NOTABLE QUOTES
"Recalling 70s dark comedies such as Altman's Brewster McCloud as well as the post-modern reflexiveness of Adaptation, the film's double-helix tale ingeniously interweaves pathos and hilarity, grief and imagination, entrapment and escape. In his remarkably assured debut, writer-director Kirt Gunn proves himself both a highly distinctive wordsmith and an accomplished visual stylist. Few recent first-time comedies have impressed me more."
Godfrey Cheshire
NY Times/Variety/Village Voice/Interview
"A terrific film."
Scott Foundas
NY Times/Variety/Village Voice/LA Weekly
"Lovely By Surprise is a playful and profound literary confection - a brilliantly original debut by Kirt Gunn, one of the most exciting prospects working in American indie cinema."
Nick Dawson
Filmmaker Magazine
REVIEWS
"The childish manner of Marian's characters is both precious and wise... Their author (and here I refer to both Marian and Kirt) loves them deeply and it shows. The peculiar logic under which they were created echoes in their every interaction: they know that the membrane between real and make-believe is permeable; and this teaches us that other barriers we have erected in our own lives may be similarly porous."
"Lovely By Surprise" is a great exploration of the artistic process and how creative people channel their experiences into becoming art. It's been a while since I've seen such a fully-realized vision from a first-time filmmaker. I'm not in the business of predicting future Great Directors, but I'm pretty eager to see what else Gunn has in store. I hope he keeps making movies, because Lovely By Surprise is a hell of a debut."
"Gunn isn't interested in mimicry nor does he engage in the kind of arch, distancing hipsterism that plagues so many small, first-time films. There's a genuine emotional core to his story and some of the film's more fanciful turns are a mechanism to approach it rather than a means to bury it."
"(Reg) Rogers delivers an absolute powerhouse of a performance. He manages to be both laugh-out loud funny and heartbreakingly sad at the same time. Rogers deserves to be recognized at the end of the year."
"The brilliance of a truly great book is that at the end you are simply a different person. There are four movies that have made me feel something similar ... and Lovely By Surprise is one of them."
"Gunn's beautifully acted and distinctively shot Kaufmanesque debut, combining three intertwining narratives is a funny, imaginative, and very moving examination of loss and grief and the redemptive possibilities of the artistic process."
"After experimenting with a few different ways of describing what Lovely By Surprise does, I think the best I can come up with is that it takes the standard quirky indie mold and deliberately, possibly even meanly, decides to be about real human beings rather than cartoons, and thus what starts out as a fanciful exercise in whimsy and style turns into a genuinely moving, slightly terrifying, but absolutely gentle and delicate look at how easily the human soul is bent and broken by loss and grief. It is a lovely, silly film that pulls none of its punches and tells no comforting lies. A paradox? A most ingenious paradox."
