Two movies about people searching for love open this Valentines Day weekend. Fifty Shades of Gray features the torture that is both real and metaphorical when it comes to some relationships. And a low budget ‘Indy’ film, called, Old Fashioned is marketing itself as the ‘ antidote’ to Fifty Shades.
Call it serendipity., but when the producers of Old Fashioned saw that their movie could have a release date the same weekend as Fifty Shades of Gray, it was an opportunity too good to let go
"Both of the stories deal with a broken male protagonists who have serious damage in their past, who are isolated," says Screenwriter and Director Rik Swartzwelder, who sees his film as a kind of antidote to the modern malaise known as dating.
Characters in both may be seeking similar things, but they take very different paths to deal with what he calls, their ‘brokenness’
"Where the stories diverge is, in Old Fashioned, you have a character who is trying to deal with his ‘brokenness ‘ is pursing god and a spiritual path and rediscover God in a culture that doesn’t always affirm a virtuous approach to things."
Swartzwelder, also plays the lead, Clay Walsh, ‘a former party boy’ who treated women badly in the past. But Clay has seen the light and believes there’s a better path to finding love in the 21st century.
I don’t believe dating trains us to be good husband and wives it trains us to be good dates... it’s all icing and no cake.. nothing magical happens when you walk down the isle.
The foil to Clay’s conviction that his path is the right one is a beautiful, free spirit named Amber Hewson who arrives in town as if on a whim and moves into the apartment upstairs. And in what sometimes plays like a Platonic Dialogue, she questions his ideas about love. If Amber were filling out her personal info for a dating site, she’d check the box marked, ‘spiritual, not religious.’
"It was different than anything I had done before, yet I identified with her so much. Here’s this woman that is looking for love, trying to be her best self and who’s what I like to call a runner. When things get messy she picks up and moves and I had done a lot of that in my own life," says Salem Virginia native Elizabeth Roberts. She studied drama at Virginia Tech and headed out to Los Angeles, where she lives now. The emotional and intellectual the heart of the movie she’s a representative for a secular audience.
"I think she’s a seeker and I think she is really open and she finds something in Clay that she adores and that lifts her up and that makes her feel like a better version of herself.
Old Fashioned is a movie that is part of a growing genre, faith based films, from the recent, Heaven is Real, all the way back to the Passion of the Christ, movies with a Christian message are finding audiences and box office success. Moviegoers this Valentines Day weekend, have two very different takes on love to choose from.
