Lars and the Real Girl

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The second the credits started rolling after a recent showing of the film Lars and the Real Girl, my friend turned to me and said, “That was the most boring film I’ve ever seen in my life. I fell asleep, like, five times.”

Boring? I disagree. The film creeps along at a slow pace, but can you tell the story of an extremely sensitive, emotionally wrecked young man whose platonic relationship with a blow-up doll helps him get over the death of his mother and social anxieties at a fast pace? You could, but it probably would have to star Will Ferrell and be directed by Judd Apatow.

This film, starring Ryan Gosling and directed by newcomer Craig Gillespie, is an earnest, sincere, and often sappy tale of a small Midwest town transformed by one man’s real “relationship” with a fake person. It is hokey (the older, wiser women of the town sitting in a knitting circle wearing sweaters and offering casseroles and their undying support when Gosling’s character is depressed), and it is, at times, a tear-jerker (lots of close-ups of a misty-eyed, red-faced Gosling as he comes to terms with his inner self), but it’s also funny (Gosling getting into “arguments” with his doll).

The movie feels like an art-house film for the family: It’s quirky and character-driven, but it’s also, in the end, a feel-good flick about good people doing good things for each other. Boring? Maybe. Depends who you ask, or what mood you’re in when you see it. Cheesy? A little. Worth watching if you’re into small-budget films with mostly unknown actors forming friendships with a plastic woman purchased on the Internet? Yup.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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