Sparks of Hope – RUBY SPARKS
RUBY SPARKS
REVIEWED BY RESIDENT CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK
After so many duds, and so many opportunities to be cruel, it is sometimes necessary to be nice. And this note is nice, well, mostly. Ruby Sparks is worth the expenditure of a modest amount of time and money.
Twenty plus minutes of ads – count ‘em and realise that’s three times as much time as all the worthwhile bits in Total Recoil, Hot and Runny and The Botch put together . Two spurts of Andrew Gunsburg, against a Hollywood backlot, trying to drum up interest in the latest Madagascar and The Botch and Paranorman , a piece of animation. Previews for Twilight: Breaking Wind or somesuch, featuring more people with red eyes than an Adam Sandler/Vince Vaughan buddy movie, and for a truly woeful Glee-goes - to-Carlaj thing called Pitch Perfect and for Fun Size , another film somehow related to American youth and their amusing irresponsibility. Life of Pi looks interesting, though I would have thought the book close to unfilmable. There may have been more but by this time I was checking my mobile phone and hoping for a message from someone trying to interest me in getting money out of Nigeria.
Anyhow, Ruby Sparks is not a big movie by any account. Four recognisable faces – Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, Elliott Gould and Steve Coogan – going through the motions as, respectively, a ditzy hippy chick mother, her current partner*, a kindly shrink and a sleazy novelist. Also, the girl who played Maeby on Arrested Development , playing a lit-fan of limited moral fibre or vision.
The leads – Paul Dano and Zoe Karzan – twinkle with almost as much star power as the second burger preparer from the left in a recent McDonald’s commercial. They act about as well as Mitt Romney maintains consistency, which is to say that they appear to have learnt their lines and that they are determined to say them. The dog is cute, and pivotal, and performs as well as anyone else.
Anyhow, Dano plays Calvin, a lonely bespectacled boy-genius writer whose second novel is more blocked than a colon on a fibre-free diet. Kazan is the funky girlfriend he dreams up. The budget for the whole exercise was probably less than the muffin budget for Total Recoil but the film is about a hundred times smarter about using an interesting idea. Could have been made anywhere** and would have looked much the same.
The script plodded a bit at times and a lot at other times. I won’t spoil the ending, other than to grumble about Americans always going for the soft option.
* – a Hispanic “artist” who makes things using a chain saw
** – remove Banderas, add Bryan Brown. Remove Gould, add Jack Thompson. Remove Bening, add Jackie Weaver. Remove Coogan, add Sean Micallef. Remove leads, add recent NIDA grads. Make changes as necessary for UK, Canada, Uzbekistan etc.
Tags: annette benning , fp bluck , ruby sparks