by MARK SLUTSKY

It’s a strange coincidence that Keeping Up With the Steins, a new comedy from first-time director Scott Marshall, should open this week. That’s because also premiering this week is the third season of HBO’s series Entourage, and both the movie and the TV show feature actor Jeremy Piven as a high-powered Hollywood agent. What’s more, the movie, like an episode of the show from season two, centres around the elaborate Bar Mitzvah Piven is throwing for one of his offspring (okay, on Entourage it was a Bat Mitzvah, but you get the idea).

Those strange similarities aside, Steins is quite a different beast from Entourage, which focuses on buddies, good times and sex. No, this movie is definitely more in the family-friendly camp, with its emphasis on values, relationships and even a modicum of good-natured religiosity. It starts as a fairly broad comedy but slowly turns into something pretty heartfelt.

Daryl Sabara (from the Spy Kids movies) is the shy kid of brash agent Adam Fiedler (Piven). His Bar Mitzvah, that essentially American rite of passage for Jewish kids, is coming up in a few months, and when Piven’s business rival stages an incredibly elaborate Titanic-themed party (the funniest thing in the movie by far), the competition is on. To curb his parents’ Bar Mitvah mania, Sabara secretly invites his grandfather (Garry Marshall, father of director Scott), who’s been estranged from the family for years.

Naturally, this—and the party’s complications—cause some degree of pandemonium to ensue. This is where Marshall the elder really steps in. A wise hippie type with a hot girlfriend (Daryl Hannah), he takes it upon himself to oversee our little mensch’s education, unsatisfied with the materialistic approach to religion in the family’s wealthy suburb.

It’s pretty corny stuff, but Garry Marshall’s got a very amiable paternal charm and he just about pulls it off. Though the movie gets gradually less funny as it gets more meaningful, it definitely has its heart in the right place, and is likely to become staple viewing at synagogue and summer camp movie nights.

Keeping Up With the Steins opens Friday, June 16

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