Posts published in “Off the Record”

BOONVILLE REDEMPTION, the movie partly filmed here, doesn’t seem headed for blockbuster status. Even its on-line description is unpromising. “Thirteen year-old Melinda (Strike one! — any movie featuring a kid is, by definition, awful, even if the kid can act) “is angry about the hand life has dealt her,” an anger shared by most sentient beings and so what? “Being born out of wedlock and scorned by many, Melinda desperately wants to know what happened to her real father. No one will tell her.” Most so-called illegitimate kids are better off not knowing. “Alice, Melinda’s mother, feels that God has abandoned her and now relies on superstitions to cope with her guilt.” But God has always been, ah, inattentive, and Mendo is indeed a kind of national woo-woo center. But Mendo wasn’t woo-woo heavy in 1913 when this epic is set. Woo-woo arrived in ’67 with the hippies.