Hangover star and People's "sexiest man alive" Bradley Cooper is miscast as the leading actor in David O. Russell's dark romantic dramedy about a man with bipolar disorder finding love in an equally crazy, medication-ridden wreck played by The Hunger Games' tween-girl icon Jennifer Lawrence. The film starts out with Cooper's character coming home from the looney bin with his mother (Jacki Weaver). When they get home Cooper wants to get his life back in check, including trying to get back together with his wife - who he caught cheating on him with an English professor while their wedding song was playing in the background. But enter Lawrence's character, who he meets at a dinner party, bonding over the various medications they've taken, and from there on it's an awkwardly scripted romantic comedy that only thinks it's in the league of Woody Allen.
The only "silver lining" in this movie are the performances. Although Bradley Cooper was an incredibly odd choice for such a neurotic character, he did show more of his acting chops. And this is probably the best "acting showcase" for Jennifer Lawrence we've seen so far, and she is more than likely to be nominated come Oscar season. Robert DeNiro, playing the football-loving OCD father, gives one of his better performances in a while for a script that doesn't deserve it. Something about the way the characters interact was so strange. The emotions the actors convey feel very real, but I just can't put my finger on what's so unappealing about the dialogue; maybe they just talk a little too fast and a little too smarmy for real life.
The story is really muddled at times, balancing very intense emotional scenes with light comedy and for me it didn't really work. I really do like the style and edge David O. Russell and cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior, The Grey) infuse into it, but overall this film comes as a disappointing follow-up to The Fighter.
Rating: C-
Ang Lee, the director of such critically lauded films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, is taking on an "unfilmable" novel with Life of Pi, an ambitious story about religion, survival, and the act of storytelling itself. As with Cloud Atlas, I applaud the film on a pure technical scale, but unfortunately for me it was not the cinematic equivalent of a religious experience.
The story is about a man, named Pi, recounting his life to an author in an effort to prove to him that God exists. We see the origin of this boy and his religious background and his family life, and after about 15 to 20 minutes of that crap, we finally get to the shipwreck scene that was promised from the trailer. The cargo ship Pi was on was holding various zoo animals, and once the storm settles down, oh fuck, he realizes there's a god damn tiger on the boat. Then it kind of becomes becomes Cast Away-on-acid with a tiger instead of a volleyball.
First the positive: the CGI is fucking amazing. The tiger, named Richard Parker after a mishap at the zoo, is pretty much photo-realistic. I can definitely see why James Cameron has his official seal of approval because I'd say it's in the same ballpark as an Avatar on a purely visual scale. While I'm still very much anti-3D, this film will certainly give the pro-3D losers some ammunition for their [weak] arguments on the medium. The way the sea is shot, sometimes perfectly reflecting the sky above is gorgeous. And you could definitely feel the shadow of Titanic in the shipwreck scene.
Maybe I'm not the perfect person to be reviewing this film, but I just did not "get it." There's all kinds of religious symbolism that is often times not subtle whatsoever. I liked the idea of how the film centered around storytelling, using religion as an example, but the execution was pretty iffy. I loved the stuff on the boat, because the relationship between Pi and the tiger was pretty grounded in reality and the stakes were clear, but once the movie goes into hippy-dippy land, I just checked out. Like Cloud Atlas or Tree of Life, it tries so hard to be profound and I simply have a hard time with those types of films. On a pure technical level it's totally worth seeing, but I think it went overboard with its own ambition.
Rating: C
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