Let me just say one thing before I go off on a tangent, I don’t hate hippies. It’s an awesome lifestyle…it’s just it can’t, no it shouldnt be used to explain away bad parenting. A fact that Peace Love & Misunderstanding dosen’t seem to get.

Okay let me just give a brief summery of the plot: An uptight NYC lawyer (Catherine Keener) takes her two teenagers (Elizabeth Olsen & Nat Wolff) to her mother’s (Jane Fonder) farmhouse upstate for a vacation.

Sound familar? I’m not surprised, this basic plot had been done… well let’s just say a lot. And it’s usally the same, uptight city person comes to country and meets less uptight people and gains a new out look on life. That’s not to say that it’s a bad plot or that it can’t be done well… it’s just it’s very easy to get wrong as this film so clearly shows us.

Okay where should I start, well let’s go to the root of so many problems the mother. This woman is horrible! She judges everything unless it’s something she approves of. Forgets to pick her daughter up from school because she’s involved in an art prodject, has loud sex with strange men while her child’s in the next room. Constatly has wild parties that her child has to run to a lake *and swim unsupervised, risking drowning* just to escape from . She sell’s weed at her daughter’s wedding and then just to top off the whole disgusting cake she gets her grandchildren high…And this woman wonders why her daughter hasn’t spoken to her for twenty years.

Oh and I didn’t even get to the most dispicable of all things yet, she sets the daughter up with one of her old lovers.  Replacing the husband who she didnt like becase he was too *Polite and proper* with someone more fitting her criteria. Someone more likely will take the mother’s side.

So after hearing all that what do you think the outcome of this delightful little film will be? Maybe the mother apolizies and the daughter finds it in herself to forgive her at last? Or maybe the daughter  tells her to go fuck herself and drives off into the sunset free at last… That would ofcourse be reality in a world where pigs fly.

But in the depression world we live in or at least the one in which this film resides, the dughter forgives this horse’s ass of a mother with nary a sorry from the wringgled old hag. But you know what’s more anoyying then even that…it’s not a horribly bad film.

The acting’s of fair quilty and the new agey ideas though presented in a quite frankly self righteous and preachey way are good and intresting ideas. It had the potential to be a good if slightly preachey film. The fact that they made the hippy mother just so…unlikeble and downright narcisstic  screws up anything else they were trying to say.

Cinderella , yeah no real surprise there. Everyone goes on how sexist this film is, how it’s encouraging little girls to do nothing and a man will come save them. But thing is I don’t really see that, sure Cinderella might not have done much to move the plot along but it wasn’t like she was doing nothing.

She was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making food, feeding animals and doing all of her step family’s dirty laundry, poor thing was probably too tired to go out looking for princes to marry. And really the prince doesn’t save her, it’s more the mice and to a much lesser extent the fairy godmother’s work.

So if I don’t think it’s offensive to women why call it sexist at all? Well, quite frankly I think it’s more offensive to men.

Think about it, although Cinderella basically a slave through out the film, at least she has a story. We see her pain, we see her joy, we see her slightly unnerving habit of dressing and naming vermin.

She actually has a character that, while many might disapprove of the messages she’s sending to little girls, you can sympathise with.

The prince doesn’t even have any lines, let alone a character or a personality. In fact we hardly see him.

The prince is in essence the prize at the end of the race, the carrot dangled in front of our heroine’s nose to keep her going. It’s a weird thing to realise but a lot of the old disney films were like that.

Well I say a lot, but it’s probably only Snow White …maybe Sleeping Beauty , I’m not sure having never actually watched it. But still that’s a very odd occurrence especially for the time period they were released in.

But did it ruin the film for me? Well yes and no… while it was enjoyable and the songs were plesent and catchy as hell. The fact that we learn absolutely nothing about the prince’s character does lend a sort of twisted atmosphere that I found disturbing.

If you haven’t seen it, I would, simply because its such a famous film.Just keep telling yourself it’s just a movie and you’ll be able to sleep at night.