This year's Virginia Film Festival theme is Kin Flicks, movies that share the theme of family. Keeping with the theme, Academy Award-winning director Ray McKinnon will be showing his award-winning, one-year-old film about "the family," Randy and The Mob, Saturday night at the Paramount Theater.
McKinnon wrote and directed his first film, a short called The Accountant, in 2001 and proceeded to win the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 2002. You might also recognize him from the HBO series Deadwood. Earlier this year at the Nashville Film Festival he also received the President's Award and the Audience Choice Award for this film.
Randy and the Mob is an eccentric, fresh and entertaining film that made me smile. McKinnon wrote and directed this family comedy, which takes place in an unheard-of Southern town in Georgia called Spivey. Filmed on location, McKinnon and the rest of the cast portray the place realistically and believably, with a good strong Southern drawl, a pickup truck to be envious of and a slow, easy-going lifestyle with nothing much to do.
The story centers around an ambitious, fast-talking, truck-stop-owning man by the name of Randy Pearson. Randy is a good ol' boy whose luck turns bad and whose problems begin to accumulate. At the beginning of the film, his goal is to do whatever it takes to receive the Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year award. He's up for volunteering at a retirement home or taking out a loan from the mafia in order to build up Randy Pearson Enterprises -- made up of a truck stop, a BBQ diner and storage units. He's also willing to do anything and everything to gain the status he believes accompanies this award.
And as he tries to make ends meet, his family relations, which were strained to begin with, get worse, the bills begin to add up, the IRS is hunting him down and Randy Pearson Enterprises is doing no better than before.
Unable to pay, Randy begins to receive phone calls from Franco, a loan shark dealer from the mob. The mob sends a member, Tino, down to take care of the situation. Randy realizes he needs to come clean to his family -- his seemingly depressed, baton-twirling, carpal-tunneled wife, Charlotte and his gay, successful, identical twin brother, Cecil -- because at this point he has no where else to turn.
By the end of the film family, of course, conquers all. I found the humor to be innocent and relatable. In the same way that Napoleon Dynamite depicted middle-school humor of the 90s, Randy and the Mob has the same essence for Southern humor, which McKinnon presents in a realistic and believable manner. Additionally, the music selection emphasizes this Southern humor.
In an effort not to give away the entire ending, I'll just jump straight to the punch line here. Randy and the Mob is definitely worth your while. It is a quintessential, light-hearted, happy-go-lucky, clean-humored film, with a fable-worthy ending.
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