Ruby Sparks: Meine fabelhafte Freundin

Greetings again from the darkness. Well it took six years, but co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris finally deliver their follow-up to the smash hit Little Miss Sunshine. With a script from first time screenwriter Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan), we get an odd mash-up of would-be Woody Allen, Charlie Kaufman, Stranger Than Fiction, and a Twilight Zone episode.

The story begins almost as a whimsical fantasy. Paul Dano plays Calvin, a blocked writer 10 years after writing the next great American novel, while he was still a teenager. The necessary comparisons to JD Salinger are made, and we witness Calvin as a socially-inept type who was never comfortable with his early success, and now can't find a way to move on with life. Given a writing assignment by his shrink (Elliott Gould), Calvin discovers the true power of the written word.

After a dream of meeting a lovely girl in the park, Calvin's fingers tear through his manual typewriter and develop a story around his literal dream girl. And literal means literal. He runs into her downstairs. His creation has become his creation. Once he realizes they aren't going to lock him away for insanity, Calvin and Ruby begin a real relationship. Well as real as it can be with a girl who is not really real and whose actions can be changed simply by typing words on a page. If you think this sounds like a male fantasy, then you are in agreement with Calvin's brother (Chris Messina).

A trip to visit the brothers' mothers (Annette Bening) and her boyfriend (Antonio Banderas) adds some humorous scenes while also signaling the beginning of trouble for Ruby and Calvin. It turns out that bringing your invented dream girl into the real world doesn't always work so well. Who would have thought? There is much humor in the film including Steve Coogan as Calvin's mentor. Deborah Ann Woll has a scene as Calvin's ex-girlfriend and it is probably the best written scene in the film. Really good insight into how two people's view of the same relationship can vary greatly.

The story can be looked at from different perspectives. It certainly serves as insight into how a writer's mind can work. Many writers need a muse ... but few get to create their own! More importantly, it makes a statement on how we (well, not me) often try to control and manipulate the other person in our relationships. This is a sterling reminder to be careful what you ask for ... you just might get it. www.moviereviewsfromthedark.wordpress.com

In an age of cheesy, predictable, and sometimes simply stupid romantic comedies, let's thank the romcom gods for the work of brilliance known as Ruby Sparks. The films stars Paul Dano as a man with a a huge amount of genius when it comes to writing fiction and an equally large amount of ineptness when it comes to relationships. He finds strong inspiration in a dream about a girl and quickly writes many pages about her, only to find the living, breathing, figment of his imagination in his kitchen. Although she seems the perfect girl in every way (he made her that way, after al), having a girlfriend that he can totally control with a few strokes of a keyboard comes with a price. As a writer myself, I have found a few books and movies in which I look at the basic idea of the plot and wonder, how did the writer come up with that? This was one of those plots. On top of it, brilliant quirkiness of both Dano and Kazan plays up the wonders of this film. To some this review up in two words: see it.

I liked the movie a lot. I felt very moved and intrigued both by the premise and the complications to move the story along.

Big but: The lead character, Calvin, is not believable as a "genius novelist" nor even as a pretty good one. Why? He has no idea how to make Ruby, whom he completely controls, subtle and complex the way any good novelist would his characters.

He paints her happy and sad, joyful and childishly clinging with such broad brush strokes he is an incompetent "inventor" of a character/person, let alone his dream girl. If you or I created an automaton, WE might swing back and forth to the extremes while trying to adjust his/her behavior. Calvin should be an expert not a tyro at subtle shades of behavior. Granted, if he got her just right, we would have no crisis to force the story to a resolution.

And the resolution is Hollywood sugar. In Europe or Israel, the hero would be left with the sad results of his failure. (He stares out to sea on a deserted beach to ponder what happened and his bleak future?) Here, the filmmakers insist we leave the theater feeling good about Calvin and Ruby.

The unique Zoe Kazan wrote and stars in this quirky, fascinating, and original film about a writer with writer's block (Paul Dano, Kazan's real-life main squeeze) who invents the girl of his dreams, writes about her, and watches her become real.

While this film has been billed by reviewers and marketed by publicists as a "romantic comedy," in many ways it's not. It's both more and less. Less predictable, certainly, as the endings of modern romantic comedies are notoriously pat. More ... what? Strange? Edgy? Depressing even (at times)? Maybe all of the above. But ultimately upbeat.

The gifted Paul Dano has created a character - a young woman - who is exactly who he wants, or at least so he thinks. It's not until he meets his ex at a party 2/3 of the way through the movie that the audience really begins to understand what's going on. And it's not just hearts and flowers. But no spoilers here.

That Kazan pulled off both this original idea AND the ability to end it in a way that made sense yet left unanswered questions that should be unanswered is testimony to her screen-writing talents. Her roots here are strong: both of her screen writing parents and her famed grandfather Elia. But Zoe is also extremely appealing as the film's title character, showing a range of acting skills that could make her a star.

And for fun, we get Bening, Banderas, and Gould, all enlivening the proceedings.

Original movies are hard to find, and when you find them, often hard to watch. This film is both original and very watchable.

The storyline is original and very well written. I thought it was great. It's not about superheroes or an action movie or a thriller or a blockbuster. So who would enjoy it? Geeks, smart people, romantics, sci- fi lovers ... Regarding the latter, I'm sure the writer was not thinking in terms of sci fi, but it meets my #1 criterion for great sci fi, namely, it changes one aspect of ordinary reality, preferably the here and now and not the distant future, and through that change gives insight into that ordinary reality that we live in. Despite its' being about impossible fiction, it seemed more real than most movies. A lot of the best writing has a writer as the main character - so maybe it's true that one should write about what one knows best. Of course, it's about romance and objectification as well and that's well done as well.