It used to be that movies had some small element of mystery about them. Sure, you'd know vaguely what would happen from watching the trailer, or the broad strokes of the plot from seeing an ad or reading a review or two, but for the most part you wouldn't know exactly how things would turn out until you actually saw the movie. It was nerve-wracking, wasn't it? All that uncertainty. All that stress. All those fingernails nervously chewed wondering if, for example, love would finally—finally!—happen for Jennifer Aniston in that movie. Basically, going to the movies was like lowering yourself into a nightmarish cauldron of doubt.
But recently, the movies have been helping their nervous audiences by spelling out exactly what will happen in the movie right there in the title. First, there was the beige explosion of the Jennifer Aniston/Aaron Eckhart romance, Love Happens. And now there is the Robert DeNiro family Christmas comedy: Everybody's Fine.
Whew! We can all exhale now. Everybody's fine! Just like Mary J. Blige's song about her life, but with all the music replaced with thick coats of blandness.
I mean, normally a poster like this would cause buckets of anxiety. A family happily celebrating Christmas in a white void? And what's Mr. Focker's father-in-law doing there? And who is taking that picture of them?!? Why isn't the picture-taker in the picture? Is he/she not part of this charmingly dysfunctional white void family Christmas? Dear God, will they all be fine? At Christmastime, will they somehow see that, even though their family is a little dysfunctional, they're still a family??
Without the helpful title, we just wouldn't know if everything would turn out fine. But now, thankfully, we do. Can't wait for the Thanksgiving sequel: Everybody's Still Fine.