The Peanut Butter Falcon

[silverscreenselect]

This movie is currently making the rounds in somewhat limited release, but if you have a chance to see it, you should. It's a wonderful, uplifting film with some great performances. It's about a young man (20ish) with Down's Syndrome who is stuck in a nursing home in North Carolina because there's no other place for him since his parents abandoned him. He wants to go to a wrestling school that's a couple of hundred miles away to become a pro wrestler, so he escapes from the home and eventually hooks up with Shia LaBeouf, who's a down-on-his-luck, dead broke fisherman. The journey the two take is like a modern day Tom Sawyer (they even make their own raft to go part of the way). Although set in North Carolina on the Outer Banks, it was filmed here in coastal Georgia. What really makes the movie work is that the actor playing the runaway actually has Down's Syndrome but delivers a very realistic and emotional performance. Mrs. SSS and I loved the movie, and my tweet about it got more likes and retweets than anything I've posted in the last year or more.

[kroxquo]

Interesting that although it's set on the Outer Banks, it was filmed in Georgia. A few years ago the legislature here in NC repealed all incentives for film companies and the market has dried up with Georgia picking up the slack and anyone involved in the film industry leaving he state. Wilmington used to bill itself as Hollywood East. Not anymore.