As we adjust to practicing social distancing for the foreseeable future, the Woodstock Film Festival is continuing its “Virtual Films & Conversations” program, highlighting films by festival alumni and inviting audience members to join the conversation with the filmmakers online. Our third installment will be Craig Gillespie’s LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, the 2007 oddball romantic comedy starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner, and Patricia Clarkson. The film was produced by longtime friend of the Woodstock Film Festival Bill Horberg and composed by David Torn.
| The film is currently available to rent and digitally stream on several platforms including: Tubi (free!), Vudu (free!), YouTube (free!), Google Play (from $2.99), Amazon Prime (from $2.99), and iTunes (from $3.99).After you’ve finished watching, join us online on April 2nd at 7pm EST for an in-depth Q&A session with the film’s producer Bill Horberg and composer David Torn moderated by WFF’s Executive Director Meira Blaustein. Click the button below to register ahead of time or join us on Facebook live.We look forward to staying connected and seeing you online. Until we can see you in person, stay well and healthy! |
ABOUT THE FILM:
How do you make a film about a life-sized love doll, ordered through the Internet, into a life-affirming statement of hope? In “Lars and the Real Girl,” you do it with faith in human nature, and with a performance by Ryan Gosling that says things that cannot be said. And you surround him with actors who express the instinctive kindness we show to those we love.
Gosling, who has played neo-Nazis and district attorneys, now plays Lars Lindstrom, a painfully shy young man who can barely stand the touch of another human being. He functions in the world and has an office job, but in the evening, he sits alone in a cabin in the back yard of his family home. His mother died years ago, his depressive father more recently. Now the big house is occupied by his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and pregnant sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer). She makes it her business to invite him to dinner, to share their lives, but he begs off with one lame excuse after another, and sits alone in the dark.
-Roger Ebert
