Read

September/October 2006 Living Now
The Movie Mystic: Expiration Date

by Stephen Simon

Comedy is perhaps the hardest kind of film to make. When the great comic W.C. Fields was about to die, he was rumored to have said, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

Satiric comedy raises that degree of difficulty to Olympian heights. Add in a sweet romantic story line. Blend with finesse and a genuine love of humanity and voila—Expiration Date magically appears.

Produced and directed with style, elegance, compassion, wit and grace by Seattle filmmaker Rick Stevenson, the film is an absolute delight from start to finish.

Expiration Date tells the wonderfully wacky story of Charlie Silvercloud III, whose father and grandfather unexpectedly and tragically "expired" on their 25th birthdays, both times at the hands (tires?) of runaway milk trucks. Charlie is fast approaching his own 25th year and, convinced that his family is cursed, believes that nothing will protect him from a similar fate.

Accordingly, he runs from even a glimpse of someone carrying a milk carton and shops diligently for an appropriate vessel for his soon-to-be-deceased body and for just the right burial plot. However, as fate would have it, Charlie keeps running into the same young woman who seems equally determined to outbid him for everything he sets his sights on. He can't even seem to get his life together for his death.

What's a poor, cursed fellow supposed to do? Just lie down in front of a dairy farm and wait for the inevitable? Rob a bank so he can at least retain the dignity of being able to plan for his own demise? After all, by the time the law gets him, the Silvercloud curse will have eliminated him anyway.

Or maybe in planning for his death, he finds someone who teaches him how wonderful life can really be.

To say more would deprive you of the sheer fun and warm discovery that the film reveals as Charlie careens toward that 25th birthday milestone.

Mixing comedy, satire and romance is an amazingly courageous journey for a filmmaker to embark upon. Rick Stevenson has an obvious love and respect for his characters and his compassion infuses every scene in the film. It's just not possible to encounter these off-the-wall characters and not be totally enchanted by both them and the increasingly wild and outrageous situations in which they find themselves.

Expiration Date is opening in cities around the country and I strongly recommend that you see it. You can get more details at www.expirationdatethemovie.com. Films like Expiration Date remind us how wonderful movies can be when they show us humanity functioning at our very best. I loved this film and I believe that you will too.

Stephen Simon produced such films as Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come, and recently produced and directed the film version of Conversations with God. He also co-founded www.spiritualcinemacircle.com.