Auto-Gratification: Running with Scissors: The Movie (Sneak Preview Report)

Last year, a friend of mine recommended to me a book by Augusten Burroughs, an author I had not heard of before. The book was called Running with Scissors (pictured below).

Prior to that point, I had associated the title Running with Scissors only with the Weird Al Yankovic album of the same name (a classic....New Mexico will never be the same). However, it was not long into the book before I was totally hooked into this bizarre childhood story. It was somewhat like the fascination that keeps your gaze fixed on a traffic accident, only funnier. In case you are not familiar with the book, it is the personal memoir of Burroughs' thoroughly-twisted childhood, in which he is abandoned by his alcoholic father, given up for adoption by his insane mother to her manipulative and equally-insane psychiatrist, and seduced into a years-long relationship with a schizophrenic man more than twice his age. Beyond that, it is the literary equivalent of Blue Man Group--you just need to read it rather than listen to someone try to explain it. After completing Scissors, I read another of Burroughs' works, Dry, also an excellent book and which I wrote about previously on this blog.

So, I have been excited for quite some time about the upcoming adaptation of Running with Scissors on the big screen (opening day this Friday, October 20). And my excitement grew as I read the superb cast list, including Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Joseph Fiennes, and Kristen Chenoweth. Consequently, when I was online last Thursday checking the theater I usually go to and saw that they were having a single showing of the movie that very night, 8 days before its scheduled release, I was very excited. I bought two tickets and went with a friend to see what was the reason for the sneak preview. It seemed too close to the opening to be marketing research, but I wasn't going to complain regardless.

As it turned out, the movie was being shown for the benefit of students at the campus of nearby Northwestern University, as an attempt by the studio to generate early word-of-mouth buzz for next week's release. And, as an added bonus, the very handsome 20-year-old star of the movie, Joseph Cross, was in attendance for a question and answer time after the movie.

Throughout the movie, I knew I had seen Cross somewhere before, but I could not place it until I came home and looked him up online and remembered he had played a friend of Clark Kent on an episode of Smallville (pictures after the jump below). Apparently, he is being noticed more and more, because he also appears in the upcoming Clint Eastwood-directed World War II movie Flags of our Fathers.

Well, I was very pleased with the movie, though it was not what I expected. Burroughs' writing style is so engaging and funny that it is easy to forget (while reading the book) the very sad undercurrent that runs through the unbelievable family life he experienced growing up. But, when put on the screen, those sad things had to be dealt with. So it was much more dramatic than I anticipated, though the comedy is certainly still there. It was also surprisingly touching, particularly in the relationship between Augusten and the psychiatrist's beleaguered wife Agnes. The interchanges between those two, combined with a likely Oscar-nomination-bound performance by Annette Bening as Augusten's mother, make the movie well worth watching, and I recommend it to anyone considering seeing it.

Click below to see pictures of Joseph Cross on Smallville and various other hot guys with no connection to this post whatsoever:

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