Out of Omaha

If you've never been to Omaha, you're doing good and if you've never watched this movie, you're doing better than me.

This movie is as exciting as Omaha - and Omaha is not exciting.

A script that is as lame as the bland, vacant, uninteresting of Nebraska.

If you live in Nebraska, I now know what your life must be like. My heart goes out to you.

I just finished watching California Dreaming with Dave Foley and Lea Thompson. It was so bad on so many levels it's impossible to decide where to begin the review.

It's too late for me. But you can still save yourself.

No one associated with this film knows the basic rule of movie making. There has to be someone in the film that the audience is routing for. This movie should have been called A**holes on Parade.

Everyone is twisted, but not even in a funny way.

The daughter is so stupid that she thinks her boyfriend can hide in the bathroom of the RV all the way to California. The boyfriend runs into the corn and gets lost in 10 secs. That might have been funny if the boyfriend character was dumb enough to be funny, but he wasn't. While he was in the corn, he used the word "infinate". (WHO wrote this script?) The daughter doesn't mind the fact that her "boyfriend" never told his parents about her and that the mother is a criminal and the parents (who by all standards are white trash) do not allow him to have a girlfriend. When does that happen? The father is so lame, I don't even have a comment about him. (and I really like Dave Foley). The mother is the one person I was trying to relate to, but then she turned into a psycho. The sister and the grandmother are twisted individuals.

The lovey dovey resolution at the end doesn't make up for the mess that this movie is.

I like funny family movies, I like family travel movies, the idea of going along on a motor home vacation at some level with a nice middle class family seemed like at least it would be pleasant if not raucously funny. I did not like this movie.

I blame the writing. The basic premise, that the family spends a day trying to get on the road to CA with their motor home and continually runs into time-sucking obstacles, totally pulled the idea of a 'family traveling comedy' movie right off the table. This is a depressing movie. DEPRESSING. The husband and wife have a very cold relationship, the daughter is downright annoying, and the son, well he's there and says what few lines he has but he really doesn't have anything going in the story beyond maybe saying "I want waffles and syrup too." I think I could have learned his part in less than five minutes. Of all the characters, he's just 'there'. Maybe that makes him the least annoying.

The bunch of obstacles the face are also annoying. The daughter doesn't want to go on vacation without taking her airhead boyfriend, the boyfriend's parents are quirky in a bad way and unlikeable, the aunt and grandmother are also someone you can't wait to get away from, the aunt's dog runs in front of the motorhome (what is the dog doing in the street??) and seems to have gotten killed, the family has to take the boyfriend's mother to her parole officer for a meeting, there is NOTHING funny. On top of this, the husband and wife spend half the movie unhappy (or sad) with each other. It's all tedious and annoying and after a while you feel this movie sucking out any happiness or joy you had earlier in the day. You find yourself wishing that the family would finally overcome all these delays and just get the motor home on the damned road so the movie can end, hopefully with a shot of them happily playing on the California beach where they were headed, but we didn't even get that.

This movie could have been written in two hours by someone with a hangover being held at gunpoint. Awful. I give it two stars instead of one because, they could have made it longer and that would have been even worse.

Poor Ginger Gainor, she would love to take her family to a California beach where she vacationed and has the fondest memories of that time. She is an uptight real estate woman who might have the best intentions in wanting to show that part of the country to her family, but little does she realize, no one really wants to go! Her family, though, really enjoy going to Branson, where they feel 'at home' and are surrounded from people like them, so why bother?. Ginger is, what appears to be, a take charge woman, who does everything by the book and even calculates how long they will spend traveling from Omaha to California!

Unfortunately, things don't work the way Ginger wants. Things have a way of happening to her that completely derail her carefully laid plans. Ginger is defeated by everyone and everything, so guess where the family will head, after all? Yes, you guessed it!

What is Lea Thompson doing in this movie? She certainly deserved better. The movie will not add anything to her film career. The idea might have looked better in the written script by Linda Voorhees, who also directed, but alas, it doesn't translate to a fun time at all.