seemingly similar

I realized, after a predictable weekend of watching, the films are quite strikingly similar. They’re all about a person, who’s clearly the protagonist, and all of them are characters of a book. It gets weirder, because the first two is both an adaptation of an autobiographical book and two of the films involved conversations with a shrink. Here are my recent watch:

A Guide to Recognizing your Saints: I can’t remember the last time a film moved me to tears. Well, almost. This one moved me close to crying, actually. It’s quite a surprise though; the first half of the film would make it apparent. A Guide TRYS is based on Dito Montiel’s memoirs – a troubled adolescent who vowed to leave his hometown to find his future in California and his journey back to his familiar neighborhood of Astoria, Queens – a familiar locale in SoCal. Think thugs spitting the f word like it replaced every punctuation mark in the sentence. Think brawls like a common social scene like it is almost an aberration not to witness it in an everyday basis.

I haven’t actually read the book but I think as a piece of film it readily stands out. The story, the plot, the characters are familiar but the script doesn’t oversentimentalize on these things. It’s unpretentious and actually cool. Chazz Palminteri is outstanding as Dito’s father. The last time I remember him was in The Usual Suspects. Equally competent is Shia Le Beouf who plays the young Dito. Robert Downey Jr. plays Dito.

A Guide TRYS was a crowd favorite at last year’s Sundance. So if you want some tug-in-the-heart kind of thing and not actually having to think of shallow romantic comedies, I suggest you go see this one.

Running with Scissors: This is based on Augusten Burroughs’ memoirs (again I haven’t read it, hehe) – an account of his troubled childhood and what supposedly prompted him to venture into New York – and write the book. By troubled we mean, a psychotic mother (Annette Benning) who’s a frustrated writer/poet on the verge of a divorce from her alcoholic husband (Alec Baldwin). Mother sends his son to be adopted by her shrink because she feels incapacitated and she realizes she’s a lesbian. Under the auspices of the shrink who experiences epiphany by analyzing his morning shit (Brian Cox), Augusten meets another troubled family – two disparate daughters (Evan Rachel Wood and Gwyneth Paltrow), and her wife who enjoys eating dog food while repetitively watching Dracula and Frankenstein. Augusten is also in love with his schizophrenic boyfriend (Joseph Fiennes). Looks like, everyone is a potential psychiatric ward inmate.

With a seemingly perfect (sick) cast, it could have been a greater film but it doesn’t seem to take off. I feel that the characters are half-baked and everything seems to be muddled. There are some light and comical scenes reminiscent of American Beauty or something Cameron Crowe-ish but it doesn’t seem to fit into a cohesive whole. I like the soundtrack though and Annette Benning as always pulls her own thing off, but does she really have to play again the role of a dysfunctional mom on the verge of a breakdown?

Stranger than Fiction: This one I enjoyed. Will Ferell is Harold Crick who has spent life with an interminable precision you’d think OC was an understatement. He’d count brush strokes when he’s brushing his teeth, 32 times left and right and up and down and in circular motion. He counts his steps up to the moment he rides the morning bus up to the IRS office where he works as an agent. His calculated life halts when he starts to hear a female voice narrating his actions and thoughts. Apparently, the voice is real and it is from a best-selling author experiencing a writer’s block (Emma Thompson) who has killed every protagonist in her books. The film leads to their eventful encounter and its denouement lies on whether Harold will die or not in the book and so in real life.

Will Ferell is actually not annoying here. He has some serious moments. Wait, I think I haven’t seen a single Ferell movie yet. Hehe. But he is treading familiar territory here. Think Jim Carrey in his earlier less comedic roles. If you’re life is like numerical gibberish like Harold’s you direly need a break, so go see this one.