Earlier today, the international trailer for We Need to Talk About Kevin showed us that a child raised in a seemingly normal environment could still end up a horrifying, dead-eyed sociopath with a panache for porn. Lynne Ramsay’s Cannes film swiftly removed any hope that human spawn could be charming or cuddly – so let’s chuck ‘em all and turn to something a bit more organic. After all, there’s nothing more hip than locally grown produce, so why not some locally grown kids? You liked the Cabbage Patch Kids when you were younger, right? Enter Disney’s The Odd Life of Timothy Green. The film is billed as “an inspiring, magical story about a happily married couple who bury a box in their backyard, containing all of their wishes for an infant. Soon, their child is born, though Timothy Green is not all that he appears.” That’s right, in this film, Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton can’t have children, so they write down everything they’d want for the kid they can never have, toss those wishes into a box, bury it in their garden, and act like it’s totally normal when a mud-covered elementary schooler shows up in their house during a hefty rainstorm. I know we’re doing great things with soybeans right now, but this is too much – there’s a big difference between a tofu burger and a garden-grown kid. Cue some stuff that looks like Powder fell in with some slow food hippies, and boom! there’s The Odd [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The movie is half-understated, intimate comedy, while the other half tends to veer into screwball comedy territory. There’s no excuse for Peter Hedges to take a story that should be a character study of what it’s like for a middle-aged man raising three daughters on his own and film it like Meet the Parents mixed with Wedding Crashers.

Actor Steve Carell and comedian Dane Cook have one distinct thing in common — in the year 2007, they have each made for which they were completely wrong. Thankfully they’ve both found a movie that was absolutely perfect for them — and it just happens to be the same film.