Guest writer Samir Mathur (follow him on "The Twitter" here) has checked in with some reviews, including a frank, honest look at the opening night film, Paper Man. I'll have some more of his writing in a bit.
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What is it with Jeff Daniels playing troubled writers? After The Squid and the Whale and The Answer Man, Daniels returns in Paper Man as Richard, a novelist who's missing his mojo. He's set up with a typewriter at a remote little house in Montauk by his wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, a successful surgeon who works in NYC.
Richard has trouble focusing on the task at hand, and is constantly arguing with his (imaginary) best friend, Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds). One day in town, Richard meets sadsack teenager Abbey (Emma Stone, in her most grown-up role to date), and hires her to come and babysit the child he doesn't have. For some reason, she isn't fazed by this, and from there, the two develop an unlikely friendship.
I didn't much like Paper Man. The scenes with Captain Excellent are played for laughs, but don't really hit, and they still very heavily contrast with the rest of the film, which is very dark and sad. Richard's marriage is on the ropes, he can't get beyond the first sentence of his book, the furniture in the house is all ugly, and he doesn't quite understand his new relationship with Abbey.
He has trouble relating with anyone, and that makes him increasingly difficult to be around. I know we're supposed to root for him, but I have real difficulty getting behind a lead character who's a jerk to everyone, especially when their primary motivation is merely "he's just lonely".
His wife's weekly visits see her getting more and more freaked out by his erratic behavior, such as replacing the couch with one made entirely of unsold copies of his first book. The tone tries to stay balanced, with Reynolds' character showing up periodically to lighten the mood, but this just doesn't sit well next to the childhood tragedies that emerge, as well as some other very heavy, very serious imagery later in the film. Plus there's one of those always-excruciating scenes where an old, uncool dude tries to impress high-schoolers by throwing a party, and you can probably guess how that turns out.
The performances are all fine - Stone, in particular, is very solid - but for me, the disparity of tone was hard to get past. Plus, we never really found out what Abbey and Richard see in one another - it can't just be that they're both kinda lonely, can it? Plus the soundtrack was all acoustic guitar-based stuff, which really grated after a while. This was a disappointing opening night selection.