It’s a family affair in Clara’s Ghost<\/strong><\/em>, written and directed by \u2014 am I reading this right? \u2014 \u201cBridey\u201d Elliott? That seems like a typo. She\u2019s the daughter of Chris Elliott and sister of Abby Elliott. Mom is Paula Niedert Elliott, who was a Late Night with David Letterman<\/em>\u00a0staffer when Chris worked there. The whole family plays the Reynolds family, whose circumstances lightly mirror the Elliotts\u2019: Ted Reynolds (Chris) is a once-famous actor whose star has dimmed; daughters Julie (Abby) and Riley (Bridey) co-starred on a sitcom as children and have struggled to find work as young adults; and mom, Clara (Paula), is in the background, the non-famous one, the one who isn\u2019t asked to stand in the pictures when magazines do stories about the “famous family.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The girls have come home to Connecticut for a couple days for a photo shoot and to celebrate the dog\u2019s birthday (yes, really), but Clara is having trouble keeping a grip on reality. She\u2019s started seeing a ghostly woman in white, perhaps a former occupant of their very old house. She\u2019s also drinking a lot, but that\u2019s normal, and she\u2019s not the only one. Meanwhile, Ted is bitter at being fired from a show that Julie and her producer fianc\u00e9 are developing, and the girls are hanging out with family friend Joe (Haley Joel Osment), their high school buddy and weed dealer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The family dynamics are funny and gently odd, and the film has the sort of quirky humor you\u2019d expect from something with Chris Elliott\u2019s DNA in it. I enjoyed hanging out with them, even though the story ultimately fizzles out. Surprisingly, the best performance is by the non-actor, Paula Niedert Elliott, whose worried, addled, tipsy Mom character is never more endearing than when she\u2019s late-night drunk-dialing a winery to pay compliments and ask questions (\u201cIf someone could call me back about the fruity undertones, I would appreciate it\u201d). The movie isn\u2019t quite an insightful look at the Forgotten Mom character, but it almost is.<\/p>\n\n\n It’s a family affair in Clara’s Ghost, written and directed by \u2014 am I reading this right? \u2014 \u201cBridey\u201d Elliott? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":10723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,340],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-movie-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Grade: B-<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n\n
1 hr., 20 min.; not rated but it would be R for language<\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n
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