10/23/07

Introducing the Dwights

What do they feed the guys in Australia? Can it be canned and sold to blokes who live elsewhere? By the time our youthful hero Tim (Khan Chittendon) finally takes off his shirt, you too, will begin to wonder! Yum!

A movie like "Introducing the Dwights" could never work if they had used second-rate actors in the key roles. If you are anything like me, you already know that Brenda Blethyn ("Undertaking Betty" and "Little Voice") can do ANYTHING! In this, she plays a mother of two young men, one with cerebral palsy from his difficult birth and the other is a young man striving to succeed with his own moving business. She is loving, concerned, sensitive to their needs and has been a single parent far longer than she wants to remember. She works in a commercial kitchen but also is a part-time stand-up comic who really knows how to work a room! Her humor is bawdy and risqué but she has high hopes...

That is where her real passion lies and both of her sons totally "get" her ambitions, they are generous with their time and appreciative of her sacrifices; they go to great lengths to support her and her efforts.

Their absent father is also a performer, a wanna-be Country singer who has just produced his latest CD. He too, has high hopes...

The actor who plays Mark, the brain-damaged brother, has certainly spent some quality time studying Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar-nominated performance in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"

Despite the nobility of the mother, she is also self-serving and alarmed when she sees her son Tim becoming very interested in and infatuated with a young woman, played by Emma Booth, who works at a Midas Muffler shop.

The characters in this movie are fully fledged, they are good AND bad, kind AND cruel, generous AND selfish. In other words, they are human in every sense of the word. You know me...I always want someone to root for! I liked it...