PRODIGAL SONS

I saw a movie this week:

It was PRODIGAL SONS. This was a documentary mainly about two brothers (well, three, really, but one is only briefly covered). One of the brothers is now a sister, which was a bit of a shocker. And it's also rather surprising that the seemingly most well adjusted of the three sons was the one who had fake boobs rammed under his chest skin, his genitalia hacked up and mutilated, and his body injected with female hormones so that he can pretend to be a woman. And not just a woman, but a lesbian! Yeah, you got that right. The guy had his pecker hacked off and turned into a vagina-like substance so that he can make love to another woman as a woman. That is major-league fucked. (I swear to Jove I am not making this shit up.)

It could just be that the one who wrote and directed the documentary (Kimberly Reed) merely comes off as the best adjusted of the three because he got to edit the film, but maybe not. Maybe he really is the least screwed up of the trio. (Yeah, that thought made my nuts draw up, too.)

The third and youngest brother is a weepy homosexual who seems bewildered by everything. Which is okay. Everyone is bewildered by the world and our place in it. We just don't all cry like bitches about it. It doesn't help that this brother looks like he should have been one of the Beach Boys. But the guy's totally forgettable. I can't even recall his name. (Sorry, dude!)

However, the most interesting person in the movie, and the one whom the film was really about (at least for me) was Mark McKerrow, who was adopted. Yeah, that's a bummer, too. His parents adopted him because they couldn't have kids, and then right after they take him in his adopted mom gets pregnant not once, but twice! So here he is adopted and suddenly he gets two brothers to compete with! Man, that had to suck!

He's also a whining girly-man constantly bemoaning his fate, and a little bit of this guy goes a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong way. I don't think I'd be able to stand more than a few minutes in his company, and then I'd have to take my leave. But that's not the point. The point of the film is that this adopted brother, in researching his roots, discovers that he is the grandson of the (some say) genius filmmaker/polymath Orson Welles.

Mark McKerrow, and "Kimberly Reed" with his huge fake jugs.

Once you know that Marc McKerrow is the direct descendant of Orson Welles, it's all too obvious. He looks like Welles. He sounds like Welles. He's even fat like Welles. Of course he's totally fucked up from massive brain damage due to an automobile accident that occurred in his early 20s. Otherwise, what might have he accomplished without the scarring on the gray matter? Maybe he'd be something other than a psychotic whiner. Who knows?

At any rate, the parts of the film that deal with Welles' issue are the best parts of the documentary. I could have done with a lot less of the soul searching of the self-mutilated son going through life as a pretend-woman. Despite the total weirdness of the guy's life, it just wasn't very interesting to hear him concentrate on how everything affected him. Yeah. Self-centered moaning. Oy.

Worth seeing? Well...maybe. Just barely. I can say that it didn't suck. That's actually high praise from me.

He was a hell of a guy. You should watch all of these "Sketchbook" episodes if you have the time. Fascinating bullshit. Much better than your average bullshit.