A Family Stone (2005) PG-13
8/10
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An uptight, conservative businesswoman accompanies her boyfriend to his eccentric and outgoing family's annual Christmas celebration and finds that she's a fish out of water in their free-spirited way of life.
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Funny and sweet adult family film about family, love, acceptance, differences and fitting-in. The first three-fourths of the film are well paced with a few beautiful outdoor and indoor scenery sets, inner-family humor, warm family love, light story exposition, and a couple heavy family change of life issues; softly done with a large ensemble cast.
The last forth of the film became a bit too densely packed with syrupy sentimentality. It also went with one incredibly unlikely scenario that seemed to snowball into an unwelcome overall feeling of ridiculousness and disassociation.
The film does tackle, or perhaps tries to champion, a couple divisive societal issues. It's partly used as conflict and acceptance plot points, where there had to be one; however the particular issues may also jolt some audience members out of the film's warm immersion and into a circumspect and guarded state. So the film goes niche... Not sure the producers knew just how close it was to being universal gold.
Lastly, as Repo'd would say, all the women are very easy on the eyes.