Familial dysfunction on the big screen is nothing new, of course, but it seems like a whole bumper crop of starry-eyed American indies — from Smart People to Jesus Henry Christ, and many more — have rushed to throw a light on fractured home life and assorted seriocomic neuroses in the wake of the Oscar-winning success of Little Miss Sunshine.

Into the breach enter yet another entry in that canon: Cold Turkey, written and directed by Will Slocombe. Previously titled Pasadena (for its upper-crust setting), this Thanksgiving-set ensemble black comedy about mixed siblings jockeying for attention and material bail-out from their dad will try to scare up some business rooted in knowing laughs in the weeks leading up to the real-life holiday, but its wound-up bickering is all show, devoid of any attachment to real characters, feelings or problems.



Cold Turkey centers on patriarch Poppy Turner (Peter Bogdanovich), an erstwhile Stanford professor who has two daughters from his first marriage and a son who is in law school, Jacob (Ashton Holmes), by his second wife, Deborah (Cheryl Hines, above left). In addition to Jacob and his girlfriend Missy (Amy Ferguson), Thanksgiving brings home oldest daughter Lindsay (Sonya Walger) and her husband TJ (Ross Partridge), plus their kids. For the first time in 15 years, meanwhile, youngest daughter Nina (Alicia Witt) also deigns to break bread with her hated stepmother, blowing into town late with her truck-driving boyfriend Hank (Wilson Bethel) in tow.

Immediately, and predictably, the wheels on this gathering come off. Free spirit Nina is a bundle of passive-aggressive fury excused away under the sobriquet of “straight talk.” This rankles Jacob and Lindsay, but neither seems able to directly or effectively call shenanigans on their sibling. One by one, then, Poppy’s children come to him seeking money. Jacob’s debt, at over $220,000, is the most serious, but each kid has what they feel is an urgent and compelling reason for favor. Unbeknownst to them, however, their father may not be in a position to financially support them any longer.

Small bits of Slocombe’s dialogue here and there have a pinch of engaging snap (“I’m the one that gets to be on the receiving end of all your shitty, failed trying, so I get to use whatever analogy I want,” rages Nina to her dad at one point), but it comes in the service of characterizations that across the board feel flat and colorless. Mostly, though, Cold Turkey just spins its wheels, uncertain of where to focus. A good start would be the jettisoning of all of the “significant other” characters, freeing up time and space to more believably root down into the fragile dynamics between the children and Deborah — whom the movie posits as some sort of lightning rod without ever really showing a convincing reason that is true.

There’s also some nonsense involving an outed affair with a neighbor, obliging Victoria Tennant to pop in for the movie’s anticipated, dinner-gone-wrong centerpiece scene. The layered arguments in this sequence (wherein magically one character knows the business of all of the others, presumably from eavesdropping) are numbingly stupid, as if Slocombe thinks overlapping dialogue in and of itself indicates dramatic tension. But the film really jumps the shark or nukes the fridge or swallows the lead pill of stupidity — however you want to say it — with a scene-capping act of mock-outrageous violence that serves as a cathartic response to… a years-old act of disrespect never seen, or previously mentioned.

It’s at that point that Cold Turkey stops being just shrug-inducingly “meh,” and in fact outright irritating, and the type of movie you want to punch in the balls. In an effort to underscore the movie’s “Suburban Tension” while still keeping things kind of light, Slocombe uses twinkly, ironic music that in reality serves to only further call attention to his film’s dramatic inadequacies. Flexing her musical chops over the end credits in a tune with Ben Folds entitled “You Can Go Home Again,” Witt delivers an airy song that the previous 80-plus minutes have served to contradict. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Cold Turkey is also available across VOD platforms. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (FilmBuff/Midway Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

A well-meaning documentary of environmental compassion, Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey details the joint trek across hundreds of miles of the Himalayas by a group of several hundred people endeavoring to spread a message of social commitment as it relates to recycling and other measures to combat climate change. While definitely not without a good number of moments of breathtaking natural beauty, this film — less call to action than bleeding-heart eco-postcard — otherwise suffers from too scattershot a focus and too stodgy a tone to sustain interest over even its concise running time.

The debut feature of director Wendy J.N. Lee, Pad Yatra opens in Ladakh, India (also known as “Little Tibet”), in the aftermath of a cloudburst which deposited more than two inches of rain in just 60 seconds, decimating the area with flash floods and mudslides. Loosely taking Buddhist spiritual leader Gyalwang Drukpa as its central figure, the movie focuses on a 450-mile walk from village to village by his monk-and-nun followers, as well as a number of foreign tag-alongs, collecting trash (including some 800 pounds of plastic) and culminating in the planting of 50,000 trees. Their mission is to save the planet’s so-called “third pole,” a glacial region already experiencing damaging effects of climate change.

Lee unfortunately evinces no great or native editorial instincts for blending her interview material with footage from the trek itself, and neither does she provide enough contextual information to root one’s understanding of the Drukpa lineage or tradition. Pad Yatra evokes awe in relation to the undertaken journey at its core, certainly, but, as yawningly narrated by Daryl Hannah, it doesn’t cohere in a meaningful way. Lee can’t see the forest for the trees, and with such an ineffective guide a viewer’s interest founders. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall in Beverly Hills. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Jelly Bean Films, unrated, 72 minutes)