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Family Man
Directed By Brett Ratner
Christmas Foolishness
Flogging A Dead Horse
It's Christmas soon, that holy time when America repents. The first and now only world superpower are paying their dues by offering us a new film in the 'What If Life Was Different?' genre. An important question that we all think about, especially when it means giving up 2 hours and 10 minutes enduring this insipidity, made to make us question whether having money and enjoying our job is bad and depressing. Apparently it would be better to be changing a baby's diapers and selling tires retail in New Jersey. After the crazy 'golden eighties' we return to good, old-fashioned values: the kid's nursery, cheap shirts and a beer-soaked game of bowling with friends. You will eventually be accorded an affair with your neighbour but only if you are really and truly a rotten sod.
Mr Jack's Strange Christmas
Jack Campbell is abandoning his girlfriend Kay to go for broker's training in London. Thirteen years later his life is nothing less than distressing; he is swimming in dollars and Italian clothes and reading the Wall Street Journal while waiting for the repulsive Amber Valetta to put her dress back on. It requires the intervention, on Christmas Eve, of an African-american angel (politically correct) to send our man back into the life he could have had with Kay: he wakes up in a house in the suburbs with two toddlers who turn the TV on at 7am to watch Woody Woodpecker. And he develops a taste for it.
Butter, money from butter and the dairyman's daughter
Well, miracles only happen in films. It's not Frank Capra who wants one though: the redemption of Jack, cynical finance shark joined at the hip to his assistant and Palm Pilot, above all makes you want to yawn. If he thinks he's on some kind of acid trip at the beginning of his adventure then perhaps the viewer should be on one to put up with this tasteless story. But all's well that ends well seeing as it's Christmas in New York: Jack wants butter, money from butter and the dairyman's daughter. And he's going to get them. There is nevertheless an honourable performance from Nicholas Cage. You would be better off watching 'It's A Wonderful Life' again for the wanderings of the angel Clarence who saves George Bailey (a wonderful James Stewart) and learn how to believe in miracles again.
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Corinne Le Dour
Translated by Nick Harrison
 Red Dragon
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Family Man review
