This week the theme over at
Wandering Through the Shelves is about Adopted or Foster families. So without further ado here are my picks.
First pick is Despicable Me. If not for having a child I probably would never have seen this, but since having a child and seeing all these kids movies, I realized I was missing out on some great movies. In this one Steve Carrell voices Gru who is a supervillian who wants to steal a shrink ray but it was stolen from him as he was stealing it, so he adapts 3 girls so they can distract the other villian while he steals it back. It is a really good family movie.
The second movie I picked is Flirting with Disaster. It stars Ben Stiller as a guy who was adopted and now wants to go find his real parents, so he enlists the help of an adoption agent played by Tea Leoni and goes on a road trip with her and his family to find his real birth parents. It is a real funny movie as they end up at the wrong house a couple times on the journey.
The final pick is Four Brothers. It is about a group of adopted brothers from Detroit who are looking for the people responsible for the death of there mother. It starts Mark Wahlberg, Garrett Hedlund, Andre Benjamin and Tyrese Gibson as the brothers. It is full of action and I think a great movie that will keep you entertained throughout.
I'm not an animation fan in the least so I haven't seen your first pick and Four Brothers wasn't something I cared much for but it's a terrific pick for the theme. I do enjoy the wacky chicanery of Flirting with Disaster, so many fantastic performances! Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal are brilliant as are Lily Tomlin and Alan Alda as the two very different sets of parents.
ReplyDeleteMine this week are a mix of comedy and drama and I included an extra that I just stumbled upon it's a bit of a stretch on the theme but was so bizarre I just had to make room for it to cast a cautionary light on the movie.
Loggerheads (2005)-Three separate vignettes look at an adoption story from different angles. Feeling unsure and unsettled Grace (Bonnie Hunt) returns home to visit her mother and search for the child she gave up for adoption years before. Young drifter Mark (Kip Pardue) begins a relationship with a handyman while trying to help endangered loggerhead turtles survive. Elizabeth (Tess Harper) struggles with defying her pious minister husband to seek out her estranged adopted son. On a Mother's Day weekend in North Carolina their three stories converge.
Baby Boom (1987)-Hard driving executive J.C. Wyatt, not affectionately called The Tiger Lady, is on the cusp of being made a partner in her advertising firm when she is named guardian for a baby when a distant relative and his wife are killed in an accident. Unexpectedly taking to the little girl she decides to adopt and raise her which throws her life into tumult and takes her in a direction she never expected. Charming comedy is a perfect fit for Diane Keaton.
Room for One More (1952)-Cary Grant and Betsy Blair, married in real life when this was made, play a couple with three children who also have been foster parents to many over the years. They take two deeply troubled children into their home who prove to be almost more than they can handle. The film follows the difficult adjustments they all face when they decide to adopt rather than foster them.
Dishonorable Mention: Happy Mother’s Day, Love George aka Run Stranger Run (1973)-What starts out as a quiet drama about a young man, adopted at four days old, returning to the Nova Scotia coast of his birth to search for his roots takes an extreme wrong turn about 3/4 of the way through and becomes a slasher flick for no discernible reason. Up until then it's not a bad little film, with a very strong performance by Cloris Leachman, in a terrible black wig, as a sad, beaten down woman but that severe shift in tone scuttles the movie completely. How this ever attracted a cast of such quality, aside from Cloris there are two other Oscar winners-Patricia Neal-chewing scenery like crazy, and a brunette Ron Howard as well as Bobby Darin in his last role (as a fry cook!) is a mystery. There are some beautiful shots of the Nova Scotia area but this is a strange mishmash of a movie.
I was never one to watch animation either, until my wife and I had our son, then got stuck watching a lot of animated movies, and most turned out to be pretty good.
DeleteAs far as your picks, I have not seen any of them. But I have a lot of movies to catch up on.
Great picks! I've only actually seen Despicable Me from your picks, but Four Brothers sounds like a movie I'd like to watch soon :)
ReplyDelete- Allie
Yes Four Brothers is a movie I really enjoy and think you may like if you like a good action movie once in awhile. I would also recommend Flirting with Disaster, it is one of the earlier Ben Stiller movies. The cast is great as it features Patrica Arquette, Tea Leoni, Mary Tyler Moore, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins, Alan Alda and Josh Brolin.
DeleteI love Despicable Me which is getting a lot of love around here today. It deserves it. I have not seen the Ben Stiller film but it sounds entertaining. Love 4 Brothers! I find that film excellent and it is a remake of a great John Wayne film called "The Sons of Katie Elder" which i also love!
ReplyDeleteWhy am I just now realizing that was Garrett Hedlund in Four Brothers? Clearly I haven't thought about that movie in awhile. Nice pick!
ReplyDeleteI was just about to say the same thing.
Delete