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Amazon’s Brittany Runs a Marathon isn’t exactly setting off any pangs of originality or excitement in my brain from this first trailer. However, my perception from the trailer is reportedly wrong as it did win the audience award at Sundance and Nathan really, really dug it when he saw it there. The humor in the trailer and the life-affirming story don’t seem like much special but evidently it hits just the right balance of comedy, drama, and reality. Plus, Jillian Bell is amazing.
As such, I am putting my faith not in this trailer but in the greater world’s opinion. The idea of someone finding themselves as they train for a marathon sounds like the plot of 50 other movies, but self-discovery films work when they take trite life lessons and turn them into something special. One does wonder if the “true story” aspect is basically that a person ran a marathon once, but it does add a certain credibility to the whole affair.
Brittany Runs a Marathon will release on August 23.
