Not Forgotten

2009

As I started to write these comments, having watched the movie scant hours ago, I could not remember the title. Not Forgotten was indeed forgotten after all.  If I wanted to extend the wordplay a bit, I might say that it is eminently forgettable. But let's not go there.

It is, more or less, a by-the-numbers thriller that takes place along the border between the USA and Mexico, with the action centered around Del Rio, Texas. A young girl is kidnapped in broad daylight. Her father, a local sheriff, two FBI guys and some Mexican police get involved in the search. It turns out that many of the central characters are hiding dark secrets.

This slow, low-key film has several flaws, the worst of which is a totally stereotyped look at the two cultures which sit side-by-side across the Rio Grande river, the Del Rio portion of which is pictured here as more of a creek than a river. On the American side there are stately homes on tree-lined streets, dignified parks with old-fashioned cart vendors manned by avuncular and good-hearted citizens, vintage mom-'n'-pop retail outlets, and kids playing soccer with quiet determination. A few hundred yards farther south, the streets are teeming with hookers, and any woman who is not a hooker is a stripper. Toothless men are holding cockfights in the streets, shouting angrily, drinking tequila until they can no longer stand, and firing guns in the air - all accompanied by non-stop guitar and accordion music.

Kinda makes you wonder why they want to be on our side of the border.

At any rate, the film does have some interesting elements:

• One of the FBI agents is played by Long Duc Dong!

• There is a forbidding tone created by an ongoing backdrop of "Santa Muerte," an actual Christian death cult which is disavowed by mainstream Christianity. Its rituals and symbols provide a frightening, ominous atmosphere.

• The film pulls off an interesting red herring with some trick casting. The missing girl's father talks about his deceased wife. Before the kidnapping, the girl looks at a picture of her late mom, and the image she holds is obviously the beautiful actress Claire Forlani, who has an unmistakable and unique look. Therefore, when the girl is kidnapped, we automatically think (1) the mother is not really dead since Ms. Forlani must play a character in this film; (2) the undead mother is probably responsible for the kidnapping.  When hour passes and the search has not yet turned up any key leads, we are mystified that we have not yet seen Forlani. Given this film's obsession with obscure death cults, we imagine that she is this film's version of Colonel Kurtz, a powerful, shadowy character pulling everyone's strings.

Wrong. That was all a ruse. Forlani does appear  - for about a minute. Her character is still alive, as we deduced, but it turns out that her ex-husband knew that all along. He was hiding it from everyone else. Essentially, that had little to do with the main plot. Years earlier, Forlani's character was messed up on drugs and involved with criminals, so the father simply abandoned her and took his daughter out of harm's way.

That combination of the script and the casting created a nice little bit of misdirection. What's even better, all of that misdirection did tie in with the main plot in an indirect way which I can't describe without spoiling what the kidnapping is really all about. Since Not Forgotten is actually an adequate thriller, I need to leave those matters for your own discovery.

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Box Office: I suspect that no film will ever break the box office records set by Zyzzyx Road, the domestic gross of which reached just thirty dollars, but had that film never existed, this one may have set some records. For example, on Monday, June 1st of this year, this film was in three theaters and grossed $27 - nine bucks per theater. I suppose that is only a single ticket in each venue. Given multiple screenings, it must have played to several empty theaters, with nobody to confirm its existence, like the proverbial tree falling in the deserted forest. As it turns out, 27 bucks was nowhere near its worst day. On Thursday, June 18th, its final day in theaters, it grossed six bucks. That was the third consecutive day in single figures! Details here. Amazingly, this film managed to hang out in at least one theater for 49 consecutive days! God only knows why.

Reviews: Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter gave it good reviews, and the Austin Chronicle gave it three stars. In fact, nobody panned it!

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Nudity:

There are numerous topless and bottomless hookers and strippers, and they come in all shapes, sizes and ages. I passed on capturing those anonymous (and often unattractive) body parts.

Paz Vega was topless, but the camera was behind her. You can, however, see almost her entire butt, thanks to some scanty panties. Somebody else had already done this, so I picked up his vid rather than duplicating his efforts. Here's the vid. Sample below.