Queue Tips: The sly stoners.

I have been aware of the movie "The Family Stone" since it first came out, but I was never interested in watching it.  One of the main reasons is the title.  There is a band called Sly and the Family Stone.  So why would you give your movie a similar name?  At the very least, you could have called it "The Stone Family".  Or, to quote Wikipedia, "The Christmas Holiday Misadventures of the Stone Family".  Was the confusion intentional?  Was it better for marketing?  The tagline should have been, "Not your everyday people".

I didn't know much about the movie, but I always gathered that Stone was the name and that it was not about literally a stone that the family owns.  The title of the film was an indicator to me that this was written either lazily, incompetently, or both.  Incidentally, the writer-director of the film also did a movie called "The Good House".  I wonder if it's about the Good family and their house?  Or is it just a general statement that good people house others?

But anyways, it's a fictional family, so you couldn't come up with a different name?  I just googalized it, and apparently Sly Stone's actual last name is Sylvester.  It would have been more clever to name this movie "The Family Sylvester".  But it's obvious that the write just needed a last name for a family and having heard of the band, decided to call them the Family Stone.

This movie is set during Christmas, and as I often do during the holidays, I like to watch these types of movies after Thanksgiving through New Year's Day.  With Diane Keaton recently having passed, I was pleasantly surprised to remember that she was in this movie, with a big role, actually.  So I was in a receptive mood and looking forward to seeing her perform (without putting on a Woody Allen movie), especially in something that was new to me.

Sarah Jessica Parker is also in it.  I'm not a big fan.  I never understood the rage when she was in "Sex and the City".  (The rage.  Get it?  Apparently, her character's name was Carrie.).  She is probably a nice person, and husband Matthew Broderick seems to be able to stand her.  But I'm not impressed with her work.  So when the movie begins and all the other characters instantly just hate her, I could identify.  I liked this movie.

For those two facts, I mostly enjoyed it.  But then eventually, you do realize that the story is terribly written and not very well directed.  Despite that, most of the actors performed very well with the material they were working with.  Nonetheless, this is not going to be a yearly holiday film I will be going to watch.  Unless I was stoned.

Now I'm off to write my own magical holiday movie about a wizard family.  It's called the Sorcerers Stone.