Ryan Gosling apparently had a good time working on last year’s overlooked and under-valued indie drama”Lars And The Real Girl,” as he’s set to re-team with the film’s director Craig Gillespie. The duo will be reuniting for the “Dallas Buyers Club” – a true story of Ron Woodroof, a heterosexual, redneck electrician who contracted HIV around 1980. After being told to go home and die, he tested illegal drugs on himself to prolong his life six years and help thousands of people with AIDS. Woodroof parlayed the schema into a lucrative smuggling business that made those drugs available to AIDS patients, before he died in 1992.
Once originally intended for Marc Forster (“Stranger Than Fiction“) and Brad Pitt, the script was (re)written by Guillermo Arriaga, the longtime screenwriting collaborator of Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel”) (before they had a falling out and stopped taking each other’s phone calls), and this is his first script not being directed by the Mexican director (though as noted he rewrote someone else’s first draft).
‘Lars’ was met with a lot of mixed reviews, an early, particularly critical one from New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calling the film saccharine and cloying, took the wind of its buzzing sales (the film was met with a standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival a few weeks before her review) and set the tone for many of the reviews that came afterwards. Even our review was foolishly apologetic after Dargis convincingly shamed us all into thinking the film was “canned, teary hokum,” but in retrospect we still think the film was poignant and handled the almost-silly subject mature with a remarkably mature and respectful tone.
Another thing we loved about the film was composer David Torn’s lonely/sweet music; a score that was never too precious or tear-wringing, but just the perfect pitch of inquisitive melancholy. We’ve been meaning to post songs from the ‘Lars’ score for ages, so here’s our excuse (and of course, we only have one song onhand). Torn’s elegiac and sunstroked-touch will be featured later this summer in “The Wackness” (with a dreamy score right out of a Sofia Coppola movie) and again, hopefully later this year in the remarkable heavy metal dinosaur documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” (which sounds like moving and inspirational post-rock ala Sigur Rós or Mogwai with perhaps a more sentimental bent).
In related news, Gillespie is going to direct the pilot episode of “The United States of Tara,” the Diablo Cody-written cable show produced by Steven Spielberg that just got picked up by Showtime (Toni Collette and John Corbett are starring).