Review of The Joneses (2010) by Dannielle A — 08 Oct 2010

What happens when the Joneses move next door and they have all the shiny new toys and a seemingly perfect life? You gotta keep up with the Joneses!

A modern-day zeitgeist farce that focuses on satirizing the audience into seeing how ridiculous our culture has become.

The Jones family is not a real family... they are four people pretending to be a family whose job it is to be a walking, talking commercial. The film tags it "Self-Marketing" and it's almost concievable that it could possibly be a real marketing ploy. The idea is that if the beautiful and popular people buy it then it must be good, and the rest of the sheep will follow along.

The director shows no signs of being a novice and the actors do an amazing job as well... even the supporting actors and minor characters are cast very well.

The subplots with the neighbors were almost more interesting to me than the other subplots with the teenagers and I wish I could've gotten more of that. The teenagers really bothered me and I couldn't help but wish they would go away and stop ruining the movie. (But that was their job... to create more confusion and chaos.).

The movie had a lot of good things to say... like how materialism is uncool and literally fatal, underage drinking has huge repercussions, being a slut is so not sexy, your job is not worth losing your relationships, and being honest is the best policy. (I couldn't see why it wouldn't work out if they didn't pretend to be married... if they really were married, lost those two fake kids, had their own kids, and got real jobs in addition to selling the stuff, but got to choose the stuff they wanted... that way they would be honest. Also, it would be important to not push people too far to buy things they can't afford.) Other than the random nudity scene which was completely unneeded (yeah, yeah, we already got it that the "daughter" was a slut... we don't need to actually see it) it was a decent movie and worth seeing if you leave the room during the part where she tries to seduce her "father.".