I haven't seen many movies since the beginning of the new year because there really haven't been many I've been interested in seeing, but last night I stumbled across a unique documentary that demonstrates how truth can be stranger than fiction. Prodigal Sons begins as a story about a transexual's return to her rural hometown in Montana, but it becomes more about her relationship with her estranged tragic brother, and explores universal questions of identity, sibling rivarly, and nature versus nurture. Paul was valedictorian, class president, and quarterback of the high school football team, but after graduation, he moved to San Francisco and became Kim. Marc is Kim's older adopted brother, who was held back in preschool, didn't graduate from high school, and suffered a brain injury at 21 that left him severely emotionally unstable. While Kim tries to leave her past as a man behind her, Marc only wants to live in the past, and find out who his real parents are. In one of the strangest twists I've ever seen in film, Marc learns that he's the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. A film about two brothers dealing with identity shifts while hoping to reconnect with each other, this film is continually engrossing and unlike anything you've seen.
The Academy Awards continues to confound me every year. How did The Hurt Locker, a film which is essentially a series of bomb set pieces, win the Oscar for Best Screenplay? Here's a story with no character arc, which blatantly states its theme in the opening credits, and is mostly an exercise in suspense. It also bugs me that people praised the film for NOT making a strong statement about war. Why is that a good thing? Ironically, I think the film actually DOES say something about war, namely that it can make people crazy, so the fact that right-wingers have embraced the movie because they think it doesn't have a political message indicates their frequent inability to understand art. At any rate, I expect a Best Picture winner to be a revelation, which The Hurt Locker isn't. I would have given the Oscar to An Education.
