A Home of our Own (1993)

Life for a single mother with six kids, no job and no place to live might be enough to break almostanyone's spirit. But for a proud and resiliant woman like Frances Lacey, it's both a challenge she embraces and a battle she refuses to lose. Starring OscarÂ(r) winner* Kathy Bates (Fried Green Tomatoes) and featuring Edward Furlong (Terminator 2) and "a supporting cast of fine young actors" ("Entertainment Today"), this "radiant [and] inspirational" (The Hollywood Reporter) film is a "touching, involving experience" (Los Angeles Times) that proves home really is where the heart is! Independent, strong-willed Frances Lacey (Bates) is determined to turn hard times into prosperity. Fed up with her supervisor's harassment, her oldest son's (Furlong)increasing delinquency and all of Los Angeles, she packs her kids into a rundown Plymouth and headseast. To some, Frances may look like a woman bound for nowhere but this is one tough lady who's definitely got a destinationthe American dream! *1990: Actress, Misery

True Story

This is a great True Story about a struggling family. Makes you appretiate every little thing August 14, 2008

Better than any self help book / one of the best 100 movies of our time and a great story of perseverance, unity and triumph.

This 14 year old film can still inspire and remind you that your problems are trivial compared to the Lacy family.

How a group of roving and impoverished mother of six with as much gusto and as little money as possible leaves L.A in post war 1950's in a beat up car and settles in a remote Idaho community.

Frances Lacey (Kathy Bates) leads her "Lacey Clan" from a cannery job in L.A. with more hope than prospects but with the help of her oldest son Shayne (Edward Furlong) they overcome un-imaginable odds on an odyssey to find the write house when they see it.

Stopping on a 1 1/2 lane road in remote Idaho, they stumble across a half constructed shack which inspires something only in Frances, she asks the neighbor across the street from the dilapidated dream to discover a Japanese florist who admits it is his land and confronts Frances with vigorous curiosity why she is interested.

The rest of the film reflects the traditional rites of passage of adolescence for Shayne and his siblings but for a family of working poor who struggle to attend school and work traditional jobs or devote all of their time maintaining their home or installing the basic necessities you and I take for granted.

A Home Of Our Own is a masterpiece because despite the fact it is set in post war 1950's Idaho, the lessons and struggles are relevant to any era past and present.

You can't help but feel inspired by this story and it diminishes any challenges you may have at the moment or at least force you to rebalance your perspective.

The lessons of indomitable optimism and sacrifice are the core characteristics of success and positively depicted in this film while balanced with a gritty realism.

This isn't a film for the young kids, it contains profanity but isn't gratuitous and is well used to emphasize the most trying struggles.

This movie is introduced as a true story but our extensive searches were unable to find any references and epilogues to the author or narrator of the story. If there is anyone who can verify if this is a true story and the name of the book it is based on, the Amazon community would owe you a meaningful amount of gratitude.

Whether you watch it during the holidays or Cinemax at 4:00 AM Sunday morning, it is time well spent. August 4, 2008

For anyone who ever heard the story that their parents had to walk 20 miles in snow to school everyday

When I was little, my mother would pack up the Packard and load us kids in the back seat.
She's bring along a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread in case we got hungry. And she'd
drive cross country to meet my dad in whatever port he had been stationed.
Once, during a blizzard, my older sister changed a rather rank diaper on my little brother. RAther
that travel with the nasty thing in the car, she threw it out the window. When we got to the next town,
Mom got out and discovered that the diaper had frozen solid to the side of the car.
A Home of Their Own, took me back to those days when you didn't expect much but hoped for a warm
bed and something to eat. It takes the view back to a time when women were tough because they had to be.
A lot of men were off to war and women kept the home fires burning. In this case, Kathy Bates finds herself
a single mom, trying to build a "home of their own" for her five young kids. The movie humbles you and reminds
you that life in the early 40's and 50's required imagination.
Buy it for yourself and your grandkids. It's exciting and sad and offers us all a valuable lesson. May 22, 2008

family values?

About half way through this movie it hit me how and why Hollywood and various journalists had heaped praise upon A Home of Our Own as fine family fare: it spews, through the endlessly repeated cursings od star Kathy Bates, contempt for and reviles the " g...d.. Irish Catholic" father.

A Home of Our Own promotes the Feminist cliches with the self-sufficient, never-say-die single woman constantly reminding the audience that her dead husband was worthless. It promotes the cliches of both the national WASP establishment and the Jewish elites of Hollywood, journalism, and academia with Bates' foul-mouthed contempt for the Catholic Church and Irishness.

What is wrong with that, beside the fact that no can can make and get aired a film that does the opposite, is that this mess is marketed as family entertainment. That is like claiming that The Last Temptation of Christ is a Christian movie. May 13, 2008

a home of our own

What a great holiday movie. Lets you know how it feels to be a poor family just trying to make it. And how things can all work out in the end. January 17, 2008

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