Like Todd at Twitch, I'm a huge Michael Rapaport fan. Ever since I accidentally caught his debut, Zebrahead, at my local multiplex (!) in college, I've wondered why
such a talented, interesting actor ends up in so much godforsaken crap. He's clearly cursed with a)needing to make
money (presumably The War at Home is keeping him in
groceries), and b)not being a hot, photogenic kid who gets jobs because he's pretty. Sometimes the latter curse can be
turned into a blessing, though, because it means people with weird, interesting scripts looking for an actor with
passion and no fear come to him first. The result of one of those imagined encounters is Special, a movie I had never heard of until I saw the trailer on Twitch yesterday. It's about "a lonely metermaid [who] has a psychotic reaction to his medication and becomes convinced he's a superhero," and its tagline is the realistically harsh "A very select group of people in life are truly gifted. Special is a movie about everyone else." The trailer is both completely hilarious and incredibly depressing, but Rapaport is fantastic throughout, and the movie - the debut of writer/directors Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore - looks really wonderful. It played at Sundance this year but somehow managed to evade our screening dragnet; as of yet, no distribution has been secured.
[via Twitch]
1. I was able to catch it at a late-night public screening, and I dug it quite a bit. Good to see some ground-buzz grooving for this flick.
Posted at 5:19PM on Feb 18th 2006 by Scott Weinberg