Dad – ragglefragglereviews

My Neighbours the Yamada’s is a comedy film about the daily lives of a Japanese family, it was both written and directed by Isao Takahata.

Its quite difficult to discuss the plot of this movie because it doesn’t really have one, the film is a viewing of the daily lives of an eccentric Japanese family, the movie shows various scenarios that they have to deal with and this is often portrayed through comedy.

I will be honest and say that I found a lot of these scenarios very forgetful but some of them were really memorable such as when they accidentally left the daughter in the supermarket which is quite a scary scenario for any family, another example was when the young boy bought cookies for a girl in his class but they were eaten by his sister and his mum.

So the story wasn’t too great but the animation was really cool and unique, the whole film looks like a children’s colouring book and is a treat to watch, some scenes such as when they are under water or during the motor bike chase show off the wonder of this animation style extremely well and images alone cant do it justice so I would recommend at least checking out clips of the film on YouTube.

The voice cast was great in this film, the only characters with major dialogue was the family and all of them had a talented voice actor which suited their character very well.

I really struggled to say much about this film, It is really unique and has awesome animation but as a whole its just a little bit boring and I feel that some viewers might end up not enjoying the film as much as others, if you want to tackle the full Studio Ghibli collection or see this for just the animation then give it a watch but otherwise I would say that this is one film you could skip.

I hope you enjoyed this review of My Neighbours the Yamada’s

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They gotta celebrate four Christmases with four families and all in one day.

Four Christmases is about a couple Brad and Kate played by Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon who always lie to their parents and make excuses as to why they cant visit for Christmas every year, unfortunately for them on this particular year they made the excuse that they couldn’t make it because they are doing some charitable work over in Burma when in fact they are actually going on vacation in Fiji, all flights get cancelled due to fog and a news team comes in and interviews them live about how they feel about the holiday being cancelled, of course as you may expect all of the parents see the news report and are very excited because now Brad and Kate can spend christmas with each of the families which is great the only problem is that each of their parents are divorced which means that they will need to fit in visits to all four families on Christmas day.

The movie has a really interesting plot that honestly I have to give praise too as it’s definitely something that could actually happen in real life, I would be surprised if this hadn’t happened to anyone especially given the large number of divorced parents in the world.

What I hate about the movie is everything else first of all it is so obvious that Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon did not want to be in this movie, I don’t think I have ever watched a movie where the actors and actresses have looked so bored and uninterested through out an entire film, Reese Witherspoon did occasionally have fun playing her role a good example would be the bouncy castle scene where she is trying to get back her pregnancy test that had earlier been stolen by a child, the same cannot be said for Vince Vaughn his performance through out the entire movie can be summed up in just two words boring and awkward.

As what is probably expected all of the families are very different and each over play their lifestyles to give off a comedic effect, the families are great and each of them have left me some memorable moments from the film, you got Brad’s angry dad and his abusive kid’s which is the complete opposite to Brads mom who is what most people would call a hippy, Kates mother is played by Mary Steenburgen an award winning actress who has performed in many popular films such as Step Brothers, Elf and Back to the Future 3, Kate’s Mother is dating a Pastor and so to Kate’s surprise shes actually become a christian and Kates dad is just normal

The movie is advertised as a comedy and yet the jokes are just about as childish and cliched as they can get, I didn’t expect much else from this movie given it’s average rating on IMDB but the problem I have is that the film almost does have good Jokes but for some reason it moves on before even executing them, a great example of this is a scene in Brads mum’s house where a kid finds some Marijuana Brownie’s and that’s the joke he doesn’t eat them and it’s never even mentioned again, the kid finding the brownies is not funny but what would of been funny is the affect the Brownies would have had on the kid yet for some reason the movie doesn’t even try to make a joke out of the situation.

Four Christmases was a really disappointing movie, it had a great premise but an awful and effortless execution, the cast was just as boring as the film, the jokes aren’t funny and the entire movie is so predictable that you will know what going to happen before long before it ends.

Thanks for reading my Review of Four Christmases, please comment below if you think I was too harsh and remember this is just my opinion plenty of other people like this movie, I’m just not one of those people.

The next Christmas movie I will review is