you think you haven't seen things weirder than this?
Fair warning--this is reposted from a response to another thread.
The other thing I really love about this film is that it's in that class of stories that seem impossibly odd until you realize that things like this actually do happen in the real world, more frequently than most people think. Check the "news of the weird" on the Internet any day and you can imagine the way the news account would read:
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Santa Clarita (AP) -- A local 16-year-old girl was questioned and then released after her mentally disabled father forced her to help him break into a local Costco and then tied her to a vending machine.
Charles McCann, 57, who had been released only last month from ABC Treatment Center, is presumed to have drowned after jackhammering into an underground waterway for reasons not yet clear to police.
An accomplice was arrested after a low-speed chase. Police first arrested Pepper Johnson, 61, for loitering and suspicious behavior, then heard a voice coming from a walkie-talkie hidden inside the man's jacket. Johnson also faces a possession charge from two marijuana cigarettes found in his pocket.
The girl, whose name has not been released in accordance with state policy regarding juveniles, was uninjured. She will not face charges.
Searchers plan to call off the search for McCann by Thursday, if his body is not found by then.
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I guarantee you I'll find you five stories a day weirder than that one.
If you've ever seen films like The Coca-Cola Kid (Aussie films used to do this better than almost anybody else did), you've seen this kind of thing before: In summary, the situation seems almost impossible, but when you go through the story one step at a time it seems much more plausible. It just isn't all that hard to imagine a guy who filled his inside-the-walls time with figuring out where a big stack of gold might be located, and then going straight to it as soon as he's released, using whatever means he has at his disposal, with his teenage daughter both skeptical and semi-involved.
(In CCK, it was an American Coca-Cola employee, a specialist in conquering marketing territory for Coke, who finds himself out in a valley in the bush, trying to figure out how to put the clamps on the local small-factory soft-drink manufacturer who happens to be the reason that in that one very small area, Coke is not #1. And friends, Coke cannot be anything but #1. It just isn't so implausible to think that this wouldn't annoy the living sh$% out of them, like a pebble in the shoe--they dominate the entire continent except for this one spot, and they MUST WIN THAT ONE SPOT. If you haven't seen it, give it a try and just accept some of the mid-'80s datedness. It's a lot of fun, and AFAIC it was Eric Roberts' funniest role ever as the obsessed ex-military man who is going to win that territory for his employer--while an employee at the hotel where he's staying thinks he has Roberts ID'd as a CIA agent, digs up a briefcase full of cash for an arms deal he swears must be in the works, etc.)
Of course, one thing I did NOT see in the film was an explanation of how Miranda could have been taken into custody, questioned, and released without anybody figuring out her true age and finding out that no agency or foster family actually was taking care of her or was responsible for her. Maybe somebody else has this figured out, but it looks to me like a big glaring flaw. Doesn't matter a lot. I loved it.