Image Credit: Jas Shelton
In C.O.G., the first-ever movie adaptation of a David Sedaris story that premiered last night at the Sundance Film Festival, there’s a scene in which a proselytizing Christian named Jon (Denis O’Hare) counsels Samuel, his young fine-crafts protege (Jonathan Groff) — and non-believer — that only God can make him happy. “[Happiness] is not going to drop in your lap,” he says. “You have to ask for it.”
If Samuel’s only half-listening, it’s advice that 29-year-old writer/director Kyle Patrick Alvarez took to heart. He pursued Sedaris — delicately but aggressively — even showing up at one of Sedaris’s book readings in Irvine, Calif., to present the best-selling author and NPR humorist with a copy of his first movie, 2010′s Easier With Practice. The gamble paid off. “I liked Easier With Practice and then I just liked how enthusiastic he was,” said Sedaris, who chatted with reporters after seeing the movie for the first time. “There’s a way that people [in Hollywood] talk and you just get the idea that it’s just bullsh-t, and he didn’t sound like that. He seemed like the real thing to me; he seemed like an artist.”
In the movie, which is based on a story from Sedaris’s 1997 collection, Naked — C.O.G. stands for Child of God — Groff’s conceited college student heads to Oregon to “get his hands dirty” on an apple farm and see how the other half lives. But his intellectual prowess quickly proves a liability and his real education to the ways of the world is alternately helped and hindered by the farm’s curmudgeonly owner (Dean Stockwell), a romantically interested co-worker (Midnight in Paris‘ Corey Stoll), and Jon, who builds clunky jade clocks shaped like the state of Oregon. READ FULL STORY »
