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Plot: Workaholic TV producer Ally faces a major professional setback which sends her running to the comforts of her hometown. She spends a whirlwind evening reminiscing with her first love Sean and starts to question everything about the person she’s become. Things only get more confusing when she discovers Sean is getting married to Cassidy whose confidence and creative convictions remind Ally of who she used to be.

Review: Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, was a slick indie thriller that was a surprisingly adept first feature from the actor-turned-filmmaker. Franco delivered a solid horror movie with his wife, Alison Brie, in a lead role. I expected his sophomore effort to be similar, but Franco has instead turned his sights to romantic comedy. With Somebody I Used To Know, Franco and Brie reunite for a film that takes a mature look at a genre that often has been relegated to a rote formula.

Ally (Alison Brie) is an overworked TV producer whose life revolves around a reality television show about dessert. The gig is a far cry from her dream of making documentaries, but it pays the bills and gives her, a Los Angeles transplant from Washington state, a sense of purpose. When Ally’s show gets cancelled by the network, she returns to her small, picturesque hometown of Leavenworth to recalibrate. What she finds instead are reminders of her past and the life she could have had.

Somebody I Used to Know, written by Brie and her husband Dave Franco (who also directs here), is a sharply conceived and smart romantic comedy — the kind of film that might inspire hasty accusations of trying too hard to be different. It takes the narrative skeleton of the genre and enhances it with its own subversive elements. The writing — intelligent but not showy — has echoes...

Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling can’t help but feel out of place in her fundamentalist Christian community. The only person who seems to understand her is Owen (Lewis Pullman), her church’s youth pastor. He’s more than eager to get close to Jem (despite being a married man), making for a complicated relationship that will inevitably bear harsher consequences for Jem than her older male counterpart. Brian Lannin, the film’s cinematographer, discusses his collaboration with director Laurel Parmet (who also happens to be his fiancé), the Kentucky shoot’s unpredictable weather and the film’s most difficult scene to shoot. See all responses to our […]

The post “We Lost Quite a Bit of Time Waiting Out Lightning Storms”: Dp Brian Lannin on The Starling Girl first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling can’t help but feel out of place in her fundamentalist Christian community. The only person who seems to understand her is Owen (Lewis Pullman), her church’s youth pastor. He’s more than eager to get close to Jem (despite being a married man), making for a complicated relationship that will inevitably bear harsher consequences for Jem than her older male counterpart. Brian Lannin, the film’s cinematographer, discusses his collaboration with director Laurel Parmet (who also happens to be his fiancé), the Kentucky shoot’s unpredictable weather and the film’s most difficult scene to shoot. See all responses to our […]

The post “We Lost Quite a Bit of Time Waiting Out Lightning Storms”: Dp Brian Lannin on The Starling Girl first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl finds the first-time feature director treading well-worn terrain. Starring Eliza Scanlen and Lewis Pullman as Jem Starling and Owen Taylor, a 17-year-old and her youth pastor, respectively, the film looks at the very-Christian idea of guilt, blame, and sexual desire. Parmet, who also penned the script, crafts a young woman who wants to explore, without the best role models, the struggle to reconcile her actions with her God.

Opposite Jem is Owen, a youth pastor returning from a mission trip to Puerto Rico. He’s easygoing, a cigarette smoker, happy to let a lie slide or keep a secret. Pullman radiates a shady charisma in this role––a perfect showcase for the actor’s charms––as his character slowly begins a relationship with a high-schooler eleven years his junior. A married man, Owen seems tepid only for a few moments. He jumps at the chance to be with Jem,...

Within the first few minutes of her remarkable directorial debut, “The Starling Girl,” writer-director Laurel Parmet skillfully lays out the impossible paradox that is evangelical Christian purity culture. Flushed and happy after joyfully performing a lyrical worship dance in front of the congregation, 17-year-old Jem Starling has powdered sugar wiped from her mouth by her mother Heidi so that she can be presented to the pastor’s son for potential courtship, right before another women pulls Jem aside to scold her for the visibility of her bra underneath her white dress.

It’s a brilliant sequence that immediately demonstrates the prison panopticon of expectations in which young Jem is trapped — being pushed by her parents into what is essentially an arranged marriage while being shamed and scorned for her body’s visibility. Jem’s sexuality is not her own, and it might never be within this closed patriarchal Christian community.