The Thing About My Folks (2005)

If you have not seen this jewel of movies yet, you are in for a wonderful surprise. Between Riser and Falk, you cannot go wrong. Dialogue to die for. "Car rental? Car to rent. Just wanna rent a car. (anxious Riser)I know what it is. I was just thinking." (Mechanic in the boonies) ++++"Paris, Kenya and Bocca Raton we got it down to here. (Riser about his mom)"No one is going to Bocca Raton this time o' year? It's a hundred and thirty degrees there.""OK, somebody just shoot me would ya?" (Riser) +++++++++++OK, so you have to be there. Go see it. ONe of the most charming movies made. If you do not laugh out loud, then this is not the movie for you.It is about relationships, caring and much love.A wonderful movie to cherish.

Paul Reiser is one of my favorite people in show business. I have read both of his books and think that he is great. Peter Faulk can deliver a punch line with the best of them. The combination of the two is magic.This is a story about a family really getting to know each other. Through a road trip a father and son connect for the first time in their lives in the midts of a family crisis. They do all the things that fathers and sons are suppose to do in life...they are just doing them much later in life. The situations are very funny, but have the feeling that they could actually happen to people in real life (not obsurdly over the top or cartoonish). This is the first time that I watch Paul Reiser and fully believed every emotion that was portrayed. At times, his eyes look so sad.Gret movie and great story and plot. It has comedy and emotion but an uplifting message...Olympia Dukakas does a great job also :)

I won't go into too much detail about the plot of this movie as other reviewers have covered pretty much the same ground.Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the film very much. Peter Falk's performance alone is reason enough to watch the film.A small scale 'road trip' movie with Falk & Paul Reiser in upstate NY in the fall is the setting for most of the action in the film.Very well written with an adult target audience in mind. Plenty of reality based humor & some well played drama give the film a feeling that it could be your own family.Really can't say enough about this film except that it's a damn shame that a lovely movie like this doesn't get more exposure while other trashy junk out there does.It's great to see Falk with a big leading man role again & he makes the most of it. It proves that his famous friend & writer/director John Casavettes was right in casting Falk in many of his ground breaking films of the 60s & 70s.

This should have been a movie about Sam and his wife, the glorious Peter Falk and equally glorious Olympia Dukakis. That would have been a movie worth seeing. Instead it's a Paul Reiser vehicle, with a little Falk thrown in. The wonderful Elizabeth Perkins is also in this movie, but you'd hardly know it. I presume Reiser is under the impression that he's a giant movie star who needs an appropriate vehicle. He's not. Even more galling is that Reiser took the trouble to hire some of the best women character actresses on the screen today and then shoved them all into his background. Dukakis does not show up until the last 15 minutes, but when she does, the screen glows. The story is about Falk and Dukakis really, but we're subjected to a pointless, silly, preposterous road trip in which Reiser gets to show how very cute, precious and oh-so-deep with psychological insight (wrong!) he can be. For instance, In a restaurant scene that I imagine Reiser had hoped was "Cassavetes-like" there's a laughably false confrontation between Reiser and Falk that is so patently ridiculous, I was embarrassed for Falk.