'Ten Years' With Channing Tatum? Sign Me Up!

Only heard about "Ten Years" while flipping through the Village Voice on Saturday -- how "Thirty Years" of me! -- then found myself in a screening and Q&A the following afternoon with the stars, including Channing Tatum and Scott "Jason Street" Porter, at the Landmark Sunshine. Despite its leading man, "Ten Years" is a full-on indie project, complete with a first-time director, Jamie Linden (best known for having written the screenplays for "We Are Marshall" and "Dear John"), no budget and no studio support. (Hence the in-person promotion.) Despite the well-tread ground of a high school reunion, the film does manage to mine some original ground along the way, with characters who don't all neatly fall into the "mess" or "together" column. Even the more cliche storylines feel a bit more genuine as the characters seem like they might have actually grown up together and have some real chemistry, which the cast chalked up to the fact that many of them are indeed old friends (the film is set an Albuquerque high school named after the one in Winter Park, Florida, from which Porter and Linden actually graduated) and that they all stayed in the same hotel for a month making this "labor of love" for which "no one got paid." Because the film was low-budget, Linden said he shot the film in sequential order ,allowed the actors to develop characters beyond what the script called for, and did not discourage improvisation, all of which added to the film's sense of realism. (I'm positive Chris Pratt had to have improvised those lyrics to "Lady in Red" at the post-reunion karaoke outing!) Besides the always-adorable Tatum (does anyone seem more natural and likable on screen than this guy?), Kara Mara shines as a loner who surprises herself and gets surprised herself by showing up, and Brian Geraghty steals more than a few scenes as the guy whose wife had no idea he "used to be a wigger." "Ten Years" isn't exactly "The Big Chill" for the Millennial Generation, but it doesn't feel like it's trying to be, either. It's the film's casual aspirations that give it a sense of authenticity and make it definitely worth a look.

''Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose''