Family values on the big screen

Scott’s big (and mostly positive) review this week is 20th Century Women, Mike Mills’s memory of growing up surrounded by strong feminine figures of all sorts. (Greta Gerwig strikes again!) It’s one more example of family not having to mean Mom, Dad, and their biological children (which may have been a little more unusual back in the ’70s).

The Ardennes, meanwhile, concerns two brothers, one of whom did time for the other, only to find that while he was inside his spared sibling was making time with his best girl. Awkward.

On my end, The Founder is an obvious family pic, seeing as how it’s all about how the McDonald brothers came to lose their name to Ray Kroc. Beyond that, there’s Kroc’s sales-pitch claim that McDonald’s is family, a kind of national dinner table. And his delight in having husband-wife teams set up franchises, even as his own marriage withers.

M. Night Shyamalan’s psych-horror Split? That one has family at the heart of both its dramas: a Dissociative Identity Disorder sufferer with a deserter dad and a monster mom plus a resourceful young woman who listened well when Daddy talked about hunting deer (especially bucks).

The outlier here is XXX: The Return of Xander Cage, though he probably wouldn’t have it any other way, seeing as how he’s the rebel the world doesn’t know it needs. Family, after all, can get in the way of kicking ass, getting the girl, and looking dope while doing it. However, any movie featuring Vin Diesel and a multicultural team of highly skilled hotties does counts as a family movie under the Fast & Furious provision, which states that family is whoever you say it is. I mean, how can we not talk about family when family is all that we got?