About My Father: A droll surprise

About My Father (2023) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for suggestive material, mild profanity and partial nudity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Given Robert De Niro’s penchant for dumb comedies, this release was approached with a wary eye.

 

No need to worry.

 

Although Salvo (Robert De Niro, right) long ago promised a treasured family heirloom
when his son Sebastian (Sebastian Maniscalco) became ready to pop the question to a
True Love, this agreement comes with a hitch: Salvo first wants to meet his
son's fiancée's family.

Director Laura Terruso’s delightful little film is both hilarious and heartwarming, thanks to a sharply tuned script by star Sebastian Maniscalco and co-writer Austen Earl. They deftly avoid the numb-nuts slapstick that frequently infects such projects, while still including one side-splittingly bawdy set-piece that’s certain to go viral (and deservedly so).

An additional blessing: None of these characters resorts to screaming, or the tiresome hurling of breakable objects at each other. Disagreements and arguments, sure: even occasional raised voices … but it feels authentic, and not contrived.

 

This obviously results from Maniscalco’s input, relying on the “immigrant growing up in America” experience that he has honed so well in his stand-up act. He’s a natural born storyteller, particularly when it comes to his own story (or a somewhat, um, enhanced reading of same).

 

Sicilian-born Salvo (De Niro), a hard-working hairdresser, long ago moved his family to Chicago, in order to grant his son what all parents desire: better opportunities for their children. Sebastian (Maniscalco) has indeed thrived, rising to a coveted position within the city’s Hilton hotel chain. He also has fallen in love with budding artist Ellie (Leslie Bibb) — who possesses more enthusiasm than talent — and who adores him in return.

 

Their personalities are wildly different. He’s reserved and somewhat wary, content with his place in the universe. She’s open and ready for anything, cheerfully applying just the right pressure to occasionally take Sebastian out of his comfort zone (in good ways). Maniscalco and Bibb are adorable together.

 

The only remaining detail, in Sebastian’s mind, is the perfect when and where to pop The Question. He also requests his grandmother’s heirloom ring, which Salvo long ago promised his son could give to The One.

 

But Salvo is concerned. Ellie comes from a super-rich family with a palatial estate in Virginia (and at least one more home elsewhere). Her father, Bill Collins (David Rasche), is a captain of industry and CEO of a rival luxury hotel chain; her mother, the aptly named Tigger (Kim Cattrall) — because she has claws — is a firebrand, ultra-conservative U.S. Senator.

 

And while they’re both immigrant families, the Collins clan beat Salvo’s family to American shores by quite a few generations, having arrived on a modest little ship called The Mayflower.

 

How, Salvo worries, could Sebastian possible fit into their world? Worse yet, would they look down on him?

 

Somewhere in Queens: Family strife writ noisily

Somewhere in Queens (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Parents sometimes lose their way, when it comes to an honest assessment of what’s best for their children.

 

As oft has been said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

Leo and Angela (Ray Romano and Laurie Metcalf) are astonished — shocked, even — to
discover that their painfully shy son has a girlfriend: a detail that he has failed to
share with them.

There’s a tendency, at first blush, to assume that Ray Romano’s new film — which he directed, co-wrote (with Mark Stegemann) and stars in — occupies the territory he mined so well during the decade-long run of television’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Comparisons are easy, given that the focus here also is on messy, complicated family dynamics.

But while there’s plenty to chuckle at, this film’s overall atmosphere is more subtly tense, some of the relationships genuinely toxic. 

 

Leo and Angela Russo (Romano and Laurie Metcalf) enjoy a simple but mostly happy life in an Italian-American enclave of boisterous family and neighborhood friends. Sunday dinners are a raucous ritual — laden with profanity-laced shouting and frequent breaking of balls — that includes matriarch Rose Marie (Karen Lynn Gorney); Leo’s father, Dominic, aka “Pops” (Tony Lo Bianco); Leo’s younger brother Frank (Sebastian Maniscalco) and his two adult sons, Luigi and Marco (Franco Maicas and Adam Kaplan); their younger sister Rosa (Deirdre Friel); Leo and Angela’s son, nicknamed “Sticks” (Jacob Ward); and Uncle Pete (Jon Manfrellotti).

 

Occasional larger-scale events — weddings, christenings and so forth — are even noisier affairs that take place amid the cheesy atmosphere of the laughably named Versailles Palace, where scores of families mingle, drink and dance to the enthusiastic chatter and platters spun by DJ Joey Bones (Erik Griffin, a total hoot).

 

Leo’s working life, however, is somewhat fraught. Although amiably content to be part of the family construction business alongside Pops and Frank, this involves tolerating an endless stream of emotional abuse from both. Frank has long been the “chosen one” in Pops’ eyes, and — as such — misses no opportunity to belittle his older brother; worse yet, Frank has raised his two sons to echo such sentiments whenever possible. 

 

Maicas and Kaplan play them as obnoxious, under-educated thugs who probably grew up pulling the wings off flies.

 

Leo goes along to get along; he has long shrugged this off, in great part because he lives for Sticks’ weekly high school basketball games. Although emotionally withdrawn and painfully shy, the young man truly comes alive on a basketball court, where he has blossomed into a star athlete. Indeed, the first act features a superbly choreographed and edited — and tremendously exciting — season-ending match against the area’s top-seeded school.