King of California

Last month I made a big mistake by buying like a dozen new DVDs. There was a huge sale on indie films at Best Buy and I picked up a bunch for three or four dollars a pop - the price of a rental, dammit. But while my wallet escaped the transgression nearly unscathed, it was my movie backlog that took a huge hit and doubled in size. Tonight, I began to right September's wrong by watching the first of many indie films sure to be seen in the near future: King of California. The story here is endearingly simple; Evan Rachel Wood plays a teenager living on her own and makings ends meet while Michael Douglas is her irresponsible and partially deranged father. Douglas has spent the past few years in a mental institution, so Wood is understandably excited but cautious to let him back into her life. Things go well at first but Wood quickly relearns not to trust the man who has failed at fatherhood so terribly in the past when he begins to rack up bills (eventually selling off her car and their house to make ends meet) in order to finance his latest wild goose chase: a quest for buried treasure from the original Spanish explorers. Exasperated and without any real reason not to do so, Wood joins him in his search. Now, if you've seen even just a handful of movies, you know at this point that this particular story will end in one of two ways. Either Douglas will actually find the treasure and be once and for all vindicated in his daughter's eyes, or he'll come up empty-handed but the search will reunite the pair and become some kind of far greater intangible treasure. And I mean, yeah, one of these two things is what happens. But things still unfolded just a little on the unexpected side; although one of those two outcomes is indeed the answer, the film left me saying, "I guess I didn't see that coming." Regardless of how much the movie manages to surprise you, I still think it was a good one. The cast was essentially just Wood, Douglas, and a handful of other actors found in just a few recurring scenes throughout the movie. I mean, this was by no means a knock-out must-see film, but it was endearing and entertaining all the same. To simplify this recap to the point where even Rotten Tomatoes fans could understand it, I'd call this movie "fresh."