jisyourpadre

This film changed my life. There's no other way to say it--the grandeur of the landscape, the courage of the title character and that scene where he chases the raccoons off his porch wearing nothing but long johns and a smile. A little more about the title character: he is every bit befitting his name, tough and chewy and, yes, a bit sour on the outside, but the more you take him into your heart, the more you grow to love the old cuss. He, and his beard, will stay with me forever. This I know. My friends and I watched this small masterpiece several times after discovering it on the rack at the Miranda Market in rural Southern Humboldt County, and I can say with certainty...it just keeps getting better. Watch it. Today.

I live in Marin County where this flick was filmed and was an extra in it. I remember watching Jonathan Parker direct his actors and thinking, "This is gonna look better in the finished product. It HAS to." Because what I was seeing looked laughably amateurish. If not for the presence of name actors like Noah Wylie and Illiana Douglas, I would have assumed I was watching the production of a student film.

Well, when this baby finally hit screens at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I was surprised to find my suspicions had been correct: no amount of editing or re-packaging was gonna polish this turd.

What's too bad about all this is that, at its core, the movie had some good ideas. The ongoing battle between slick, greedy developers and aging, environmentalist hippie boomers is a very real one here in the Bay Area, and there's ample hypocrisy and fodder for satire on both sides.

But Parker gets lost in a sea of tired clichés and labored, talky dialog and in the end can't decide what kind of movie he wants to make. Is it a satire of the tug-of-war between progress and preservation and the colorful players involved? Or is it a sappy, love-triangle romance? Or how about the tale of a short-sighted man's redemption by way of a flighty young songbird? The Californians tries to be all these things (and more) and ends up being nothing more than a muddled, uneven mess.