Monday, September 3, 2012

Ruby Sparks (2012)

I expected to like this fantasy about a writer who falls in love with his character when she appears in the flesh. I did! So did Jack but Amy, not so much. Paul Dano (last in these pages in Being Flynn) co-stars with his real-life partner Zoe Kazan (most recently in Meek's Cutoff), who wrote the script, her first. With Chris Messina (covered in Julie & Julia, where he played Julie's husband, he is getting more and more roles these days) as Dano's brother, Elliott Gould (profiled in Contagion) as his shrink, Annette Bening (last in The Kids Are All Right) and Antonio Banderas (Haywire) as his free-spirited mother and stepfather, it moves along quite nicely and ends just when it should.

Directed by the married team Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and a bunch of music videos, the movie takes an honest look at relationships, even as its premise is unreal. You can watch this featurette about the two couples working together.

The wardrobe and production design are arty and so is the music is by Nick Urata, of the band DeVotchKa. You can listen to one whole track here, download another here, a third here, and listen to clips from the whole album on the amazon page. I thought I counted 22 songs in the credits when we saw this on the 15th, but only four by artists other than Urata are listed on the album.

For my regular readers, babetteflix rule #8 is broken and rule #14 is in play, both in the trailer. Here's the whole list.

You don't have to take my word for it--rottentomatoes' audiences disagree with Amy and give it 82%, while critics weigh in at 79%. This is well worth your time, big screen or small.

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