Filed by KOSU News in Art & Life.
August 30, 2011

Fireflies In The Garden stars Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, and Willem Dafoe. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival — in February 2008. It rolled out across country after country, as Vulture noted last week, and on October 14, it will finally open in the United States.

It took me three times through the trailer to understand the story, so I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. But it seems to involve a lot of suffering on the part of Ryan “I Rock This Beard And Glasses, Because I Am A Writer” Reynolds, a lot of nastiness on the part of Willem Dafoe, and a lot of angelic glowing by Julia Roberts. (And some other things. She’s angry once!)

It seems like the kind of movie that could be pretty good or pretty atrocious, depending on the execution, but in all honesty, holding back a Julia Roberts movie from a U.S. release for three and a half years (even though, according to Indiewire, some of the problems had more to do with business collapses than confidence in the movie) doesn’t fill the world with confidence. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]