
The saying goes, you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. At least this is how it went until we began to broaden our ideas of what family can mean. Well, the idea of having a family that goes beyond blood relatives is not new. And it is being looked at in different ways in the movies. There are darker takes like the Jesse Eisenberg film Manodrome from earlier this year, and now there is, on a much lighter note, the rather self-explanatory Chosen Family, a labor of love from the ever-lovely Heather Graham (who also gets credit as the writer, director and star of the film).
The last time Graham was messaged, she played a Western character attempting to save her daughter while filming a scene in Place of Bones. In this present scenario, Ann portrayed by Graham, attempts to reach out to someone else’s daughter but ends up doing the opposite. It is these traumas that make certain millennials and Gen X’ers cringe to this day which is the humourous twist in the film Chosen Family. That’s the magic of films!
Graham has disastrously written a nice little screenplay that includes expectedly amusing and familiar faces in the supporting cast like Thomas Lennon (Reno 911) who is cast as Max, Ann’s friend. The perfect friends, Frances (Odessa Rae) and Roz (Andrea Savage) are part of the group as well and they brainstorm some more to try to get Ann the perfect partner after she goes through a series of awful dating and relationships. One would expect self-control from a professional yoga instructor. On the contrary, we learn that her crazy wannabe-singer mother Dorothy, played by Julie Halston, and the rest of Ann’s annoying family, who create havoc as they’re always around, make the situation a lot worse.
Ann has to master boundaries (don’t we all?) and at the same time be extra vigilant regarding her sibling Clio (Julia Stiles), a recovering drug addict who is always just about to fall off the wagon. Ouch. Graham spends the majority of the picture’s running time as Ann, which is okay because Ann doesn’t seem to be a very interesting character in the first place; however, the conflicts between her and Clio are perhaps the most emotional of the entire 87-minute film.
Mention Julia Stiles and, for the potentially millennial audience, they may whip back 25 years to the actress’ nonsense appearance in arguably the best scene of the movie “10 Things I Hate About You” (dearly departed Heath Ledger, where are you when needed?). After witnessing the kind of character Stiles portrays in ‘Chosen Family’ in her recent comedy all this will make sense, but one may feel herself craving for more of Stiles’ character (and of Thomas Lennon’s).
Years later, it appears that Stiles and Graham have not changed much, and they are both even better actors than before. So, it’s not surprising that some people might go crazy knowing that Graham plays a single yoga instructor in her recent film. Graham also puts on a bikini countless times to update her vlogs aimed at her character’s fans, which seems to be rather self-referential. However, the fact that it is her passion to make Chosen Family is probably the number one reason to go head over heels for her once more.
Of course, you can say, “Oh, she is just a child” but there comes a time when people might get tired of it. This is a disgusting person with no regard for the feelings of anyone and no fear while showing a cocky attitude saying, ‘Ask me if I care.’ In any event, Ann’s friends, who sometimes take foolish steps, are fortunate in this instance that Graham, Stiles, and Lennon are capable of fulfilling the role that Lilly was supposed to fill.
What saved Graham’s situation was the fact that A-story ended in a predictable manner that is typical in stories without plotlines. You go, girl! This is the only film I would recommend to people today at least because it is entertaining and manages to strike a chord such that boundaries in our twenty-first-century existence have a point.
piano.” Whenever the instrument is in her sight, Berniece recalls her mother crying over it. For the sake of this piano, her father was hunted down by a white mob and got killed as he and his accomplices tried to “retrieve” it some thirty years ago. The film begins, with a term hardly appropriate, with a heist that is, for want of a better expression, shot against a display of the stars and stripes and exploding rockets. That option makes the film a very effective cinema from the beginning. Even though the film has many such flickering recollections, they would come later when Wilson’s single-room theatre comes alive.
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