Picks from Chip: Ruby Sparks

Films: Ruby Sparks
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

This is the ninth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Chip Lary.

Chip and I had different tastes in movies, as is evidenced by the fact that we sometimes didn’t like a movie that the other person selected. This year has had a few close calls for me on Chip’s films, but nothing that slid below the “3 stars = like” criterion I use on Letterboxd. Well, there’s a first time for everything, and Ruby Sparks is that first time. I went into this expecting something very different than I got, because what I got was a clunky, mean-spirited version of the rather charming Stranger than Fiction.

Calvin Weir-Fields (Paul Dano) was a writing phenom who took the book world by storm at the tender age of 19. Since that time, and after great acclaim and endless groupies, Calvin’s output has been a few short stories and a long chunk of writer’s block. Calvin also struggles on the personal front. His introverted nature keeps him from developing new relationships and his relationships with women tend to be more about sex with fans, who see him as an idealized version of himself instead of as the person he really is.

Family Values

Film: Little Miss Sunshine
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass DVD player.

Comedy is a subjective thing. I realized this yet again recently when I recommended the film My Favorite Year, a personal favorite of mine, to my podcasting partner, Nick Jobe. Nick was lukewarm on the film, liking Peter O’Toole’s performance and not much else. Me? I think that film is riotously funny. But comedy is subjective and what I find funny, others don’t and vice versa. Little Miss Sunshine is a film that only those with a hint of a black soul will really enjoy for the comedy it contains. It’s an homage to the idea that all comedy comes from the pain of others, or pain in general. This film is a wrist-slitter of a comedy, at the same time bleak and riotous, depressing and screamingly ridiculous.

We spend a few days on a road trip with the Hoover family. Mom Sheryl (Toni Collette) is overworked and overstressed, in no small part because husband Richard (Greg Kinnear) is currently jobless. He’s not out of work—he’s just jobless. He’s attempting to pitch his self-fulfillment program called “The Nine Steps,” but is unable to get anywhere with it. Older child Dwayne (Paul Dano) is a devotee of Nietzsche and has taken a vow of silence until he fulfills his dream of becoming a test pilot for the military. Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin) is living with the family because his constant desire for sex and new hobby of heroin snorting got him kicked out of his retirement home. And then there’s Olive (Abigail Breslin), who is obsessed with child pageants.