38 Days

There are 38 days until Sundance and I still cannot believe I'm going to be going to one of the largest film festivals worldwide. It's an opportunity of a lifetime and I can't wait to start it. My friend and I started a countdown way back in September at 90 some days and the lower the number gets, the more excited we become.

We are able to request to see a few movies and I requested to see 5. From simply reading the synopsis of them, I had to just sit and think about the issues and pictures the film is going to try to paint. After watching between 12-15 powerful films, I know I am just going to need to sit, think, and process the subject of the film. It's going to be such an incredible experience.

Here's one film I want to see. I ranked it as my #5 movie.

#5 Blue Valentine (U.S. Drama)
On the far side of a once-passionate romance, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are married with a young daughter. Hoping to save their marriage, they steal away to a theme hotel. We then encounter them years earlier, where the met and fell in love-full of life and hope. Moving fluidly between those two time periods, Blue Valentine unfolds like a cinematic duet whose refrain asks, where did their love go? Framing the film as a mystery whose answer lies scattered in time (and in character), filmmaker Derek Cianfrance constructs an elegant set of dualities: past and present, youth and adulthood, vitality and entropy. The rigor of his process is visible throughout the film. Eliminating artificial devices, he has only the truth of the characters to work with. Because Gosling and Williams bring amazing intensity and emotional honesty to their roles, the experience of connecting to these two souls becomes truly moving.

This film has a lot of potential. In a society where most movies have happy endings, the chance Derek Cianfrance took to make a film that isn't all happy-go-lucky says a lot. It looks to be a realistic movie with real emotions. A lot of couples wanting to save their marriage probably try something similar and I'm really curious how the movie will play out. It seems to be like another 500 Days of Summer in which love is portrayed as it is in real life versus the Hollywood love story. I have high hopes for this film and I'm interested to see it.

Choice #4 coming soon...