Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Angus MacLachlan Deserves Your Attention

Fine profile of Angus MacLachlan in today's Greensboro News & Record. MacLachlan is the graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts who wrote that wonderful little home-grown movie "Junebug," which is known mainly as Amy Adams's big breakthrough movie (she got an Academy Award nom for Best Supporting Actress for her work in it) but ought to be known and celebrated by fellow Southerners for its deep insights into our family strengths and strains.

It's mainly about brothers estranged by one's success and the other's sense of failure. The failure is played by Benjamin McKenzie, who was popular on "The O.C.," I hear, though I never saw that show, and he gets festering Southern male disappointment dead right. The cast also features Scott Wilson as the father of the two brothers. Scott Wilson played the more talkative of the two Clutter family killers in the 1967 "In Cold Blood," and dozens of other parts since then.

This is the kind of film Angus MacLachlan's fellow regionalists should be supporting, instead of those cannibal-hillbillies-feast-on-invading-teenager epics. Or movies in which cars blow up at regular 12-minute intervals.

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