The tale of a loner who befriends a fellow high school student with leukemia has become the breakout hit of theSundance Film Festival.
Fox Searchlight bought Me and Earl and the Dying Girl after its well-received premiere Sunday for a reported $12 million, a record price for a Sundance movie.
The film stars Thomas Mann as Greg Gaines - the "me" in the title, and British actress Olivia Cooke is the "dying girl," while newcomer Rj Cyler is "Earl" - Gaines' best friend. The audience at Sundance's Eccles theatre gave the film a five-minute standing ovation as credits rolled.
"It was really emotional. We had seen the movie before but obviously it's a really different experience seeing it with a huge group of people who have no idea what they're about to see. And then the credits start rolling and everyone stands up and starts clapping. I mean, you start bawling.
Fox Searchlight bought Me and Earl and the Dying Girl after its well-received premiere Sunday for a reported $12 million, a record price for a Sundance movie.
The film stars Thomas Mann as Greg Gaines - the "me" in the title, and British actress Olivia Cooke is the "dying girl," while newcomer Rj Cyler is "Earl" - Gaines' best friend. The audience at Sundance's Eccles theatre gave the film a five-minute standing ovation as credits rolled.
"It was really emotional. We had seen the movie before but obviously it's a really different experience seeing it with a huge group of people who have no idea what they're about to see. And then the credits start rolling and everyone stands up and starts clapping. I mean, you start bawling.
- 1/28/2015
- by Cineplex.com and contributors
- Cineplex
Me & Earl & the Dying Girl
Written by Jesse Andrews
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
USA, 2015
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is a film that has perhaps garnered the most hype this year at Sundance, and you should believe every word of it. By the end of the screening, there was hardly a dry eye in the entire theater. Following a teenage outsider, Greg (Thomas Mann), who makes cheap and funny remakes of classic films with his friend Earl (Rj Cyler), as he befriends a classmate, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just developed leukemia. With a logline like that, it’s hard to not understand where all the tears are coming from. It sometimes feels cheap for filmmakers to use cancer as a way to garner emotion from the audience, but trust that when the tears do come, every single one has been earned.
Thomas Mann is often cast...
Written by Jesse Andrews
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
USA, 2015
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me & Earl & the Dying Girl is a film that has perhaps garnered the most hype this year at Sundance, and you should believe every word of it. By the end of the screening, there was hardly a dry eye in the entire theater. Following a teenage outsider, Greg (Thomas Mann), who makes cheap and funny remakes of classic films with his friend Earl (Rj Cyler), as he befriends a classmate, Rachel (Olivia Cooke), who has just developed leukemia. With a logline like that, it’s hard to not understand where all the tears are coming from. It sometimes feels cheap for filmmakers to use cancer as a way to garner emotion from the audience, but trust that when the tears do come, every single one has been earned.
Thomas Mann is often cast...
- 1/27/2015
- by Dylan Griffin
- SoundOnSight
Park City — A great film is often one that it transcends the cliches of its genre. The 2015 Sundance Film Festival already debuted one movie that overcame the tropes of the coming-of-age picture, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl," Saturday. And on Sunday, it brought another genre-breaker to the zeitgeist with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's powerhouse "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl." Let me start off by saying that the film's main character, Greg (Thomas Mann), would want everyone to know that the dying girl isn't going to die. She's gonna be Ok and what you'll eventually see in theaters is really just the story of their friendship. The dying girl is named Rachel, by the way, and she's wonderfully played by Olivia Cooke ("Bates Motel"). But back to Greg. Greg has spent most of high school trying to be casual friends with everyone while remaining as invisible as possible at the same time.
- 1/26/2015
- by Gregory Ellwood
- Hitfix
Zweig peeled back the veneer of Austro-Hungarian culture to expose sexual repression and the nature of love – no wonder he inspired Anderson's latest film
Why read Stefan Zweig? It is wonderful that Wes Anderson has cited him as an inspiration for his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but there have been quite a few people who would rather you didn't. Most famous of these were Hitler and Goebbels, for the very simple reason, at the same time both boring and terrifying, that Zweig was a Jew, on top of being the most translated author writing in German at the time. Being both was an intolerable affront, and if Hitler or his agents never laid hands on him, it was because they didn't have to: not only would burning all copies of Zweig's works have been a time-consuming exercise, he and his wife killed themselves, in exile in Brazil in...
Why read Stefan Zweig? It is wonderful that Wes Anderson has cited him as an inspiration for his latest film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but there have been quite a few people who would rather you didn't. Most famous of these were Hitler and Goebbels, for the very simple reason, at the same time both boring and terrifying, that Zweig was a Jew, on top of being the most translated author writing in German at the time. Being both was an intolerable affront, and if Hitler or his agents never laid hands on him, it was because they didn't have to: not only would burning all copies of Zweig's works have been a time-consuming exercise, he and his wife killed themselves, in exile in Brazil in...
- 2/25/2014
- by Nicholas Lezard
- The Guardian - Film News
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