There is a movie coming out in March that I have been waiting to see for about three years now. Kevin Smith started talking about the film Red State shortly after Zach and Miri was released. Since that time he directed another movie (Copout). Copout was the first time he directed a film that was not written by him and the results were by all accounts pretty poor. I personally have not gotten around to seeing it due to the incredibly bad reviews and the way Smith has talked about it since the film was released. My desire to see a film drops substantially when the director himself bashes it. Regardless of the result of that movie, I have been a huge Kevin Smith fan since his debut Clerks way back in middle school. Being a movie dork at that age, I was awaiting its release excitedly. Of course everyone else I knew had no idea what I was talking about when I told them, “A new director named Kevin Smith has a movie coming out that he shot in the gas station that he worked in. He filmed it nightly after closing, using credit cards to fund the twenty seven thousand dollar budget along with casting all of his friends in the production.” At some point I am sure their eyes glazed over and they just thought, “Here he goes again.”
So ever since, I have followed his career closely. It is easy to do, since Smith loves talking about every aspect of his life. He has a series of DVD’s that are compilations of him speaking at colleges. While some people have a podcast or maybe two that they produce, Smith has a network with 7 different shows, one show for every day of the week and he is in five of them.
Red State was written shortly after Zach and Miri and Smith had been working ever since on getting the funding to make his dark vision. Red State is unlike anything he has made before. At this point there has been only a teaser released and it is 100% clear that this is nothing like what has come before.
The film revolves around three teenage outcasts who (in the words of Smith himself) venture into the woods looking for sex but instead find God.” He based the tone on a subgenre of 70’s horror films, the devil worship cult movie. In the late 70s and early 80s when the nation was dealing with fears of supposed satanic cults, horror films took the cue and began pumping out films on the subject. Smith has taken the basic idea of a group of teens crossing paths with a satanic cult and flipped it.
What if these teens ran across a group of religious fundamentalist that were as scary as the satanic cult in Rosemary’s Baby?
When it came to finding inspiration it was not hard, Fred Phelps has been making headlines for years now, protesting funerals of gay teens and US soldiers alike. Standing on the side of the road with posters saying things like, “Fags Die God Laughs”. Phelps was the obvious catalyst for a story that goes to horrifying extremes.
He then lined up a cast of promising young actors including Micheal Angarano, Kyle Gallner and Nick Braun. Smith was so impressed with these three young actors, he cast each of them in his upcoming hockey movie, Hit Somebody. The cast also includes some great character actors, Stephen Root (Office Space), Kevin Pollack (The Usual Suspects), and the amazing John Goodman. Melissa Leo, fresh off her golden globe win for her role in The Fighter, stars as one of the cult members.
This leads us to the main star of the film, Michael Parks. Parks plays the role of Abin Cooper, the head of the church and main villain. Parks is a veteran actor who may not be well known to most modern audiences. He caught my eye and the eye of Smith with his role in the Tarantino/Rodriguez collaboration, From Dusk till Dawn. Smith stated he saw him in the opening scene of that film and was blown away. When the scene ended with him being murdered, Smith thought, “Wait a minute, I want to see a movie about that guy.” Luckily, Tarantino and Rodriguez would resurrect that character in four more films after Dawn.
From everything I have heard, Parks blows it out of the water in Red State. His acting showcase is apparently a sermon mid-movie that last over 15 minutes.
I am beyond excited about this flick and am counting down the days to seeing it. In a couple of days, it will premier at the Sundance Film Festival. After that, I just have to hold out until March to see what Mr. Smith’s version of a horror film is.
One last note, I will say for those who are not horror movie fans, Kevin Smith insists this film is not an actual horror film. In his words, “It’s not a horror film; it’s just that horrific things happen.”
Unforgotten is a very powerful and very sad account of a terrible part of our nation’s history. It is the story of a handful of families that lived through a family member’s life at Willowbrook. The story of Willowbrook is one that his been told many times. The horrors that occurred in the facility have been well documented. The filmmakers make the wise decision of just focusing on these few accounts of how families dealt with before, during and after having siblings and children spending years locked away in this facility that was supposed to care for their disabled relatives. 
