Helicopter Mom

This film is so stupid.I mean where does one begin? The mother (though the actress was really good) was plagued by a terrible script that made her attachment to her son seem like a reverse Oedipus Complex. Besides that this movie is cringe inducing with it's "gay humor" that doesn't really come off as funny but more unintentionally homophobic. You see only two gay teens (who are side characters in a movie trying to sell itself as an LGBT genre movie I might add)who act like the most stereotypical cartoons of real people ever made. The were kinda like the gay teens in high school that all the other gay teens don't like because they are stupid and obnoxious.If you are a gay like me it feels like a black guy watching a ministerial show. How this ever got a premiere at Frameline I will never know.

"Helicopter Mom" is a film that boggled my mind as I watched. I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Nia Vardalos was tired of being a celebrity and simply did this film to destroy her career...her performance and character were both THAT bad. Now she was wonderful in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" as well as in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding II"...but here she is simply someone I hated with every fiber of my being...and I am actually shocked I completed the movie. I assume it's because when she wasn't on the screen, the picture was actually pretty good...but that wasn't often enough.

Vardalos plays Maggie, a single mother whose every thought and action is about her teenage son, Lloyd (Jason Dolley). She constantly embarrasses him and behaves in a way like no mother on the planet...and is extremely cruel and self-centered throughout this. For instance, she HOPES that he's gay because that way no other woman will come between them...and then publicly outs the boy at school and signs him up to compete for a gay scholarship. There is, by the way, no evidence that he's gay...none. She just hopes he is for her own deranged and selfish reasons. She doesn't stop at embarrassing him for this...it's pretty much constant. To say this is a one-dimensional and broadly written character is a HUGE understatement!!

When the camera is NOT on her, the film is rather nice. Dolley is very good as her meek son and his scenes with his girlfriend are very sweet. I'd actually like to see more of this actor...just never, never, never in the same film as Vardalos.

Overall, a difficult movie to like and one I hope never to see again.

This movie has little plot and zombie-like "acting" which puts the deep freeze on anything you might want to get out of the film. Aside from Ms. Vardalos, there's a reason the rest of the cast is made up of unknowns and little known bit players. Ms. Vardalos is astonishingly horrible in this and quickly making herself even less relevant than she's already become by being in amateur movies like Helicopter Mom.

There are zero redeeming qualities about this movie and everything from the cinematography to the wardrobe makes it look like a bad student film.

The only thing that's funny about this film is that apparently the sales company, distributor, production company, producer and/or director are posting bogus positive user reviews to try and trick people into watching this thing. 99% of the people see right through it which makes the losers behind this movie even more pathetic than they already are for putting out a trashy movie like this. The very few critic's who even bothered reviewing this movie unanimously panned it.

Even if you can download this thing for free off the internet, your time is worth far more than subjecting yourself to 80 minutes of stupidity.

The writing felt like this could have been a script written by a non-film major in a screenwriting class at a local community college. It is riddled with some of the worst dialogue I have ever heard in a film. And then you have Nia Vardolos; she was so over-the-top that one has to wonder if she was binging on drugs or alcohol during the filming of this. I was in utter disbelief at how bad and rotorless this film was.

Nearly everything about this movie looks like it was made by 2nd graders.

Starting with the obvious, the script is incoherent, unoriginal, unfunny and vacuous.

The person who directed this clearly was grasping at straws, and to allow the lead character to act so way over-the-top showed very little skill of the craft.

The acting by everyone (except the father) was a joke. It looked like bad dinner theater acting.

The sound was not good and uneven. Some parts of the film were inaudible and the dialogue lost. How do you let that happen (unless, of course you're a 2nd grader)?

I'm assuming this film was shot for 40-50k by film students in an attempt to raise money to try and make something bigger. However, I highly doubt this effort by those involved will lead to anything other than than an unemployment check or a job offer at Dunkin Donuts serving up flavors of the day.

THIS is what you call AMATEUR HOUR.