Indican Pictures will
bring DVD and Blu-ray SKUs of iconic film legend Ernest Borgnine’s last screen
role, retired radio personality Rex Page, to market on Apr. 30 with the release
of writer/director Elia Petridis’ The Man Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez.
The ARR is 144 days and
the box office take from the film’s limited theatrical showcase break this past
December was $6,249. That’s why we have
DVD and Blu-ray … so that the other 300 million plus people in the country who
weren’t in the right place — and at the right time — can enjoy this delightful
film.
Ernest Borgnine was
perfectly cast as the “old timer” Rex Page, a man with a fondness for Westerns
(just imagine him as Dutch Engstrom, only fifty years older and in a care
facility), who at 94 was as sharp and on his game as any thespian half his age. He can be cranky, funny (what a great wit) …
and rattlesnake mean when pushed too far!
What filmmaker Elia
Petridis (How Henri Came to Stay) has concocted here is part send-up and
part homage to the heyday of Spaghetti
Westerns, with the nursing home that Rex finds himself in substituting nicely
for any frontier town of the 1880s.
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| Rex (Ernest Borgnine) takes on Walker (Barry Corbin) |
The place is run with an
iron fist by a man named Walker (Barry Corbin), who like any Western villain
has a henchman (played by Tony Plana, perhaps best known as Ignacio from the Ugly
Betty television series) to do his bidding — who attempts to takes
liberties with the beautiful Solena (Carla Ortiz) — and terrorize the
other citizens too meek to stand up to him (actually, the other patients and
staff members of the facility).
When the mainly Latino
staff discovers that Rex once met Vicente Fernandez (famed Mexican actor, king
of the Ranchera style of music and known as the “Sinatra of Mexico”), he
becomes their hero. He becomes someone
they can rally behind, especially when Fernandez will be performing in concert
at a local venue and the entire plans to attend ... but Walker has other plans
for them.
The stage is now set, metaphorically-speaking,
for the big showdown. The
Man Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez is great fun and a nice
sign-off for the legend … who left us on July 8 of 2012.
To download this week's
complete edition of the DVD and Blu-ray Release Report: DVD & Blu-ray Release Report
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