I’m writing about Brit Marling because I just saw Another Earth recently and holy crap it was gewd. Before I get to that let me tell you about how I discovered Brit Marling.
The first time I saw Brit Marling was in The East, a movie I caught on cable some time last year I think. It’s one of those quiet, charged films that you either love or hate. It’s about an operative (played by Brit) of a private intelligence company and she goes undercover to infiltrate an anarchist group that’s been covertly attacking big corporations. It’s a pretty interesting movie – emotional, makes you think, makes you feel slightly rebellious even. I was intrigued by Brit Marling (and Ellen Page! But that’s for another post). Brit just has this interesting aura about her. I googled the movie and found out that she wrote the movie with the director Zal Batmanglij. Great, she’s not only a talented actress, but she writes, too. Hashtag girl crushhh.
The second time I saw Brit Marling was in I Origins, which I saw very recently. It’s a cool movie about scientists studying the evolution of the eye. It stars Michael Pitt whose character Ian falls in love with Sofi, played by the intriguing Astrid Bergès-Frisbey (you know, the mermaid from Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides). Sofi just happens to have beautiful and unusually-colored eyes. She dies in a tragic accident and years later he marries his lab assistant Karen, played by Brit Marling. To make a long – but fascinating – story short, in the course of the story they find a young Indian girl whose unique iris scan matches that of Ian’s first love, the one with the unusual eyes. It’s a pretty cool sci-fi film directed by Mike Cahill. I enjoyed the film so much that I googled Mike Cahill and found his connection to Brit Marling. Apparently they work together a lot and even created this amazing Sundance hyped film called Another Earth, which I just had to watch for myself.
Co-written by Marling and director Mike Cahill, Another Earth is a sci-fi drama. The movie is about the discovery of a planet that turns out to be a mirror of earth, a young girl, a music professor, and a car crash that changes their lives forever. The film was featured at Sundance in 2011 and won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for outstanding film with science, technology or math as a major theme. I think it’s brilliant. And, for co-writing it, Brit Marling is brilliant. Hashtag girl crushhh.
Brit Brit also co-wrote, co-produced and starred in another movie called Sound of My Voice, which came out around the same time as Another Earth. Sound of My Voice is dubbed a psychological thriller and is about these documentary filmmakers trying to expose a cult led by a woman (played by Brit) who claims to be from the future. I’m going to watch that next. Because Brit Marling. Hashtag girl crushhh.