Georgia Rule

Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan play three generations of women carrying around a whole mess of emotional baggage that gets unpacked one summer. Fonda is Georgia, the flinty matriarch who runs life under her roof with inflexible rules. Her daughter (Huffman) fled home long ago in a fit of rebellion but returns decades later with her own rebellious teenage daughter (Lohan), hoping Georgia's old-fashioned discipline can straighten out the cheeky, reckless, sexually aggressive girl. You could say Lohan is playing a screen version of her own rocky tabloid persona, but without the paparazzi (and with a happy ending). Film critic John Hartl wrote on MSNBC: "Not enough dots are connected ... to form a consistent character interaction. And when the running time approaches two hours, it's hard for an audience not to feel jerked around." Dermot Mulroney is the sensitive veterinarian who serves as the positive male figure in their lives, and Cary Elwes (as Huffman's husband) is definitely the negative: his misdeeds take the often humorous film into much more serious territory.

Director Garry Marshall provides a commentary track that plays like an entertainer trying to squeeze a little humor out of a fairly conventional production talk, and he gets even more punch lines in his commentary on the seven deleted scenes and three alternate endings. The three featurettes are standard promotional productions, where everyone loves the project and gushes praise on their fellow actors and collaborators. Also features a gag reel (see Lohan decide that walking barefoot on a California blacktop road in the middle of summer is a really bad idea). Available in separate wide-screen and full-screen editions.