Ruby Sparks
Crit
Wow! I was fully prepared to be unimpressed by this, but instead it's in competition with Moonrise Kingdom for my favorite of the year so far.It's the Pygmalion myth, of course, except with prose fiction instead of clay, but in terms of cinema it owes much less to the best-known adaptation of that theme than it does to Vertigo and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--which is to say that it's far darker than I anticipated, with as squirm-inducing a sequence as you'll ever see. That ethical issues are allowed to intrude on an ostensible romantic comedy about a creation coming to life is unsurprising; that Hollywood would allow a sweet-natured boy played by the angelically baby-faced Paul Dano to make such an ethical hash of things is as unnerving as it was for people who were surprised to see James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson turned into such a manipulative monster by Hitchcock.
The screenplay is by Zoe Kazan, who plays the title character-character and who proves herself to be not merely the cutest young woman on the screen today, though she is that. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who discovered Dano for Little Miss Sunshine, directed.
Trailers
- Won't Back Down--Parents stage a revolution to fix a failing school; looks ever so inspirational.
- The Master--Philip Seymour Hoffman as a spiritual guru, Joaquin Phoenix as a messed-up guy who seems in the market for same. Oh! Just noticed: directed by P. T. Anderson.
No comments:
Post a Comment