What if The Sting's Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker could be your surrogate parents? And what if they were also SoCal slackers? That seems to be the thought at the center of Brian Crano's directorial debut, an uneven but appealing dramedy about two car thieves and petty con-artists who end up taking charge of an abandoned 12-year-old boy. It's a film that should be appallingly twee, but more often than not is actually scruffy and sweet, thanks to a nicely underplayed turn by Chandler Canterbury as the kid, Kelsey, and the chemistry between Jason Ritter and Jake Sandvig (who co-wrote the film with Crano) as hipster grifters Ben and Alan.
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Casting Kathleen Turner as a small-town mom nominated for “Catholic Woman of the Year” is about as risky as it gets in The Perfect Family, first-time director Anne Renton’s soft-willed religious tolerance parable. The whiskied voice alone makes it sound like Tallulah Bankhead has risen from the dead and crashed the sacristy where Monsignor Murphy (Richard Chamberlain) is laying out his vestments for Sunday Mass. But as the anodyne network drama title suggests, petty ironies are more this movie’s speed.
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The easiest way to start an interview is to ask someone, "Was there a cock sock or not?" Take Jason Ritter, who plays Wally, the sub-par musician friend of Jillian (Jess Weixler), in Free Samples — which premiered last weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival in the Spotlight program. "It was cock sock," Ritter said, marking the second time Ritter appeared pantsless in a Tribeca film costarring Jesse Eisenberg. "[Before] was The Education of Charlie Banks, but this one was the first time I've been bare-assed for an entire scene."
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