Parental Guidance (2012)

This movie is very sweet and cute. There are parts that are a little ridiculous, but then, so is life. I'm a movie buff from film noir to recent masterpieces, but sometimes you just need to watch something light and wholesome and you've found it here. It's a funny comment on new parenting styles and how grandparents struggle to cope and assimilate. Overall just a delightful way to spend a few hours. And as usual Midler and Tomei perfect!

Fmovies: A smooth Bette Midler and a even more smoother Billy Crystal try to take your attention of their faces for a few moments in Parental Guidance. They play Grandparents who have to look after their grandchildren when the parents go off for a few days business holiday.

Crystal is a broadcaster who has been fired for being old hat and comes up with corny one liners.

Marisa Tomei is the helicopter mother who hovers over her kids almost to the point of suffocation and at turns spoiling them. She is rather apprehensive about leaving her children with her parents. For a lot of the film she refuses to join her husband who has gone on the trip before her.

The kids of varying ages are spoilt brats who simply have not had much fun in their lives and have issues. One having an imaginary kangaroo, other having communication issues with the daughter about to enter puberty and not enjoying her music with the constant practice and no social life.

However the film comes across as a sit com style clichéd family relationship film you have many times before.

The kids get hyper by eating sugary food, getting into scrapes much to the irritation of their parents.

You do actually wonder if Midler and Crystal are actually Tomei's parents as she is so uptight it seems someone else must have raised her. In that case why were they invited to look after her kids?

The film gives you a few brief laughs but mostly will leave you bored because of the familiarity of the story. Maybe the screenplay needed a face-lift more than its two stars.

This is truly one of the most awful pieces of trash ever made.

How do I summarize this? I don't - it's awful.

The plot is utterly predictable, the acting awful, the (otherwise talented) cast horribly misused, and the whole exercise is pointless. On the upside... there simply is no upside. This movie has no redeeming features.

I endured this movie simply because I have never walked out on a movie ever. But it was an act of will power not to walk out on this rubbish.

How this utter bilge could score 5.8 out of 10 brings IMDb's rating system into utter disrepute.

Parental Guidance fmovies. Parental Guidance is a completely delightful movie. Truth be told, I am a Big Marisa Tomei fan, but I don't believe that influenced my view of this very enjoyable movie.

That being said, Billy Crystal and Bette Midler rock too. There' a lot to this story, more than one might think. Alice Simmons (Marisa Tomei) and her hubby Phil (Tom Everett Scott) are ultra-Type A parents, who strive to raise their kids perfectly. They impart all sorts of touchy-feely, loving and encouraging words and phraseology on their 3 children. Who are adorable by the way.

Phil has to attend a company off-site in Hilton Head and wants Alice to join him. She says yes. In need of babysitters, they finally resort to Marisa's parents - Diane Decker (Bette Midler) and Artie Decker (Billy Crystal). As you might expect all is upside down from moment one. When they enter Simmons' house, the mantle is adorned with photos of Phil's parents with the grandchildren. This resonated with me big-time because my three children are much closer to my former in-laws than they are to my parents. Ah. . . such is life.

Simmons' eldest, teen Harper Madison (Bailee Madison - she also appeared in Just Go With It with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler) is sweet! Turner Simmons (Joshua Rush) gives a sterling rendition of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" (New York Giants vs. Brooklyn Dodgers - 1951 World Series) and younger brother Barker (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf) has an imaginary invisible Kangaroo friend Carl (ala Jimmy Stewart's Harvey)... What struck me about this movie is the reality of it. It's about the grades children give their parents and the mistakes parents think they made when raising their kids. Artie Decker sums it up nicely when he's speaking with Alice, "You didn't come with instructions." Ain't that the truth.

My parents tried hard I believe, but they left their marks in some ways. I try to be a good parent to my three children and no doubt have left my marks. But in the end and throughout, I LOVE my children and try to let them be who they are and encourage them to find themselves and their way. If nothing else, the point is we all try. Parents aren't as bad as their kids claim. Kids love their parents, despite their kicking and screaming. The generations old tug-of-war continues. And parenting is a combination of art and science. See this movie! While you're at it, keep your eye on Bailee Madison. And maybe Marisa Tomei too!

Arthur VanDam, film critic and author

"Parental Guidance" is meant to be a comedy on the generational gap in parenting techniques but Billy Crystal completely steals the movie with his smooth and silky talking. Billy Crystal, acknowledging that he is the attraction of the senior crowd, embodies the fuddled grandpa trying to understand the softness of the suburban life but at the same time vying for his youth. As clichéd as "use your words" has become of modern parenting, Billy Crystal is the one who uses his words expertly and elevates the movie from being another generic family movie.

In regards to the modern methods of parenting techniques, there are two opposites of parenting presented: first, the red haired Russian shrieking "practice, practice, practice" method; and second, the soft version of baseball where no-one given out method intended so that there is no ugly competition and just good clean fun. The first type is deemed to produce uptight children and the second type deemed to produce stuttering, diffident children or children with imaginary friends. So, it is up to the grandparents to come in to the picture and sort this out. The solution of course, you might have guessed, fun in its various forms; feel good but not a real answer or revelation.

Without Billy Crystal, this movie would probably end up like every other movie in the same mold; the shrieking screaming kids running around in a McMansion with busy stressed out parents with one hand managing the kids and with the other hand managing their jobs; the parents desperately in need a change to solve their problems. Throughout the movie, Billy Crystal is relaxed and smooth talking and first provides the calmness to the dizzying hyperactivity of the family and then sparkle with his comedy to take us through the predictable second half.

Overall, it's a generic family movie but elevated by Billy Crystal. However, it's still a movie bogged down by its uninspired family dynamics.

... the suits who fired Billy Crystal at the beginning would have tasted some bad karma at the end.

But everything in between was pitch-perfect - a tremendously accurate (if only slightly over-the-top) portrayal of multi-generational families, their dynamics, and the outcomes that can occur when folks empty their pockets of defense-mechanisms.

The plot is simple: grandparents Billy Crystal and Bette Midler (the "other" grandparents) babysit while their daughter and son-in-law go on a long-overdue mini-vacation, leaving their three intensely over-supervised children in the care of Bette and Billy, who don't much care for that type of hyper-parenting.

The delight of watching this movie is seeing how such a conventional plot will unfold with this superb cast. With humor consisting of both good writing and sight gags, with Bette and Billy and Marissa acting their hearts out, this is B-movie material brought to the top-tier in these very capable hands.

This is a wonderful confection of a movie. Go! And, for those of us from Northern California, it was great to see the San Francisco Giants play a fun supporting role. A pleasant surprise.