Monday, November 12, 2007
Just yesterday, Lesley brought a tall man downstairs from the Attic Gallery into the Highway 61 Coffeehouse to tour our secret microcinema. She introduced me to Ray McKinnon who looked vaguely familiar. We told him of our interest in screening independent films in the coffeehouse and he agreed to lend us a copy of a short he had made called The Accountant. He returned from his car unable to find the dvd he had thought was there, but in lieu of, he presented me with a CD of the soundtrack of his new feature: Randy and the Mob, which he told us was playing for the next week in Madison, Mississippi (about an hour away.) I recognized the cover of the CD, because I had seen an ad in the Oxford American promoting this film, which starred the director, Ray McKinnon and Walton Goggins of the Shield t.v. series.
Anyway, we went to see it tonight and it was hilarious.
(Also, I was reminded by the IMDB that Ray was not only the bona fide suitor from Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou, but he was the wonderful addled preacher man from the first season of Deadwood.)
If we had seen Randy and the Mob before we met him, it would have been hard to keep from laughing. (He seemed pretty normal in person.)
Ray is a major talent: writer, director, and actor with a real gift for physical comedy. Go see him tear it up as the Pearson twins in Randy and the Mob. (Walton Goggins is pretty good, too.) It is a southern story about a man who needs to change. You may not see a lot of promotion for this picture, but if you seek it out, it will make you smile. And laugh. A lot.
