I can't believe the hate or just non-watching of this gem! From the great actors to the funniness, it should be on everyone's holiday watch list!

This effort from director Jodie Foster is more disastrous than the family gathering it portrays. The premise - a Thanksgiving get together of a family which is 'dysfunctional' in all the clichéd Hollywood ways - holds ample opportunity for natural comedy, but in this movie every ounce of humor is contrived and forced. And half of it misses the mark because the characters involved are either so pitiful or so unpleasant that we feel no desire to laugh (laughter in the showing my wife and I saw was decidedly spare).The movie goes on and on. My wife caught a much-needed nap in the middle; I thought my watch had broken. "Lawrence of Arabia", at four hours, passes faster than this dog at two.Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning, Bancroft especially, put in heroic efforts and come closest to rising above the material (but not quite).If you're looking for a funny movie about family get togethers, rent National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation". Yes, the humor in that movie is contrived, but it never pretends to be anything else, unlike Foster's effort which aspires toward 'realistic' humor and ends up being more contrived than the Griswold family.An unquestioned flop.

The two movies share the same theme: spending a holiday with relatives that turns into a nightmare. Here, it's even better as it's the child (Holly) who returns to her family. It happens to me also and it's true that we travel by grinding our teethes: it warms the heart to see again the family, our familiar places but now, we are adult and it also feels like a cage! Unfortunately, this good plot is totally destroyed by an unintelligible script: the characters speak English, but can someone understand the lines? It's porridge, it means nothing, it's surrealist just to be surrealist and worst, it's not even funny or moving! The aunt is stupid like the sister and brother in law, the mother talks too much for nothing, the father is a video addict! Holly seemed cute, fragile at first but at the end, she didn't do much! In addition, the soundtrack with a lot of bad songs is just irritating and Jodie is there a poor director: all the opening credit is about a painting that we don't see! She zooms in Holly (1,57m) and McDermott (1,83m) so we have only the head of the first and the second has his forehead cut! The only interesting thing is the unrecognizable Robert Downey Jr, so puffy that he looked like a Javier Bardem. Finally, i thought after watching "Always", that Holly was a fine actress but after having watched this crap, stupid "Crash" and her horrible TV show, i really wonder....

This move was about two self-centered self-indulgent family members who could care less about whether they are making the rest of their family miserable. Sure the family may not be the Brady Bunch but whose is? And some movies manage to be humorous about that but not this one. Claudia and her brother were just mean spirited, not funny. Can't believe Jodie Foster was involved in this. The performances and production are good. I haven't watched it since reading that Downey was on drugs but I didn't notice at the time. Essentially I think this movie missed the mark of holiday movies that poke fun at dysfunctional families with the idea that we all have them but love them. I couldn't stand the two main characters. I felt sorry for the sister.