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GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

By Merle Bertrand | November 9, 2000

“Cops” meets “Jerry Springer” in this American indie flick about a battling white trash couple. Don (Bob Miller) is a toy collector and his wife Donatella (Petra Western) is a blue collar factory worker. As the film starts their marriage has already collapsed, so they use their 10-year-old son (Andre Eichner) to convey profane messages to each other. Then Don literally builds a wall down the middle of the house and it’s all-out war with Don’s lowlife friends on one side, Donatella and her white-collar lesbian lover (Tacey Adams) on the other, and their son crawling between through a doggie door.
Writer-director Frank Novak manages to capture a cruelly hilarious vein of black comedy in the situation with his cast of non-actors and a gritty, no-budget approach. And there are flashes of honest insight lurking under the film’s rough, uneven surface.

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