My Rating: 2 Buckets of Popcorn- Good Movie Worth Seeing… If you like to laugh, this will do it!
Barbra Streisand makes her return to the big screen for the first time since she was in “The Mirror with Two Faces” in 1996, with comic genius Seth Rogen in this light hearted holiday comedy offering, “THE GUILT TRIP”. Playing an overbearing Jewish mother doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch for Ms. Streisand as she seems to make it her life’s mission to make her son’s life as miserable as possible from the beginning of the movie almost to the end.
Seth Rogen plays a self-made inventor of a new environmentally safe and organic cleaner, attempting to self market his brilliant discovery, but is adept at how to do a sales pitch. He discovers when he visits his widowed New York Jewish mother that he was named after an old love interest of hers prior to his father. Since his father passed away when he was 8, Mom hasn’t been on a date, instead devoting herself to “mothering” him, even when he moved to California to attend college. So “Andy” endeavors to find his mom’s past flame through the magic of the internet, and locates him living in San Francisco, still working for the same company as the last time she had heard from him. So Andy hatches a plan to reunite his mom with her old lover by inviting her to go with him on his cross-country road trip to attempt to market and sell his cleaning discovery to corporations, ending up in San Francisco. She jumps at the opportunity to spend the week with her beloved son and thus begins the road trip from hell as she tries to “help” him with his sales pitch, his clothes style, his love life, and much more.
I joined them on their road trip briefly as she picked me up hitchhiking while he was sleeping!
It was great seeing Barbra back on the silver screen looking so vivacious at age 70. My favorite Barbra Streisand movie is “The Way We Were” with Robert Redford, although I also really liked her in “Hello Dolly” and “Fiddler On The Roof” also! Unfortunately, she doesn’t do any singing in this movie, but her comedic timing is impeccable and you couldn’t find anyone better to play an overbearing, overprotective Jewish mother! I think you’ll enjoy this if you enjoy mother/son dynamics and funny situations but with a great surprise ending.
“The Guilt Trip” is in theaters now! Please post your comments or reactions below! And subscribe to be notified when I post new entries.
