Add Tail Slate
to Your Site/RSS
| Blog: |
| Tail Slate |
Topics: |
| films, movies, television |
Terry Jernigan (right) and his dummy, Delbert in Forgotten Stars.
I know I have said this in the past, and I really was hoping to avoid going down the path of another mockumentary. But as the pile of DVDs I’ve been sent gets bigger I really feel like I gotta stick to an order. First come, first serve. And Forgotten Stars had been sitting on my desk for a few weeks now.
So, I popped it into the DVD player and gave it a look see. No, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t want another mockumentary. I can’t believe it, but I’m really getting worn out on those kinds of films.
About five minutes into Forgotten Stars, I was too busy chuckling to remember why I’d been fed up with mockumentaries.
Director Richard Keel and writer James Shearer have put together a clever concept here. It’s a well crafted comedy that follows the lives and careers of a ventriloquist and his dummy. Where it gets clever is how it treats the dummy as a real person, mixed with well created archival footage mixed with real stock shots and pictures.
As the story goes, Jerry Boyd (Terry Jernigan) was obsessed with puppets at an early age. When he was in his 20s, he got his first ventriloquist doll, but his abusive father burned it in the fireplace. When World War II broke out, Jerry enlisted, and that is where he met Delbert Schwartz, a Jewish ventriloquist doll and fellow soldier. The two developed a quick friendship. Their lives and careers have a lot of ups and downs over the next 30 years. Everything is told through narration, as well an historian, a biographer and people who knew them, like Jerry’s son.
Sometimes bizarre, sometimes hilarious, Forgotten Stars is clever and entertaining. Jernigan is terrific as Jerry, who naturally also provides the voice of Delbert. Newt Miller stands out wonderfully as Carl Gorbeck, Professor of Ventriloquial Sciences, who provides much of the backstory for Jerry and Delbert’s careers.
There are a few moments in the film that betray its concept. Although it’s a mockumentary, there are moments during the interviews where the humor would obviously not be in a real documentary. There’s also a scene with archival footage that breaks the film’s reality. These aren’t faults that hurt the film, but were elements that stuck out for me. One of the challenges to creating effective mockumentaries are staying true to your format, and Forgotten Stars fails to do that at times.
One of the nice things I found about the DVD I was sent is that it included some bonus material. In this case it was a collection of deleted scenes. Each of them were funny, although a few seemed unrelated to the film itself, going into areas of the character’s lives and careers not seen in the film itself.
Share on Facebook
- 
-