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Title: Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America (2006) Starring: Gary Betsworth, Sally Conway, William Mahoney, Alex Splendore, and Anderson William Director: Douglas Buck Rating: Unrated Runtime: 106 minutes Avg. Score: 4 Submit Comment Hits: 23

Review of Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America

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Comments for Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America

• Posted on 2008-04-05
  Hyped up garbage,
  
  First of all, it's NOT HORROR (JUST HORRIBLE)
  
  Three completely bland, removed, uninspiring, predictable shorts that are too long and really give no real insite into the state of the "American Family". There's nothing thought provoking here, these shorts make an attempt to shock it's audience with violence that ends up doing nothing to add to or help drive any real message home. That's the peoblem with all three films from the very beginning you know what the message is (none being at all enlightening) and then are forced to watch a long drawn out story with no twists, no insight, and does absolutely nothing to relate to the viewer or to draw you in, 2 of which are ended with a scene of violence that utimately means nothing. The scenes are meant to shock but end up being just another scene that just happens to have blood in it. Theres no emotion, no character developement, it's bland and dull- uneffective.
  
  Bottom line- 1.if you want something thought provoking this is not it. 2.if you're looking for gore and blood look somewhere else this just won't satisfy 3.if you're looking to be dissapointed look no further, this ones for you 4.Extremely over rated. Unfortunatly nothing special, that's why you can buy it used for like 3 bucks
  Score: 1
• Posted on 2006-09-06
  NOT the People Next Door - Let's Hope
  
  The cover summary and title of this DVD would lead you to believe that you'll find insights into the disturbances of the average American family here. Really though, the pathology of these families is much too extreme to be representative.
  
  However, there are little maggot eggs of some common American themes captured in this trilogy - and then these eggs flesh out, exaggerate, engorge into the full-scale horrors that confront us. So while the people depicted are probably not our next-door neighbors, neither are they total aliens. There is something in their overwhelming dysfunction that perhaps does speak to the American condition in some oblique, ultimately bleak way.
  
  First though - to clear up a confusion that sort of interfered with my watching of this work. The DVD is 2-sided. One side presents the three vignettes as the separately conceived, self-contained featurettes that they are. The other side of the DVD runs these three vignettes into one feature-length movie. I happened to watch the second side, and so I initially thought there was some relationship between the family members in its three chapters. I kept trying to figure out if the man in the second vignette was the son of the man in the first - and if the murderer in the third vignette was the grandfather of them all.
  
  But no. Author/Director Buck wrote these works years apart. And although he concedes some family resemblance between the actors he chose, he didn't originally intend there to be any direct connection between the families depicted. So don't waste your time trying to trace any "Cat's in the Cradle" causation between these episodes.
  
  However there are those common themes, those common obsessions uniting these works. Most noticeably, each of these episodes features a profoundly repressed wife. These women are alike in being locked up in some long-suffering hell. They are locked away from all ability to get any normal response from their mates. They are further constrained by secrets, by what they suspect, what they fear, what they dare not speak of.
  
  Then there is the common theme of gore that unites this triptych of films. The characters in these dramas find themselves in such an affectless landscape, the only way they can provoke any sensation at all is through extremes of self-mutilation and murder. In the most shocking and original of these featurettes, "Cutting Moments," a wife is seen literally scrubbing her face away. There are images here that will probably haunt you for a long, long time.
  
  In order to find any significance to these vignettes though, it would be best to skip Director Buck's bonus commentary. His remarks detract from the impact of the characters' actions. In his gab, Buck reveals a sort of randomness to his intentions. At first he wanted to make a movie about Martians - then he wanted to do a take-off on Hitchcock's shower scene...
  
  I didn't want to or need to know all this. Better to let the individual horrors of each of the movie panels just seep down and fall of their own weight. Better to leave this DVD thinking that the insights the dramas give into Americans' inner torment - were arrived at, not by a fluke, but through real artistic vision. Because maybe there really is more of a coherent artistic vision here than even Buck himself realizes.
  
  
  
  Score: 3
• Posted on 2006-08-16
  A complete waste of time...
  
  I thought, from looking at the description on the box that perhaps this was a "thought provoking" look into the struggles normal, everyday people face in normal everyday life.
  
  It isn't.
  
  It contains no thought to provoke.
  
  The characters in the "families" are completely unbelievable, completely perverted stereotypes that bear no resemblance to reality except, perhaps, in Charles Manson's family.
  
  That first review that you saw that said "I'll spare you the details"... here are the details. He's sexually abusing his son. She scrubs the bottom half of her face off with a steel wool pad, then takes scissors and cuts her own lips off. Then parades herself half naked in front of him. Yeah, sure, he notices her then. And the "bedroom scene?" He's sitting on top of her, both naked, both completely covered in blood, and he's disembowling her with the hedge cutters (she finally seems to "get off"), and then, presumably stabs himself to death with them.
  
  What family is this suppose to be like in real life?
  
  And the religious nut who forces his wife to chant bible verses with him just before he takes a knife and splatters her's and his daughter's blood on every wall in the house?
  
  The "families" his intends to portray exist ONLY on this DVD.
  
  God, what a complete and utter collection of trash. The thing claims to have won an "audience award" in Montreal. Montreal, apparently, is populated by a bunch of degenerates. (Sorry, Montreal - just making a point here).
  
  It's not thought provoking. It's not even "depressing" - it lacks sufficient plausibility to even be that. It's not even particulary shocking. It's just a complete, banal, waste of time and money.
  
  
  Score: 1
• Posted on 2006-06-27
  Forget the violence, check it out for EXTREME empathy and GRAPHIC moments of grace
  
  It's interesting to read the sharply divided reviews for Douglas Buck's FAMILY PORTRAITS trilogy. They accurately reflect the nature of his work - you're either going to Love it and (like me) even become emotionally attached to it, or you're going to hate it and be appalled/offended/unmoved. In one of the commentaries on this commendable disc, author/critic Douglas E. Winter calls Buck's work a cross between David Cronenberg and Ingmar Bergman, which I agree with, although I'd also throw in Tarkovsky and Polanski as well. All of those echoes, however, are shot through a uniquely American idiom and vocabulary. While I have my problems with the second film, HOME (for me, by far the weakest of the trilogy), I think this collection is one of the finest cinematic works to emerge in American cinema over the last ten years, and I can't wait to see what Mr. Buck does with his first mainstream picture, the remake of Brian De Palma's SISTERS, which is currently in post-production. Yes, this is heavy and horrifying stuff, but if you give it a chance, and watch the three films as a connected trilogy, you will see a filmmaker grappling with not only the darkest reaches of the human heart, but also finding light and hope in the most unexpected places. There is catharsis as well as devastation here - albeit catharsis in the most unexpected ways.
  Score: 5
• Posted on 2006-06-12
  I can't believe how people are making this film sound artsy and "disturbingly beautiful " it's pure trash
  
  All I have to say is come on people, this is a disgusting, horrible movie which came out of a very sick mind. It's grotesque and badly filmed and horribly acted with no plot or remotely interesting characters and not one redeeming quality.
  
  Of course it's my humble opinion, and I could not get through more than the first two segments because it sickened me so much. There is NOTHING beautiful to me about senseless self mutilation and murdering your little girl and wife. It's a sad state of the world when people think this obscene garbage is some sort of work of art.
  
  Rebel Without a Cause, now that is a work of art, and I am sure that Nicholas Ray, if he is still living, would be VERY dissapointed in what filth his daughter is involved in. That's my 2 cents for what it's worth.
  Score: 1