGES TYPICAL DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

"Maybe dad didn't abandon us. Maybe he just forgot who we were."

There are some things that we accept as part of life and others that we didn't even consider. We are born. We have a mother and a father (or two mothers or two fathers...) and someday we will die. What happens from A to Z is that we realize two important things. One is that we aren't teenagers anymore (more obvious in body than spirit) and two is that our parents, whether good or bad, have done their best (which may not feel like the best, but it is theirs) to help us reach a point when the roles reverse. This is payback to our parents for making it through our adolescence. Siblings, Jon and Wendy Savage (Philip Seymour-Hoffman and Laura Linney) have been estranged from their father for a length of time when the receive the call that their father's girlfriend has died and now he needs assistance. In this very clever and well crafted film, we get to know these characters. They have flaws, but they aren't evil. They are human. It becomes obvious how this circle keeps spinning round. By the rules of nature we keep swearing that we won't repeat our parent's "mistakes", but we do anyway. The Savages show a realistic portrayal of a family, that like many others, was traumatic and that trauma breeds into adult life "issues"... which is why we have therapists. This movie has heart and insight into one of the most important lessons. We are all flawed. Superior acting, seamless path between reality and fiction; a movie to watch twice.

PICK: Flawless acting provides us with realistic family drama. Well done.