Aleksi Salmenperä, writer and director of Bad Family, shows off his trendy t-shirt
A lot of American films are about fatherhood. Many, many, many. So many, in fact, that it's pretty much all of them. Even Hollywood films that are about something else are about fatherhood. Take Roland Emmerich's 2012, for example. Not about fatherhood, but about the end of the world. But the end of the world is really just a metaphor for how good a dad John Cusack is. The world is only healed when he gets back together with the mother of his kids, and the step-father is conveniently killed by the Earth's crust. In American films, dads get blamed for every evil in the world, including the apocalypse.
So it is with Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, in the competition, about a psychopath who viciously beats two women to death. But only because his dad abused his sister. Otherwise, he would've grown up as a normal psycho. Dull, fake bullshit. Another American festival movie in which the dad is blamed for everything is Father of Invention, with Kevin Spacey. What would otherwise be a watchable comedy - maybe even close in spirit to Steve Martin's classic The Jerk - is completely ruined by the assumption that the dad is responsible for every evil in life and therefore everyone he has ever met has the right to shit on him. But it does have Johnny Knoxville falling over, so that's good.
A pretty good movie about being a dad is the Finnish comedy Bad Family. Here, the dad is as odd and freakish as any cheap Hollywood hack could want, but is also a real, well-drawn character and carries the audience's sympathy along with him. Overprotective parenting is driven to funny and satisfyingly dark extremes. And it's about time someone made a film about incest.
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