If you look up the word kitsch, you will see references to material that is low-brow and mass-produced, gaudily decorated with icons of the mob, and given to sentimentality and melodrama – something like a shock jock that appeals to those with no taste at all, and little sense of decency. The film This is Where I Leave You sets new levels of vulgarity in this genre that may never be surpassed.  It redefines my notion of a nightmare – spending one hundred minutes with the people in who inflicted this on us to see whether they could increase their insult to my brain and our humanity in person.  Like The Judge, it is a generational tale about a yuppie with a cheating wife who goes back to middle America after a death in the family and confronts his demons and his childhood sweetheart and some intellectually challenged people.  It could have been shot in the same town with the same cast. but the latter film had a theme and two distinguished actors.  This one just keeps getting worse.   It is like the Titanic such a bad film that it holds you enthralled to see whether it can sustain bullshit of such elegant and inevitable refinement.  Good art puts us at home with our humanity.  Kitsch makes us think that the apes are better off.  There is only one redeeming feature.  You get the same feeling with Der Rosenkavalier.  There is not much air between fascism and kitsch – if they can sell this rubbish, selling Hitler would be a breeze.