Family Viewing Movie Review

Early Atom Egoyan, before he quite figured out his style and before he had much of a budget. This is the story of a family obsessed with video -- and obsessed in general -- we've got a kid involved with his father's girlfriend and his father's phone-sex girl (he doesn't know about the latter coincidence -- it's just that both his grandmother and her mother are in the same room at the local nursing home). Not sure how well this succeeds in its quest to damn contemporary communication breakdowns, but it sure is screwed up. Shot partly on various video formats -- a sort of testament to how the then-nascent format (this was 1987, for Pete's sake!) was making relationships impersonal and generally screwing up life (dad erases childhood videos to make room for his homemade sex tapes). The DVD includes Egoyan's Next of Kin as well as a handful of his very early short films -- all very amusing and curious.