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Today my hubby and I went to go see the movie “The Family” directed by Luc Besson. He is the director, writer and creator responsible for one of our favorite movies of all time “The Fifth Element”. We have easily seen it thirty times and it never gets old. This time Luc Besson took his creative genius to France and put a mobster family living under witness protection there to live amongst the locals. The story is based on a book named Malaviva but he wrote the screenplay and was the executive producer. I read in a magazine interview that after finding the cast; Robert DeNiro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Tommy Lee Jones, Luc Besson was going through the rolodex of directors trying to come up with the perfect director and finally gave into his huge desire to work with these great actors who he had never had the opportunity to work with before and so he cast himself as the director.

I have read the “professional” reviews and they are pretty harsh. I, as well as my hubby, disagree with those reviews on all counts, we sincerely enjoyed it. We loved being in France with the cast, I loved how they shot Michelle Pfeiffer, she is still beautiful and they closed in on her beauty and how refreshing it is to see a beautiful face without cosmetic enhancement. We could see her life lines and they make her even more lovely because she has experience, hopes, sadness, adversity and character impressed on her face and as an actress we get more of her emotions written on her face and that made her silences richer. Perhaps being 46 makes me more sensitive to what it must be like to age on the screen and Michelle has aged beautifully and it gives me happiness to see it.

The other actors, all of them did a bang up job in their roles and France did was she does best for me, make me smile and watch the countryside, the buildings, the small towns, the small streets and the people.

We really enjoyed the movie, I know that it was panned by the critics, but who cares, it made me happy to watch it and that is all that counts.