Dear Pillow (2004)

Dear Pillow: 2004, dir. Bryan Poyser. Seen at Alamo Village (Sept. 19).
It’s more difficult for me to write about very good movies than about stinkers. It takes longer, at any rate. I saw this movie nearly a month ago and I truly enjoyed it, and have thought about it a lot, but am just getting around to typing my thoughts about it now.
I think if Dear Pillow had played another week at Alamo, or if I’d seen it earlier in its run, I would have written the review earlier to encourage people to see it. But I didn’t see it until its last week in theaters, which was still two weeks longer than it had originally been scheduled to play at Alamo anyway.
Dear Pillow is about a 17-year-old boy who wants to write porn, such as the kind he reads in a Penthouse-letters-style magazine called Dear Pillow. His neighbor, who writes for this magazine and who used to direct porn movies, acts as his mentor. Meanwhile, Wes (the kid) is living with his dad, with whom he has some complicated issues, and lusting after the apartment landlady, on whom he is eavesdropping.

One thing I particularly liked about this movie was that the characters weren’t tagged as stereotypically Bad or Good, it was all relative. It would have been easy to make Wes’s dad a total prick, but instead we are able to sympathize with him and see the situation from his perspective. Dusty, the neighbor who mentors Wes, can be quite a jerk. I didn’t like Wes very much, and sometimes I wanted to smack him, but I felt terribly sorry for him at times.
The best scene in this movie takes place in a laundry room, between Lorna the landlady (Viviane Vives) and Wes the surly teen (Rusty Kelly). Lorna gets her revenge on Wes for eavesdropping on her in a way I would never have imagined.
I don’t usually like “first movies” or low-budget movies. I don’t like Clerks very much, for example. The acting is often stilted and the lack of variety in location can induce claustrophobia. I’m not all that fond of Slacker either (this could get me evicted from Austin) but then I feel like I haven’t given it a fair chance, since I wasn’t exactly sober when I finally saw it.
Dear Pillow is a low-budget film, shot on digital video, and it shows. But I didn’t care that the picture seemed a bit washed-out (other people had to point this out to me, I didn’t even notice) or that some of the sets looked like they were dressed from Goodwill’s Finest (which was kind of in-character anyway).
What you see in this movie is not usually as important as what you hear, anyway. I read a very good interview in the Austin Chronicle (go read it, it’s better than this review) by John Pierson with the filmmakers. Bryan Poyser, the writer/director, said, “The interesting thing about making a movie where the dialogue is very explicit, but what you’re seeing isn’t, is that hearing the graphic sex talk implicates you because you’re the one who has to conjure up these images.”
The acting is excellent—all three leads are believable. It is refreshing to see a 17-year-old character who actually acts like the 17-year-olds I know (or the ones I knew in high school), and not some stupid stereotype played for laughs or angst.
It was also refreshing, after seeing The Bourne Supremacy the night before, to see a film that wasn’t loaded with product placement. The contrast struck me in a scene where Wes was unloading a bag of groceries and the one visible brand name was on a roll of Hill Country Fare paper towels (HCF is the generic brand for the HEB grocery chain). The ultra-low-budget film probably could have benefitted from some product-placement money, but I get very tired of seeing that in movies.
On the other hand, seeing a local film is always pleasant when you can spot various locations you know. The grocery store where Wes worked was Wheatsville Co-op. The hotel cafe where he read a story to Dusty was the Stephen F. Austin. My boyfriend and I were trying to identify the apartment complex but couldn’t. (Sometimes I get to identify people I actually know in Austin films, but this time I struck out.)
I hope Dear Pillow plays in Austin again soon, and I wish it would get a wider release so I could urge all of you to see it. This is not an ordinary film, and it is well worth watching. But one warning: seeing such a good and honest film about a teenage boy is probably one reason why I was so disgusted by the stereotyping and shallowness of Napoleon Dynamite.
(I don’t usually post the official Web sites for movies because sometimes they’re kind of lame, but if you want to see this movie, keep an eye on the Dear Pillow site for future screening info.)