Family Stone / In Her Shoes / A Good Year (3 Disc Set)

Family Stone:
Holiday gatherings give screenwriters ideal circumstances in which to portray the comic and/or dramatic interaction within large families when they come together for one big special occasion. It’s even better if that family is eccentric or dysfunctional – and better still when an outsider is introduced into the group and quickly realises that he or she is way out of sync with this curious company. The Family Stone provides the kind of comic situation that delivers on all counts. The Stones are a bohemian New England family who unite for the Christmas season and are thrown into turmoil when the eldest son, Everett (Dermot Mulroney), comes home from Manhattan with his girlfriend, Meredith Morton (Sarah Jessica Parker), a tightly wound, high strung, immaculately groomed career woman whose controlling, rigid personality brings awkwardness, confusions and hostility to the Stone household.

In Her Shoes:
One is a party girl who steals, lies and leeches off anyone she can. She believes that her looks will get her through anything, but her idea of sex is a drunken fumble in a bathroom during a high school reunion during which even the remotest hint of romance is demolished when she throws up. The other is a lawyer with low self-esteem and an ordered life which, when it includes a man, is something that she confesses, “does not usually happen to her”. At the moment, however, she has found herself in bed with her boss, Jim (Richard Burgi) and she likes him a lot. Maggie and Rose Feller (Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette) are sisters who could not be more unalike. When their differences finally push them apart they ultimately discover – through a grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) whose existence has been kept secret from them by their father (Ken Howard) – that they are incomplete without each other.

A Good Year:
Gladiator director Ridley Scott reunites with Oscar winner Russell Crowe in a comedy about a highly successful investment expert, Max Skinner, who returns to the vineyard of his childhood when his estranged uncle dies. Intending to put his past behind him and sell the vineyard as quickly as possible, he instead discovers a part of himself that he’d lost since childhood.