marianshapiro

What a TERRIFIC film... so poignant and totally REAL!!! It's a compelling story of the relationship between father and son, father and daughters, and husband and wife as experienced by this family across 3 generations. The genius of the story is that almost anyone can identify with each character, even though one is sometimes a jerk. It is full of humor. We found ourselves laughing out loud frequently and also shedding a few tears. Peter Falk and Paul Reiser did superb acting in this film, and, in my opinion, could successfully compete for Oscars!!! "The Thing About My Folks" shows so compassionately how husbands and wives, or parents and kids, can have deep and sometimes very painful misunderstandings. It gives us hope for our own families because we see how some of these misunderstandings get worked out. It shows us that a real family can seize an opportunity for communication and start healing those deep psychological wounds. This is a beautiful and amazing work of art. The packed audience in Santa Barbara loved it and left feeling good.

I saw some similarities to the Oscar-nominated film "Sideways" in that both films were at times quite funny but also had very poignant moments in how they portrayed men's emotions, which are often not expressed. But I definitely preferred "The Thing About My Folks!" The situations and emotions between fathers and kids and husbands and wives will touch millions more of us than the central situation in "Sideways" of cheating on one's partner the day before the wedding.

We saw "The Thing About My Folks" at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. I hope it gets a distributor so many more people can enjoy it as we did. I've already emailed all my friends to watch out for it.

I thought the dialogue didn't make much sense, but the love making sure was well done. Maybe the words didn't translate well into English, but I couldn't imagine people really saying such stupid and stilted things to each other. I couldn't imagine parents acting so awful to their son or the son tolerating it. I didn't realize that these were immigrant families with all the struggles of being in a very different culture. It just seemed so foreign, nothing like the Israeli culture that I know. It was such a disgusting way to treat the girlfriend and the son, that I hated the whole thing. It also didn't make sense to me when the son hugged his father in a sexual way at the end. The only thing I liked was the lovemaking which was very well acted. Also the child was superbly acted.