The Danger Of True Stories Becoming Quirky Indie Dramedies

BuzzFeed - Jesse Plemons and Molly Shannon in Other People. Gettin' Rad Productions Other People, one of this year's Sundance Film Festival opening night movies, is exactly what the fest has become famous and infamous for: the quirky indie dramedy. It's the kind of film ? a laugh-through-the-tears cancer saga ? that split the theater between sobbing and wincing. It's the kind of film that's a mix of the sweet and the mildly edgy, the sincere and the manipulative, featuring a nice line-up of actors getting out of their comfort zone. It's the kind of film that opens on a family sobbing by a deathbed before they're interrupted by an answering machine message from a friend checking in while ordering at a fast food drive-through. It's the kind of film that distribution companies have, in the past, gotten into altitude-giddy bidding wars over. When it ended, I was left thinking whether this genre has stuck because life really feels like the stuff of a quirky indie dramedy, or is "quirky in