Unstrung Heroes

Rating:
Summary: Read The Book First, Then Judge
Review: I liked this movie a lot, until I read the following by Franz Lidz, the book's author (now I like it a lot less) (The book is great!):At the other end of this decade I wrote a childhood memoir ("Unstrung Heroes") that recounted my mother's six-year struggle with breast cancer. From my ninth birthday, in Year Two, almost every step she took was a step going down. "Her hospital stays were becoming longer and longer," I recalled. "I measured them by the nights that she was away. And I didn't like it now when she was home. She had become unpredictable. She wasn't dying like some movie heroine. She could be sullen and bad-tempered. I resented her." And yet when Disney adapted the book for the screen in 1995, my mother, Selma, was shown dying EXACTLY like a movie heroine. No anguished outbursts. No unkind thoughts. No endless days lying mute and tubed and suctioned in grim hospital rooms. My mother's celluloid counterpart (Andie McDowell) was a secular saint whose main cancer symptom was that she tripped over furniture. What I had described as a long, painful, ugly death was made quick, painless, almost pretty. On film, the more the cancer spread, the more luminous my mother became, as if she were pregnant, not ill. The way Disney spun cotton candy around my mother's suffering reminded me of Ali MacGraw's blissful description of her six-minute struggle with cancer in "Love Story" (1970). "It doesn't hurt, Ollie, really it doesn't," Ms. MacGraw, as Jenny, told her husband (Ryan O'Neal). "It's like falling off a cliff in slow motion. Only after a while you wish you hit the ground already." The way Disney killed off my mother -- after fixing pancakes, she praises her kids, plants a perversely passionate kiss on her husband's lips and, to soulful strains of "You Are My Sunshine," drifts off to die in a comfy armchair -- reminded me of Mad magazine's send-up of "Love Story." Instead of cancer, the diagnosis for Ms. MacGraw's character was Old Movie Disease. "In the old days, they used to die beautiful glamorous deaths!" a cartoon oncologist tells O'Neal. "Your wife is going to die such a beautiful death, it'll take your breath away before it takes her breath away." The Big C has always been a fruitful subgenre of Old Movie Diseases. Actresses from Bette Davis ("Dark Victory," brain tumor, 1939) to Debra Winger ("Terms of Endearment," lymphoma, 1983) to Diane Keaton ("Marvin's Room," leukemia, 1997) have received Oscar nominations for playing cancer victims. The latest Hollywood divas to brave cancer on the screen are Meryl Streep ("One True Thing") and Susan Sarandon ("Stepmom"). Both play well-off, middle-aged domestic goddesses, but only Ms. Streep is made to look ravaged by the disease. Her skin pale gray, her eyes rimmed red like a Kabuki's, she becomes so gaunt and frail that in the film's most affecting scene, she has to be lifted out of the bathtub by her daughter. Reduced to a miserable shell, she weeps, rages, endures Bette Midler songs and yet -- inevitably -- maintains her nobility. "Terminal illnesses can inspire voyeurism," Jackson Peyton, a public health consultant in Washington, said in a telephone interview. "Unable to find meaning in their own lives, some people seek it through the drama of the fatal sicknesses of others. But the hard reality of dying is brutally disappointing. For the most part, the deaths of cancer victims don't play out like characters in 19th-century novels or 20th-century films. The truth is that most suffer terribly, and many unload their bitterness on their loved ones." Old Movie Disease-driven films support their romantic agendas by evading and overlooking hard realities. The chaos and horror of cancer are papered over with sentiment and sanctimony, then packaged as a higher state of being. Hollywood cancer mutates ordinary people into angelic beings who straighten out the lives of all the mixed-up souls around them. In "Marvin's Room," the selfless Ms. Keaton draws on an inexhaustible fund of goodness to teach her selfish sister (Ms. Streep) to be more humane. In "One True Thing," the upright Ms. Streep is sacrificed so that her icily ambitious daughter (Renee Zellweger) can learn "life lessons" and turn compassionate caregiver. In "Stepmom," cancer works curative wonders on Ms. Sarandon's prickly perfect homemaker. She remains hostile toward her ex-husband's trophy wife-to-be (Julia Roberts) until, succumbing to the dynamics of the honeyed plot and repeated dosings of her own cancer theme song ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough"), she wearily slouches toward canonization. The more advanced the cancer, the more potent its redemptive powers. Terminal cancer trumps a relatively benign strain in "The Doctor," a 1991 tearjerker in which William Hurt sinks from lordly physician to lowly patient. Stricken with a treatable form of throat cancer, the chilly, insensitive heart surgeon befriends a fellow patient (Elizabeth Perkins) with an inoperable brain tumor. This doomed (and, of course, radiant) young woman guides him on one of those journeys of self-discovery that can begin and end only in Hollywood. Along the way, he learns to appreciate sunsets, desert dancing and rooftop pigeons. Watching this once heartless cardiologist transform into a benevolent St. Francis, replete with birds, I was reminded of another exchange in Mad's spoof. The oncologist tells a shaken Ryan O'Neal: "I'm afraid it's out of our hands." "You mean medical science is powerless?" O'Neal asks. "What medical science!? I'm talking about CINEMA science! Think back! What have we got so far? A corny soap-opera plot! Unbelievable dialogue! A schmaltzy piano music background! Can't you see? If the producer doesn't have a tragic, sobbing ending to make all this garbage seem meaningful, he's got absolutely nothing!" Someday somebody may find a cure for cancer, but the terminal sappiness of cancer movies is probably beyond remedy.

Rating:
Summary: Give Me A Break!
Review: I loved this movie as did friends of mine. How unfortunate that some may be persuaded against getting this movie due to reviewers comparing it to the book. I wasnt aware of the book. I simply rented this movie to find it genuinely touching and sweet. It is absolutely one of my top 5 movies. There wasn't one character in this movie that was less than outstanding. SEE THIS MOVIE - despite the critics, AND JUDGE FOR YOURSELF!

Rating:
Summary: A Good Movie For people Who Can't Read
Review: I'm from a dysfunctional family, too - but more like the one in the book, not as cute and unthreatening as the one in the film. Interestingly, the moviemakers Disneyfied Uncle Arthur into a compulsive collector of wedding-cake ornaments. The trove of flea market knickknacks assembled by the cinematic Arthur was hygienically boxed and labeled as if in a Hold Everything catalogue display. Evidently, the reality of moldering cardboard and cockroach-teeming newsprint didn't fit the director's Metropolitan Home esthetic.

Rating:
Summary: Ha, I say ughh!
Review: If you liked this movie I know a great psychiatrist who can help you. If you cried in this movie The Happy Farm would gladly have you. Do you really think that someone as annoying as Keaton could direct an animated flick? The people on the set probably acted as best they could ( which isn't too good) so that the movie would be over and they couldn't hear Keaton's squeaky voice any more! Good luck sitting through this!

Rating:
Summary: Quaint, Neutered Cuteness
Review: In its quaint, neutered cuteness, the word "quirky" has become an oxymoronic cliche - a way of making unconventionality seem blandly conventional. Quirky is the perfect word for the characters in this cinematic bastardization of a great, moving book. The four mad uncles have been reduced to a couple of only-in-the-movies harmless eccentrics. Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, director Diane Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence of the Harold and Maude crazy-people-are-more-in-touch-with-life-than-the-rest-of-us genre. But the black hole of the film is Michael (Kramer) Richards, who's opaque when trying to play a character with hidden depth. His "demetia" is weightless, and so, finally, is Unstrung Heroes.

Rating:
Summary: Quaint, Neutered Cuteness
Review: In its quaint, neutered cuteness, the word "quirky" has become an oxymoronic cliche - a way of making unconventionality seem blandly conventional. Quirky is the perfect word for the characters in this cinematic bastardization of a great, moving book. The four mad uncles have been reduced to a couple of only-in-the-movies harmless eccentrics. Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, director Diane Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence of the Harold and Maude crazy-people-are-more-in-touch-with-life-than-the-rest-of-us genre. But the black hole of the film is Michael (Kramer) Richards, who's opaque when trying to play a character with hidden depth. His "demetia" is weightless, and so, finally, is Unstrung Heroes.

Rating:
Summary: A small, calculatingly warm and fuzzy movie
Review: It's interesting to watch the jagged leaps and bounds by which this hilarious, unsentimental Lower East Side memoir became a sentimental tearjerker about a beautiful mother dying of cancer in L.A. That Hollywood gets Jewishness wrong again and again should come as a surprise to no one (Remember Melanie Griffith in "A Stranger Among Us"?) But the story of "Unstrung Heroes" is a rather spectacular example of Disney not getting anything about New York at all. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this sanitized ode to motherhood is that it is practically impossible to watch without crying. Billed as a Jewish "Terms of Endearment", it's really just another Light-Hearted Weepie that plucks at the heartstrings pretty darn hard.

Rating:
Summary: Good Performances
Review: Normally I would rate this movie higher, I just feel that the movie is a little too hollywood. But as a film, this is Sentimentalism at it's best. John Tuturo gives a great performance (as usual) as a boys father who is so in love with his dying wife that he overlooks this needs of the rest of his family. Michael Richards plays the dufus (is that spelled correctly?) as usual and I must say, he's damn good at it. I feel that this is a great movie as a family love story, but I can't let slip the Hollywood affect. Film buffs will know what I mean.

Rating:
Summary: A very dear movie with lots of laughs
Review: Our family thoroughly enjoyed the movie. Perhaps the other reviewers didn't have the *blessing* of growing up in slightly disfynctional families. :-)

Every family has a few crazy relatives. This movie just adds a lot of spice to that basic premise.

We bought the movie after renting it and have viewed it many times.

Rose

Rating:
Summary: Turns Literary Champagne into Cinematic Kool-Aide
Review: Sometimes a film should be taken on its own merit and not compared to the book on which it was based. A film by nature creates a fixed reality not subject to the imagination of its viewers, so comparisons will always fall short. This film is full of quiet beauty and captures moments of honest, deep emotions, and, regardless of possible variances from the memoir by Franz (Steven) Lidz and Uncle Danny's unfortunate similarities to "Kramer" from "Seinfeld", it is heartbreaking, life-affirming, and satisfying film experience.

Diane Keaton's first feature length not-made-for-TV directorial debut is a poignant and often humorous story. Young Steven Lidz (Nathan Watt) is a normal boy growing up during the Cold War with his sister, mother, and his slightly quirky father. The father, Sid (John Turturro), is excitable about science and his visions of a techno-topian future, endlessly inventing household gadgets, but he's also a romantic and deeply loves his wife Selma (Andie MacDowell). Those future visions are blurred when Selma's health begins to wane. Unable to cope with the slow demise of his mother, Steven runs away to stay with an odd pair of uncles, who seem to be two extremes of his father. Uncle Danny (Michael Richards) is high-strung and sees anti-semitic conspiracies everywhere, while uncle Arthur (Maury Chaykin) is child-like and finds joy in the simplest of things (he collects lost balls in the park because he believes, if you listen closely as with seashells, you can hear the sound of the children who played with them). There's a hilarious scene where the landlord sees the three outside the building and begins to chase after them; they escape to the apartment as if their lives were being threatened by a raging grizzly bear.

The strange, inventive, and sometimes playful, behavior of Steven's uncles is distracting enough to keep him from brooding about his mother's last days. Instead of filling him with paranoia and neurosis, however, his uncles teach Steven about faith and family and the joys of life. Thomas Newman's ("American Beauty") music is perfectly suited to this bittersweet film. In fact, I bought the soundtrack CD after watching the film for the first time.

By the way...the reviews by "a viewer" from Evanston and "fred q. walrustitty" have absolutely nothing to do with the film, and it's likely the reviewers wrote them as a joke. Unfortunately, 11 out of 15 people believed them and found them helpful.