My latest new thing is Red Box. Yeah, I know they've been around for over ten years, but I don't usually have a reason to rent movies. With my Adult Attention Deficit Disorder, I find it much easier to focus on a movie in a dark theater. If I watch a movie at home, I'm multi-tasking all over the place.
It took Quvenzhané Wallis to make me think I should rent a movie. The Beasts of the Southern Wild didn't make it to any theaters in Raleigh, or Durham where #1 son lives, until after the Oscar nominations for movie, director, and bast actress were announced. Now it's appearing at a theater in Morrisville near the RDU airport. My son had some time to hang out at my house on a recent Sunday afternoon, and used my PC to find the movie for himself on Red Box. "It's cheap, and it's easy," he said. (A dollar, twenty-eight with tax) I really wanted to see the youngest Oscar Nominee in action, so the next weekend, I signed up with Red Box, and drove three miles to the Hess station pick up my movie. I tried not to look like a newbie when I swiped my credit card on the machine and waited until the big red box spat out my video. Then I looked around to see who was watching....nobody. I felt so proud of myself.
The movie...hmm. It has won awards at the Cannes Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Deauville American Film Festival, and a bunch of others. What seems to have impressed the judges was a cast of total unknowns, filmed on 16mm film. Five-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, is an obvious standout.
But what the movie was about, leave it to your own imagination. It's a fantasy set on the Louisiana gulf, on a fictitious island set apart from the mainland by levees. There's a storm coming, and there are huge wild boars, and melting icecaps, and a little girl trying to survive with her sick Daddy, in a place they called The Bathtub where every day is a holiday.
The little girl gets five stars. The movie gets a foot in the door for its young producer Benh Zeitlin.
