Real Macaw

In 1850, pirates loot a temple in the Amazon jungle, plundering gold, jewels, a brightly colored parrot. After one pirate drunkenly sets their ship aflame, he washes ashore on Coral Island in the South Pacific, where he buries a casket of golden booty before collapsing. The bird witnesses all. At this point, The Real Macaw fast-forwards to contemporary Australia, where a teenage boy named Sam (Jamie Croft) spends more time with his Grandpa (Jason Robards, whose American accent is a bit out of place) than with his bickering family. Grandpa rehabilitates tame birds and releases them into the wild, but he has one special bird--the very parrot plucked from the Amazon, now substantially older.But it turns out that Grandpa is deeply in debt; when an accident puts him in the hospital, his son (Sam's father) decides to sell the old man's house to pay the bills. At this point, Sam discovers that Mac the parrot is no ordinary bird. Mac can talk--and he doesn't just repeat words, he can hold up his end of a conversation. To save Grandpa's house, Mac and Sam hatch a plan to fly to Coral Island and dig up buried treasure; but when a nasty archeologist gets wind of the plan, he secretly follows them. Worse still, Coral Island is now a tourist trap; can Mac still find the treasure when a luxury hotel is built where it was buried? The story of The Real Macaw holds few surprises, but the scenery is as colorful as the parrot's plumage. --Bret Fetzer