Film Review: Silver Linings Playbook

After coming home to find his wife in the shower with another man, Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) snapped and almost almost beat the man to death. He was court ordered into an inpatient psychiatric facility, where he discovered he had undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Rejecting medications, because their side effects compromised his sense of self, Pat learned to talk the talk and go through the motions of treatment. After eight months, his mother checked him out AMA. Uh oh!

I sat through a Lars von Trier film. The world MUST be ending ...

As we all know, the world is scheduled to end in two days, right after the winter solstice. There have been many apocalyptic predictions made in my lifetime, as there have been throughout history. And every time, Doomsday comes and goes with nobody being raptured -- the husband and I are still stuck paying off our mortgage. And humanity keeps on goin'.

Nevertheless, I didn't want this pending event to go ignored. So my daughter and I watched Melancholia, Lars von Trier's apocalyptic film, to mark the occasion.

Something is Killing Tate

Although putting down a movie as weirdly good-intentioned as "Something is Killing Tate" incites guilt in me, the truth must be told, so here goes. This film, an unholy mix of earnesty, melodrama, and blaxploitation cheesiness, comes up with a hodge-podge of issues -- suicide, rape, child abuse, alcoholism, adultery, and childhood disabilities -- dials them up to the extreme, and expects to be taken seriously.

   Tate (Jocko Sims) is dying inside... an unfortunate victim of childhood abuse by his father (Kevin Nichols, a cartoon caricature of larger-than-life proportions.) After a failed attempt to take his life, he is looked after by his fiance and friends. Tate's feeling of impending doom stops him from hopping into bed with his best friend's girl (Luz Beato, who sleazes and pouts her way through the movie, never once convincing us that she has a brain.)

Film Review: Oslo, August 31st

Year Released: 2011

Director: Joachim Trier

Screenplay by: Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, based on the novel Le Feu Follet by Pierre Drieu La Rochell

Rating: (4.5/5 Stars)

Addiction is an agonizing journey, and it's an open secret that the road to recovery can be much more painful. It tends to trigger depression, hopelessness, guilt, grief, self-pity, and anger. A recovering addict is often overwhelmed when faced with the consequences of his substance abuse, an awareness that had been numbed by the drugs, and frustrated when he is unable to immediately win back the trust of people close to him. On top of all this, where do you go when all your friendships and hang-outs revolved around alcohol and other drugs?

This Norwegian film manages to convey all of this, through quiet, thoughtful scenes, rich in dialogue, without becoming heavy-handed or cliched.

Beautiful Boy

Within a span of a couple of years, two indie films with very similar premises hit festivals, their names being We Need to Talk About Kevin and Beautiful Boy. I have just seen the latter, a tremendously acted film that deals with the aftermath of rather than the build-up to a school shooting, and concentrates on the grieving parents of the shooter.

    The tagline of this movie, "Everything seemed perfect... Everything would change" is grossly inaccurate, as the group in question is not a happy family. Katie and Bill (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) are trapped in a failing marriage to the point of sleeping in separate beds, while college student Sam (Kyle Gallner) is suicidally depressed and can barely contain his tears as he talks to his parents by phone, as it turns out, for the last time.

     Beautiful Boy's shooter does not seem to be a psychopath, as We Need to Talk About Kevin's promos show their angry young man to be. Rather, he seems to be a deeply unhappy person who irrationally not only wants to die, but wants to take some people with him.

    Frankly, I don't agree with the film's statement that "it's nobody's fault." Except in some rare cases, people are to some degree responsible for their own actions. If you say it is in no way the shooter's fault, you're taking away his role as perpetrator. Should we say the same for rapists? Pedophiles? If you don't consider the kid a monster, fine (nor do I), but give me something here.

   Paired with the son's seemingly average home life, this makes the film's act of violence rather puzzling. What really stands out is the acting, Maria Bello, primarily, but also Michael Sheen, Kyle Gallner, and Alan Tudyk (from the great series Firefly) as the concerned brother. The peculiarly named Moon Bloodgood and Meat Loaf are decent too, though not notably so. Some of Beautiful Boy reminded me of Todd Fields' In The Bedroom, the guilt, the blame-placing, and the grief, without the relentless grimness of Fields film.

   One plus is the minimal use of music to make a point, which is always applied with buzz kill in mainstream American films. Beautiful Boy is an emotional film -- try to watch the scene where the parents receive the news without your lip a-quivering, and excellently acted, but a certain something from being an "unforgettable film."

   It may be the sentimentality or naivete placed deep within the script or the fact that, although there are many characters to care about, there are none who blow you away. I'm interested to see what We Need to Talk About Kevin does with the subject matter, and whether it surpasses this in content or style.