LAFF ‘09 Opening Night: Paper Man

Click for the full poster

Paper Man, the opening night film for the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival last night, was the last to be announced and compared to the other high-profile gala presentations, it was sort of greeted with a collective yawn. That’s too bad because I think it just might have been a perfect choice to kick off a festival whose roots lie in independent cinema. It makes a statement about the kind of festival LAFF wants to be. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Public Enemies and Ponyo can sell pricey festival passes, but let’s not forget the organization putting on the festival is called Film Independent.

Paper Man has some stars in Jeff Daniels, Ryan Reynolds, Emma Stone and Lisa Kudrow, but it’s an independently financed first-time feature that is still looking for a distributor. LAFF isn’t really known for its premieres or acquisitions, but it’s nice to see it giving a high-profile slot to a film like this.

Of course, this opinion would carry a lot more weight if I’d actually been there last night to see the, but I didn’t RSVP to any of the galas in time to actually get in. I’m happy to wait for Public Enemies and Ponyo to hit theaters in a month or two, but in retrospect I should’ve made the effort to catch Paper Man.

Here’s how the LAFF catalogue describes the film:

Paper Man is the coming-of-middle-age story of Richard Dunn, a writer caught between the pressures of deadlines, the expectations of his wife, and the constant presence of the superhero who’s lived inside his head since 2nd Grade.  And then he meets a girl—a Long Island teenager whose friendship shows him that no matter how much it hurts, it’s never too late to grow up.

I’d hoped that reviews would be turning up on the Internet today, but as of this writing I haven’t seen any in the usual sources. Here’s a positive one from Cinema Verdict though.

For me, the festival begins in earnest tonight with a couple of the Narrative Competition entries I mentioned in the LAFF rundown: Turistas and Passenger Side.

Other options include the  “two straight friends make a gay porn” Sundance hit Humpday, Davis Guggenheim’s ode to the electric guitar starring Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White It Might Get Loud, and the comedy Weather Girl which was just recently picked up for distribution and will begin screening July 10th in Los Angeles.

[UDPATE: Here's Andrew Baker's review in Variety. Not so positive. He says it's "a film that wants to be a wry, intimate character study, forced into an unhappy marriage with a big, gimmicky hook" and that "it fails to connect."]

Filed under: Film Festivals
Tags: Emma Stone, Jeff Daniels, Kieran Mulroney, Lisa Kudrow, Michele Mulroney, Paper Man, Ryan Reynolds