Hey, Mr. Postman

Growing up my eccentric artist Dad wrote letters to people he met in personal columns. They resulted in painted portraits full of sex and violence. As soon as I turned 16, I started searching for escapism in pen pals. "Mary and Max" starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann and Toni Collete is about the beautiful absurdity of snail mailing your life to a stranger. The claymated feature film from creators of Academy Award winning short animation "Harvie Krumpet" tells the story of unlikely correspondents. Mary is an eight year-old girl in Australia with a mole on her forehead and alcoholic mum, while Max is a morbidly obese forty five year-old Jewish man (he confesses atheism) in New York. On opposite sides of the globe, they become each other's anchors, voices of love and understanding in otherwise madly lonely lives. "Mary and Max" made me believe in the bond between these two misfits. Sometimes people we've never met make the most sense of our often baffling lives.

-Royal