The Friedmans (Capturing The Friedmans)
The Family: The seemingly normal Friedman family, who found themselves rocked by accusations that both father and son were involved in sexual abuse involving children, and yet decided to film their most intimate moments of distress.
Strangest Member: Whoever decided to keep the cameras rolling.
It’s an extremely bizarre invasion of privacy.
The Slocumbs (Igby Goes Down)
The Family: An old-money New York institution, fuelled by resentment and bitterness.
Kids hate parents, parents hate each other, kids hate each other… you get the idea.
Strangest Member: Mimi, the spectacularly vicious matriarch.
She describes Igby’s conception as an act of animosity… to Igby!
Gee, thanks mum.
The Whites (Carrie)
The Family: An awkward teenage girl with burgeoning telekinetic powers and her religious fanatic of a mother.
It’s fair to say the two don’t see eye to eye.
Strangest Member: On balance, we’ll award it to the mother.
And given her daughter’s extraordinary temper, that’s saying something…
The Hoods (The Ice Storm)
The Family: A chronically uncommunicative bunch who find themselves wrapped up in their own problems.
The parents’ marriage is dead in the water, the daughter is worryingly sexually precocious and the son has a flourishing drug habit.
Welcome to suburbia!
Strangest Member: Young Paul, who drugs his friend in an attempt to get into Katie Holmes’ pants, before accidentally drugging her too.
Enough with the drugs!
The Goldfarbs (Requiem For A Dream)
The Family: A young man and his grandmother, both of whom suffer from crippling problems with drugs. Not your average family dynamic.
Strangest Member: The tragic Sara, an ageing widow whose obsession with recapturing her youth leads her down a very dark path indeed.
The Pack (The Hills Have Eyes)
The Family: A collection of hungry cannibals living in the Nevada desert, where a ready supply of stranded travellers provides them with regular sustenance.
Strangest Member: Papa Jupiter, the ferocious patriarch.
He’s been killing since he was knee-high to a grasshopper…
The Huff-Dobacks (Step Brothers)
The Family: A fairly normal married couple, and their utterly beserk children, Brennan and Dale.
We know love conquers all, but these two really do push that maxim to the limit.
Strangest Member: It’s a tough one to call, but Will Ferrell’s Brennan probably shades it in the gibbering man-child stakes.
The Fockers (Meet The Fockers)
The Family: Any parents who would name their child Gaylord Focker must surely be a bit bizarre, and so it proves, courtesy of a deliriously OTT pair of performances from Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
Strangest Member: The prodigious liberal Bernie, who thinks nothing of discussing his son’s former masturbatory habits over dinner with the in-laws.
The McDunnoughs (Raising Arizona)
The Family: Unable to conceive or adopt, the McDunnoughs find themselves a third way, by kidnapping a baby to call their own.
Can’t envisage any problems there…
Strangest Member: Herbert, if only for that daft hair and tache…
The Jarretts (Ordinary People)
The Family: An upper-middle-class family that swiftly falls apart following the death of a teenage son.
Depression, resentment and guilt are pretty much all that’s left.
Strangest Member: Beth, the mother, who gradually shuts down to the point where she’s incapable of loving anyone or anything.
Bummer.
