The Year of Getting to Know Us

I saw this at Sundance earlier in the year. I didn't know anything about it going into the festival and it blew me away. Sharon Stone was terrific. I'm not a huge fan of hers, but the scenes of her and her son when he was a boy were terrific. Tom Arnold was also great as her car sales/womanizing husband. Jimmy Fallon was oddly serious throughout the film. I was hoping he'd crack a jock every once in a while, but he was supposed to play is straight and he was good. Lucy Liu was also good as his girlfriend. The movie was a thoughtful/funny meditation on the father/son/family dynamic...of loss, love and regrets. Surprisingly good film.

Some years ago I picked up a copy of a literary magazine and found a story by Ethan Canin. It was excellent. As time went by I read two collections of his short stories and novellas and one novel. They ranged from good to great.

Two movies were made of his short stories. Both were good, and faithful to the stories so I was looking forward to seeing The Year Of Getting to Know Us. What a disappointment. I read both stories again upon which the movie was based, and wondered if either the director or the actors had read them.

I realize a director can't always capture the story as written in a play or movie but - The story occurred in California not Florida. There's nothing to indicate in either short story that the mother was a flake. There's no indication the father was a car salesman, only that he was successful in business. The father had multiple affairs not multiple marriages. The woman the father was having sex with in his convertible, wasn't the neighbors wife. The son was married to his significant other. The woman wasn't just his girlfriend. He was an English teacher, not a writer. His wife was a journalist not a lawyer. They lived in Boston not New York. There's a comic element to the father in the movie, not in the story. The emphasis in the story is the relationship of the son to his father, the relationship between the son and his wife is minor, and so on.

The next time this director makes a movie, I hope he writes his own story or picks a second class author. I hate it when directors mess up perfectly good literature.

Christopher Rocket (Jimmy Fallon) returns home after news that his father is dying. Home is Florida, where he was raised by his emotionally-abusing, distant and womanizing father (Tom Arnold) and his soon-to-be-hippie and emotionally-abused mother (Sharon Stone). Home is not where the heart is.

We have many flashbacks of the out-of-whack dynamics of Chris's childhood. Most of which weren't need, primarily because these are good actors, so we only needed a scene or two to see that Chris never got the love and support that he should have.

Chris as an adult is an emotionally-distant and cynical young man. His beautiful girlfriend Anne (Lucy Liu), beautiful on the inside and out, thinks he can grow up, accept his parents and then enter into a mature and committed relationship with her if he has a heart-to-heart with his father in the hospital. You know, the father who's in a coma and the one who has never said a meaningful word to his son in his entire life - oh, how naive some supporting characters can be. The almost brilliantly funny scene of Chris attempting a conversation with his father in the hospital only landed him in jail. Maturity will have to come later.

This is Jimmy Fallon playing a very sullen man in a drama-comedy that is mostly drama. Almost completely drama with a lot of slow scenes building up to emotionally-abusive results which we already knew from previous slow scenes building up to emotionally-abusive results. These struggles with maturity have been seen before, either in other dysfunctional family dramedies or in the first few scenes or trailer of this film since they didn't have too much more to add, but "The Year of Getting to Know Us" is a pretty good film, well acted and with solid characters.

I saw the world premiere of this film at Sundance and it is seriously one of the five worst films I have seen in my lifetime. During the Q&A (in which the director and entire cast were present), no one in the audience had anything worth saying because the film was so awful. It was a pretty awkward moment.

Considering all of the 10s this film has received, it seems to me that people connected with the film are clearly the ones giving it a rating without considering the quality of the final product. If you honestly think this is a good film, you have no taste when it comes to film-making.

Jimmy Fallon is painfully one dimensional. Lucy Liu is good, but her role has no meat-- it's sad that these are the only parts she is given. Tom Arnold is not an actor and never has been. Sharon Stone is caricaturish. Illeana Douglas and Tony Hale give the best performances, but in minor roles. What most people don't know about this film is that the director cuts back and forth between the present and the past at least twenty times-- an overused technique that not even the most mundane film students resort to these days. This forces Arnold and Stone, who play Fallon's parents, to carry a major portion of the film in the flashbacks.

There is rarely a truthful moment in the film. The script is contrived. The cliché ending can be seen in any below-average Hollywood romantic comedy. I hope this director grows in maturity before he writes or directs another film. He had the budget and resources at his fingertips, but blew his opportunity because he wasn't properly equipped.

Which Sundance programmer allowed this film to be shown? They should be ashamed of themselves. The work speaks for itself and it clearly falls short. I'd hate to think that the programmer was being wooed by the producer's rep or other people behind the film without considering the ramifications of screening something of this quality at Sundance. Is this what Redford's vision has come to?

This is such a funny and charming movie about families and how we all become just like our parents - I had no idea Jimmy Fallon was such a good actor. Sharon Stone is also great and shows that she can really act, which is sometimes lost in the big movies she does. I also love Ileanna Douglas in everything and this is no exception. Like Jimmy Fallon, Tom Arnold also plays a serious role and is able to hold his own with Sharon Stone. The Year of Getting to Know Us reminded me of Garden State but is a little more weird - in a good way. I'm not sure when this movie is going to be released in the UK, but I hope it's soon. It deserves to be seen.