TIFF: Buried

Ryan Reynolds is hot. And tall. And charming. And funny.

Okay, glad I got that out of the way.

Tuesday I was back to the real world at work so I only had one movie on the schedule in the evening. The movie was Buried, directed by Rodrigo Cortes and starring Reynolds as Paul Conroy, a American truck driver working in Iraq who awakens to find himself in a box, assumingly buried underground, with only a lighter and a cellphone. And that's pretty much the entire story.


Cortes introduced the film and thanked us all for coming, pretty much asking us 'you know this movie is just about a guy in a box right??'. In his comments upfront Reynolds said he hoped we enjoyed watching the movie as much as he hated making it. And I'm pretty sure he was only half joking. Filming this must have been really challenging both physically and mentally. The movie premiered at Sundance in January and has been fairly well received, and it's definitely given Reynolds a bit of indie cred. It's basically a one man show, with some voice work of actors on the other end of the phone, and he's very good in it. I found it a bit tough to watch and could just feel my shoulders tensing up throughout the 95 minute film.

The Q&A afterwards was good and showed off Reynolds at his most charming, pointing out his mom in the audience, suggesting an apt name for the sequel (there isn't one) and bouncing back and forth with Cortes. There were quite a few interesting questions and discussions about the technical nature of the filming (they had to use seven different boxes depending on the shot, Reynolds used a real lighter and cell phone to do much of the lighting) and one embarrassing one about the proposal which the moderator wisely cut off with 'how 'bout a real question' before Reynolds had to respond.

Good movie. Worth seeing. And I'll leave you with one more shot of Ryan for the day.