As mundane as its title, with characters whose color-by-numbers personalities and motivations shift randomly to fit a predictable storyline, \u201cA Family Affair\u201d is a low-wattage rom-com. As with last month\u2019s streaming romance \u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d this film features a gorgeous Oscar-winning actress as a middle-aged woman falling for a much younger superstar performer, with all the ensuing hijinks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPaperboy\u201d co-stars Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron play award-winning author Brooke Harwood and superhero franchise star Chris Cole, whose meet-cute is that Brooke\u2019s 24-year-old daughter Zara (Joey King) is the movie star\u2019s long-suffering personal assistant, on call 24\/7 for everything from picking up his dry-cleaning and groceries to just-in-time delivery of the diamond stud earrings he gives to the girls he dates as a break-up present. Zara sees how self-absorbed and helpless Chris is, but she stays with him, hoping that he will deliver on his promise to help her career.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Zara still lives with Brooke, a widow for 11 years.\u00a0\u00a0They are both very close to Leila (Kathy Bates), Brooke\u2019s warm-hearted and supportive mother-in-law and Zara\u2019s grandmother.<\/p>\n
Zara finally gets fed up and quits her job, just as Chris is about to start filming another sequel in his popular \u201cIcarus\u201d series. Chris goes to the house to persuade Zara to come back. He meets Brooke, and soon, they are literally ripping each other\u2019s clothes off, just in time for Zara to come home and discover them in flagrante delicto<\/em>. This leads to what is supposed to be an amusing scene of Zara retching. It is not. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Horrified as Zara is, she agrees to return to work for Chris in exchange for an associate producer credit on his new movie and a promise that he will never see her mother again. He keeps the first promise but not the second, leading to the expected complications and confrontations.<\/p>\n There are no surprises here, but there are a few sharp observations and bright moments when screenwriter Carrie Soloman has some fun with the movie industry setting. The opening montage that establishes Chris as a huge star hits all the right notes, from the magazine covers (GQ, Vanity Fair) to the speculation about his dating life to a\u00a0star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his appearance on \u201cHot Ones.\u201d In a case of art imitating life, a scene of Chris taking an ice bath was inspired by real-life Zac Efron’s bulking-up regimen for “The Iron Claw.”<\/p>\n Zara is on a first-name basis with the paparazzi who swarm outside his gate. The latest \u201cIcarus\u201d franchise film, repeatedly described as \u201c\u2019Die Hard\u2019 meets \u2018Miracle on 34th<\/sup>\u00a0Street\u2019 with a little bit of \u2018Speed,\u2019\u201d is directed by a French woman who does not speak English, and Chris has to re-shoot a scene because they can\u2019t have a gun in the trailer for a PG-13. When Zara gets stuck in traffic and is late getting to the restaurant where Chris plans to break up with his girlfriend, he complains that the wait meant he had to think of too many things to say. The big pink robot statue in Chris\u2019s home is precisely the overpriced junk a young guy who is suddenly rich would think was cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As mundane as its title, with characters whose color-by-numbers personalities and motivations shift randomly to fit a predictable storyline, \u201cA Family Affair\u201d is a low-wattage rom-com. As with last month\u2019s streaming romance \u201cThe Idea of You,\u201d this film features a gorgeous Oscar-winning actress as a middle-aged woman falling for a much younger superstar performer, with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[33,46,39],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comedy-movies","tag-comedy","tag-netflix","tag-romance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}