"She's your other granddaughter." "I know, I thought she was dead."

Year: 2003

Director & Writer: Peter Hedges

April Burns invites her estranged family to New York for thanksgiving, and encounters a series of unfortunate chances while she's trying to find a working oven, meanwhile her family - including their dying mother - is travelling and thinking if they should come at all. 

It was more than five years ago when I stumbled upon this movie in a store. It was cheap and I was really interested in it, but nobody wanted to buy it for me (and I was so young I never had any money on me, so it might've been like 8 or 9 years ago even). I've been thinking about this movie ever since, though, because somewhere along the way I forgot the name of the movie, and it was really hard to search for a movie. And then I found out about it somehow (I don't even remember even though it was only few days ago), so finally after five, six or even nine years, I had a chance to see this movie.

First thing that I noticed first was the cinematography. The movie was... sort of shaky, and it was probably filmed by hand. Usually that style makes me think of some kind of deep documentary, where the cameraman just followed the subject of the documentary silently, filming by hand. Usually special kind of cinematography is amazing, but in this case it just seemed sloppy. But the colour scheme of this movie was very nice, it really suited the movie.

Another kind of special thing was the lack of music. There was music only very rarely, and it kind of enhanced the idea of some sort of stealthily filmed documentary. It kind of felt like the movie was made as realistic as possible - not the story but the filming, music, all that. The music used was okay. It wasn't horrible but it wasn't too good either. Maybe they should've... not use music at all? That would've been more interesting, and it would've suited this movie better. Few songs here and there, it just made the songs feel weird. 

The story was almost ordinary, just spiced with many different things. But in the end the story made me sort of happy. It had a really nice ending, and even though this movie was kind of short, a lot happened. So that short time was used very efficiently, which is very good. Usually it's very annoying how movies are made 2,5 hours long, even though they could be shorter. I'm not saying all movies need to be 1,5 hours, but usually some longer movies just have a lot of useless scenes in them.

After all these years I feel like I was waiting for nothing. I don't know what I was expecting - I mean I was interested in this movie when I was 10 or 13 years old, so a lot can happen in that time. Maybe I would've liked this movie back then - however it's not likely. This movie was decent, but I feel disappointed. It's worth seeing if weird cinematography doesn't in any way scare you.

☆☆☆☆☆

5 / 10