In the News - Santa Cruz Film Festival Santa Cruz Sentinel Show-Me State saga highlights film festival It may not go over well at the Jefferson City Film Festival, but everywhere else it’s shown, the low-budget comedy/drama "Living in Missouri" has impressed. Directed by UC Santa Cruz grad Shaun Peterson, "Missouri," showing tonight at the Santa Cruz Film Festival, is a low-key character study about three nondescript middle Americans, living stunted and miserable lives. This funny, poignant, bleak story was written by Connor Ratliff who also stars as Ryan, a suburban nobody who escapes from his hassled wife Amy by going to the movies with his best pal Todd, a fellow prole who lives with his parents, works the counter at the local video store and harbors an unrequited love for Amy. "Missouri" has won 10 film festival awards, including the Best Feature at the Seattle Underground Film Festival, and it’s clear that Peterson is a talent behind the camera. Set in the blah Missouri suburbs where Peterson and Ratliff both grew up, the film walks a fine line, satirizing the humdrum, tragically unexamined lives of those who live by soda pop and rented videos before evolving into a meaningful examination of under-the-surface passions and delusions. In a phone interview, Peterson said he shot Ratliff’s script with a number of tones to broadly satirical to heartfelt and tragic and came up with what he felt was a resonant middle ground. Ian McConnell, who plays the lumpish, pent-up video clerk Todd, is also a UCSC grad, though by his portrayal, you’d bet he never left the small town where he lived. With a miserable self-consciousness and obvious self-loathing, he comes across like something between George from "Seinfeld" and Radar O’Reilly from the old "MASH" series. With its motifs of lazy morality, pathetic delusions and pointless consumption — these people scarf up the junk food to fill holes in their own souls — "Living in Missouri" hits a nerve and tickles a funny bone. As Ryan, the clueless protagonist screams to his wife in all seriousness as she huffs out the door, "It’s not about you, Amy. It’s about ‘Star Wars.’ " |