Widow Dennis Quaid (as Frank Beardsley) meets widower Rene Russo (as Helen North) just before their high school reunion. Eighteen children and twenty-five years ago, they were sweethearts. They instantly marry, robbing this "Yours, Mine and Ours" (1968) re-make of the sweet and funny courtship scenes played by Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda.Filmmakers update it by making six of Ms. Russo's children adopted (different ethnicities). An update might be interesting if some of the Beardsley-North children hooked up. But they dislike each other, have water fights, and spill paint. They plot to break-up their happily married parents. The family's pet pig gives Mr. Quaid a wet kiss. It's that funny.*** Yours, Mine & Ours (11/23/05) Raja Gosnell ~ Dennis Quaid, Rene Russo, Sean Faris, Danielle Panabaker

The original version with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball is one of our favorites and I, for one, am glad they didn't try to remake that story with a new cast. This is really a different story built on the same premise: a widow and widower -- each with a lot of children -- fall in love, get married, and the children are suddenly part of a new and much larger family. Unlike the original, the children don't get a chance to see this coming before it happens. The animosity is instantaneous, particularly since the Beardsley children are used to structure and organization in their lives whereas the North children have been very free and loose. The bonding of familial friendships between the children comes through their common purpose -- to destroy the relationship between their parents. There is something very profound about seeing two enemy groups come together for a common goal only to discover that they don't hate each other at all. A lot of the slapstick is over the top, but it is an entertaining 90 minutes with a message that will never grow old. I am glad to have both versions in my library.

Yours, Mine and Ours is a romantic-family comedy that brings all the already-seen jokes in movie history. Rene Russo is very badly cast, as she was already made for Jennifer Coolige's roles (like Fiona, in A Cinderella Story), and her face lacks the artsy-motherly face for Hellen White. The script was very lousy, the kids spoke our of turn, and the story was a great story, but the script ruined it all, as did Rene Russo. Sound effects snap the reality in half, not even a four-year-old can believe it. Raja Gosnell-once in for all, he proofs he could do a lot better, if he had better casting ability, and did choose amateur's to write the script.

Where to begin with a movie this bad. Bad premise, bad rewrite, bad directing, bad movie. I could hardly wait for it to be over.The original 1968 version of "Yours, Mine and Ours" was bad enough. It spawned the BRADY BUNCH TV Show which ran for 5 years so the concept has been pretty well played out.YMO 2005 "Parents" Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo have zero chemistry together on screen. I kept seeing her as Natasha from the Rocky & Bullwinkle movie of 1999.This remake has every stupid cliché and goes overboard in trying to make the organized father look like an idiot time and time again. He gets wacked overboard on his own sailboat, gets paint spilled on him and other stupid stuff along the same lines.Meanwhile, the kumbaya wacko, talking-stick mother apparently uses no discipline in her parenting regime and that is offered as the only acceptable methodology.Throughout, the designer-mother's free-thinking, no-rules household is promoted as the ideal and the more disciplined, buttoned-down Admiral's parenting style is portrayed as deficient and flawed.The mother's family of 10 kids turns out to have 6 adopted of every race which is even less realistic than "blending" a family of 18 kids in the first place. Of course the movie ends with one enormous family that wants to be together. A better ending would have been if Russo and Quaid had come to their senses and gotten divorced. Other than some nice shots of the boats on the water and some good music, the movie has nothing to recommend it.Save your time and money.