I believe it was an old screenwriting teacher who concluded Sunset Boulevard was the first film narrated by (spoiler alert) a dead character.
Glee's Chris Colfer gets the honors in Struck by Lightining, which the Laguna Beach Film Society presents tonight with a post-screening Q&A with director Brian Dannelly, who we can only hope helmed a picture at least half as good as Billy Wilder's classic.
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Colfer plays high school senior Carson Phillips, who was destined
for bigger things than his close-minded small town could offer. But that ends when he's killed by a bolt of lightning in his school parking lot.
Carson then recounts his final weeks, flashing back on a blackmail scheme targeting the
popular kids in school that he concocted with his best friend (Rebel
Wilson), a mother (Allison Janney) who was
more interested in the bottle than her son's future and an estranged
father (Dermot Mulroney) who suddenly showed up with a pregnant fiancée
(Christina Hendricks).
Colfer wrote the screenplay, and he knows something about breaking out of a small town high school, having been cast for Glee out of Clovis in Central California. (His Struck by Lightning school is Clover High School.) The movie premiered at Tribeca and is being released today on video by demand.
Tonight's Laguna Film Society presentation begins with a reception at 6 p.m. at Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. The film screens at 7 p.m. at South Coast Cinema, 162 South Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Admission is: free to members; $20 for non-members attending the reception and screening; $10 for screening only; and $5 for students.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.