Friday, September 16, 2005

The Thing About My Folks (***1/2)

Undeservedly underseen is the lone feature written by Paul Reiser, who with Peter Falk stars as a Jewish son and father on the road in upstate New York. (The director is Raymond De Felitta, who made the equally charming Two Family House and City Island, and brings a similar sense of place as he does in those features.) The very beginning has some of the bickering, bantering style of Reiser’s series Mad About You, but then the pace becomes more leisurely, though no less talky. Reiser has a gift for dialogue that’s both funny and naturalistic. Falk makes an ornery character charming. (He was equally so in person at the screening I saw.) It gets gushy at the end, but it works because you’ve gotten to know the characters and their relationship and it doesn’t feel like cheap manipulation.
 
IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening; circulated via email 9/22/05 and revised/posted 11/27/13

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