Sunday, February 17, 2013

Another one for the Bucket List, and a movie review too

As I have said before, I don't know what's on my Bucket List until it happens.  As a retired geek, I don't shy away from techie stuff, but it's been a long time since I had a paid job doing techie stuff.  In today's information age, there is so much to keep up with.  I have to depend on my kids to tell me about the latest technology.

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.

1 comment:

Howard Pippins said...

When I first started watching it I thought it was a documentary. She was so very good...