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Hoist on its own conceit: `Running with Scissors' wastes its cast in a glacially paced freak show`RUNNING WITH SCISSORS' (star).

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From: Chicago Tribune (Chicago, IL)
Date: 20061027
Author:

Byline: Michael Phillips

Oct. 27--Leo Tolstoy wrote it and a million Google-assembled term papers have quoted it: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But Tolstoy never caught "Running with Scissors," based on Augusten Burroughs' Amherst- and Northampton, Mass.-set memoir about growing up among a free-floating menagerie of sociopaths. Had he seen it he would've rethought the "unhappy family" bit, since every beat of the picture has the ring of pushy inauthenticity, and despite all the outre eccentricities, a plodding lack of ...

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