Well, now I feel like I’m selling you short, but if I was to draw a chart, and one axis was tact vs transgression, and the other was conventional narrative structure vs abstraction, and label corners based on probability to appeal purely on those factors, you’d be on completely opposite sides.
And on that chart, Tetsuo is squarely in the Kelly Wand corner.
Excellent! It is indeed the first one, not the animated short. A winnar is fire!
The forty:
sixty-one (get ready to drink, they’re about to say the name of the movie!):
The eighty-whatever:
This is what certain people would term a “Sundancey movie” I think, but I kind of like it, mainly because the cast is so good and it’s so endearing to see Ryan Reynolds poke fun at himself a bit.
Also, I watched a terrible movie the other night that made me think even more fondly of this movie.
I never saw Paperman but I did read the script 13 years ago!
So that’s not Peter Stormare as Captain Excellent?
Here’s a quote from my coverage of the script back in those heady days when John Kerry could still become president:
The centerpiece is the relationship between Richard and Abby – it’s a familiar dynamic, an unlikely friendship between a young woman/girl and a middle aged man, something we’ve seen in films as varied as MY FIRST MISTER and LOST IN TRANSLATION. But it’s hard to care about the relationship this time around – perhaps because neither character is particularly appealing. Richard is whiny and annoying, while Abby is mopey and depressive. This would be all right if they brought out something interesting in one another – if they generated some kind of dramatic sparks. But there’s no specificity to their relationship. They seem to like each other because they can sense that the movie wants them to. Richard asks Abby to “babysit” for no particular reason; she agrees for no particular reason; and gradually they become friends – for no particular reason. We don’t get a sense of specific, well-drawn characters interacting and growing. We just get occasional moments of quirky comedy, and then some sentimental platitudes as the script approaches its climax.