miércoles, 21 de agosto de 2013

Wednesday afternoon movie!


Ruby Sparks


Me ha encantado, no voy a escribir de qué trata porque para eso la podéis ver pero sí que la quiero utilizar para mis clases en la academia, este año crearé mensualmente una actividad llamada 9 meses 9 movies. Expondré una "movie" al mes y el grupo de adultos tendrá que verla, se supone que en inglés aunque luego más de uno hará trampas y la verá en castellano. La cuestión es que cuando anuncie la "movie" y en este caso la primera será esta (ya iré anunciando las demás por aquí también) leeré o les mostraré para que lo trabajen, varias críticas de rotten tomatoes, página en inglés donde se pueden encontrar críticas muy interesantes sobre películas. Aquí van algunas sobre Ruby Sparks...

Anyone who thinks American adorkability is the exclusive domain of Zooey Deschanel has yet to discover Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano. With their mutual preference for the unusual and offbeat, this real-life pair is so indie-perfect, they could have been created in a Sundance screenwriting lab.
And why not? Every writer who puts pen to paper has the opportunity to imagine his or her own ideal. In fact, that’s exactly what Kazan did as author of “Ruby Sparks,” the endearing second film from “Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
It’s also what Dano does as Calvin, a 29-year-old novelist burdened by early success. Hobbled with insecurity, Calvin spends his days and nights alone — except for the eccentric beauty (Kazan) who visits him in his dreams.
He begins to write about this vision, whom he calls Ruby and imagines as his perfect woman. And by some inexplicable miracle, his words become reality. She’s just there, one day, in his kitchen: a great cook, up for anything, and madly in love with him.
Calvin can’t believe his luck, and does his best to respect the gift he’s received. But when Ruby expresses anger, or frustration, or hurt — i.e., whenever she’s human — he’s tempted to adjust her. He acts appalled when his brother (Chris Messina) suggests rewriting Ruby with a bigger bra size. But even Calvin’s not sure whether he wants a flesh-and-blood girlfriend or a one-dimensional fantasy.
Kazan has fun tweaking all the screenwriters to come before her, who have created their own female fantasies. In fact, her quirky character is a classic example of the cliched “manic pixie dream girl” so often found in independent film. But the regrettable truth is that she’s rarely more. Indeed, it often feels as if the filmmakers expect us to be equally seduced by Ruby’s wide-eyed winsomeness.
That’s a shame, as we can sense the deeper film beneath the surface. Because Ruby remains conceptual, this ambitious project lacks the dimension of the similarly meta-minded Charlie Kaufman projects that apparently inspired it.
Still, sometimes it’s worth surrendering to cinematic enchantments, and “Ruby Sparks” T a pretty good case for its own magic. As Calvin urges his skeptical therapist (Elliott Gould), “Take the leap.”  By Elizabeth Weitzman


Movie stars and pop stars tend to be spring chickens, but if you think back on every drama or comedy you've ever seen in which the main character is a novelist, the vast majority of those characters have a fair amount of mileage on their tires. They're almost always worldly middle-aged professor types, the more jaded and dissolute the better. So it's a slight shock, in Ruby Sparks, to realize that Paul Dano, the tall, thin, charismatically droopy 28-year-old actor fromLittle Miss Sunshine (he was the sulky teenager who'd decided to stop talking) and There Will Be Blood (the pastor who has Daniel Plainview's number), is playing not just a novelist but a novelist whose most revered work is 10 years behind him.
A plausibility stretch? Not really, since Dano's Calvin Weir-Fields, who got famous for his whimsical first book, is very much a new — and authentic — archetype: an aging boy prodigy of the Jonathan Safran Foer/Joshua Ferris school. Dano, who still looks young enough to play a college student, is utterly convincing as a precociously delicate wordsmith who lives in a white-walled Los Angeles duplex and, for all his acclaim in the literary world, has never quite grown up.
That's a good thing, too, since Ruby Sparks is a romantic comedy that takes off from a premise so fanciful it needs every bit of the freshness that Dano brings it. A recessive celebrity blocked by success, still reeling from the Love Relationship That Got Away, Calvin is on a downward spiral until he lands a new girlfriend: Ruby Sparks, a 26-year-old aspiring painter who is sexy, fascinating, and emotionally generous and available. In other words, perfect in every way. Ruby is played by newcomer Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the film's screenplay, and Kazan, with her doe eyes, charmingly skewed smile, and brainy flirtatious manner, has the instant offbeat allure of Scarlett Johansson crossed with Victoria Jackson. Calvin and Ruby begin to see each other, and it all looks yummy. Only there's an odd reason she's so perfect: She's a character that he has written — literally — right on the page, while seated at his vintage Olympia manual typewriter. He made her up out of thin air (as an exercise devised by his shrink), and she's now come to life. Anything he writes, she'll do. But that's a problem.
Calvin's brother, Harry (Chris Messina), who learns Calvin's secret, keeps telling him to write Ruby with bigger breasts, and if Ruby Sparks had gone off in that direction, it might have been a bawdy rom-com slapstick bash. But the directorial duo of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, making their first film sinceLittle Miss Sunshine, do something surprising: They stage the movie in such an understated, moonstruck way that they don't so much milk the laughs (though there are a sweet handful of them) as get you to believe in what you're seeing. Ruby Sparks flirts with preciousness and has less fun with its premise than it could have, but that's because it's actually a gently touching metaphorical drama about the real essence of love: not just falling for someone because you have "so much in common," but learning to adore the differences.  By Owen Gleiberman 
______________________________________________________________________________________
Aunque en la banda sonora no aparezca, cuelgo este video de Kaiser Chiefs y su canción Ruby, un pepino!


No hay comentarios:

Publicar un comentario