Sister (2014)

Overrated

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

If this movie were merely formulaic, it might be tolerable. But it is so much worse than that. With the exception of the Sister, every character is obnoxious and over-played. It's not even over yet, and I'm not sure I'll be able to see it through to the end to find out whether there's any redemption -- for the story, the characters or the actors.

It is Christmas Eve, 2016 and I had no idea why I recorded this... yet now I understand. I lived in a world of bi-polarity and I needed this film today. The systematic approach to the unraveling of one character poised next to the grounding and evolving of the two leads was illuminating. Reid Scott and Grace Kaufman were incredible together. The evolving of love, trust, and loyalty was compelling. People who have survived families with members who were mentally ill will appreciate the links that were absent in their own lives-the bond of love and the impact it has on emotional development. This movie takes on a very misunderstood issue of mental illness and misuse of psychotropic drugs. Everyone has a unique electrical system. The Psychiatrist espoused an ignorant manifesto, but he too evolved. I loved the movie because the conflict was realistic, approach individualized (never intended to be a panacea) and the characters were viable!

I caught this movie on Showtime and decided to watch it. I was surprised and really enjoyed the movie. Everyone did a great job on the film. I saw the characters and not the actors/actresses who played them and the topics were something that many debate even today when it comes to putting children on drugs. Many feel that the children are being over medicated. Sometimes that's the case, sometimes it's not. still I liked that it took the time it needed to get to the points of the film and I really loved how it was done. If you haven't gotten a chance to see it. Please watch it. It touched on so many serious subjects and wasn't over dramatic about them. The wife was a piece of work though. Still the ending is really worth watching the movie.

'Sister' screened at the Traverse City Film Festival this summer. I've only walked out of two films in my life: 'The Passion of the Christ' and this one (Tommy Wiseau's 'The Room' is freakishly riveting by comparison). The topic - our culture's over-reliance on prescription drugs to medicate children - is long overdue for a serious film treatment. However, the script is so heavy handed (and, at times, tone deaf) that the actors have little room to become plausible characters. There's a rather familiar gallery of movie tropes here: the man-child with the stalled acting career and the loitering drinking buddies, the nagging but gorgeous striver-wife (whose prolonged swimming pool exit feels entirely pointless and gratuitous), the sullen teenage sister whose only apparent direction for the first half of the film was to pout and drop profanities (though I sense Grace Kaufman has some serious acting chops that will emerge with a better script). Overall, I'm still a bit baffled that the TCFF screening committee thought this was worthy of the Festival's tenth anniversary.