Daltry Calhoun

Bomb Rating: 

It's amazing anyone can attach so much importance to a film that never got into theaters.

One can assume that any remotely serious film that casts Johnny Knoxville in the lead role has essentially packed it in, given up, and consigned itself to the supermarket "Video Special" bins around the country. Such is the case with "Daltry Calhoun," which has the unfortunate distinction of using a flashback scene to open the movie, making it appear that when it moves to "present day," Knoxville has aged backward.

Let me explain: In the opening flashback, Daltry is living with a baton-twirling teenager and trying to wrap his mind around fatherhood. Then we're transported into the present and meet a Daltry that looks younger than in his flashback. In the present, Daltry's opened up some kind of sod business in a place called Duckville, Tennessee. So along comes May (Elizabeth Banks) and her daughter June (Sophie Traub) into Calhoun's world to re-introduce him to fatherhood.

Now, I must admit to being a little distracted at one point during the movie regarding something not having to do with the movie, but I don't really think I missed anything. Anyway, I knew that May was sick and dying, but one second she was standing there and the next minute June was crying about her death. I'm all for shortening things in movies these days, but I don't think the director has heard of the concept of "transition." Obviously, the rest of the movie is about Daltry coming to terms with his daughter and saving his business. The point of the movie is to capture all the cute dialogue we associate with the South that doesn't entail insulting minorities. So it's a bit limited.

I watched about five minutes of a featurette on the DVD featuring director Katrina Holden Bronson and executive producer Quentin Tarantino. It's basically a festival of mutual backslapping, with lots of footage of Bronson dealing with her actors and Tarantino walking around the set like Zeus. It's amazing anyone can attach so much importance to a film that never got into theaters.

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