Ted Movie Review

It was inevitable that SOMEONE would make a movie about the Unabomber and his troubled relationship with his family and the world. What was less inevitable was that a flick with a rock-bottom budget like Ted would attract the likes of Edie McClurg, 47, as Ted's mother, Jeff Corey, 84, as his professor, and Andy Dick as a sheriff. Ted looks like it was shot on short ends of 16mm film stock and then tossed into a vat of yellow dye to disguise its humble origins. Director Gary Ellenberg, star Daniel Passer, and producer A. J. Peralta all worked on the script, which looks, feels, and sounds like it was meant to be funny. This Ted (no last names here) is idolized by his brother and actually goes out on dates with girls in his pre-scraggly days. He is peculiar, but appears to be making somewhat of an effort to find a niche within society. The real Ted remains a mystery, especially when we compare the photograph of him as a young man at the Berkeley campus of the University of California and the press pictures taken on the day of his arrest. What happened? Don't look for answers here! Played at San Francisco's Indie Fest in 1999.

1998 85m/C Daniel Passer, Edie McClurg, Paul Provenza, Jeff Corey, Richard Fancy, Megan Cavanaugh, Kaitlin Hopkins, Andy Dick; D: Gary Ellenberg; W: Gary Ellenberg, A. J. Peralta, Daniel Passer; C: John Wolfenden; M: Evan Eder.