Silver Linings Playbook Mini-Review

On Friday my wife and I saw Silver Linings Playbook, the Oscar-nominated film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. It's a good movie, well-constructed, well-acted, not quite a romantic comedy but not so heavy as to be a full-on drama. Typical Hollywood ending.

But what I thought was interesting was that the climax of the movie involves the furtherance of a criminal enterprise. That's spelled out pretty explicitly, but no one in the film seems to notice or care. The father, played by Robert de Niro, has lost his pension and started a bookmaking "business", which is, of course, illegal. To hide his profits he wants to start a restaurant, through which he can funnel his illegal earnings.

His son Pat, played by Cooper, can help his father win a bet (itself, ahem, illegal) in order to obtain the capital needed to open the restaurant. Spoiler alert: they do win, and Cooper gets the girl and his father gets his restaurant. Which, we couldn't help but notice, is the front for his bookmaking operation.

The reason this is so very odd is that the story revolves around Pat's difficulties with the law. He has just come out of a court-ordered stay at a mental institution after beating his wife's lover nearly to death. Needless to say, Pat figures out a way to control himself and stay on the right side of the law. Except... does he? He ends up being an accessory to a crime, or at least enabling his father to commit one.

I suppose we aren't supposed to worry about such things, but it struck me as strange. The family could easily have had some other, less illegal, form of financial hardship. In any case, the circumstances detract only a bit from an enjoyable, if hardly profound, movie.

Unsportsmanlike Conduct

I didn't watch the HBO movie Game Change Sunday night - largely because I don't get HBO - but I've read a bit about it. To me, really, the questions surrounding its accuracy are irrelevant. How many movies have been made about losing Presidential campaigns? They lost; it's over; let's move on.

There are many movies made about the winning team, and rightly so. Supporters often make sycophantic documentaries, opponents often make vicious fantasies, but in either case they're about the winning side, not the losers.

So "Game Change" is an oddity. It's worth pointing out that, while this is an HBO film, it was made with an all-star cast: Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Woody Harrelson. Why was it made? Possibly the film-makers thought Sarah Palin would be in the midst of a Presidential run at this point and this movie would be relevant (and *cough* hurtful). Possibly they really thought the story was interesting and worth telling - although the events portrayed happened just three years ago and there are no new revelations in the film (from what I hear).

What I think motivated the filmmakers was simply schadenfreude. The election of 2008 was so cathartic that they needed to relive it in just one more way. Well, good for them.

Atlas Shrugged: The Movie

Looks like Hollywood finally noticed that Atlas Shrugged is one of the bestselling novels of all time. The question, "Who is John Galt?" will finally be answered in cinematic form. I'm happy about this - and tickled that the movie opens on Tax Day, April 15, 2011. Even though I continue to have grave reservations about Ayn Rand herself, the novel is something different - something novel, if you will - and a sound rejection of the liberal platitudes that suffuse so many movies.

You can expect a thousand-page novel to be shortened for the film version. But maybe not too much: the one coming out in a month is just Part 1. Will Part 2 be just John Galt's speech? Let's hope not.

Movie Review: Pirate Goats Who Stare at the Radio

The theme of this movie (known in the U.K. as "Radiomen Who Pirate Goats") is subversion against a tyrannical government, and that's something I can definitely get behind. Ultimately, though, it fails to deliver anything beyond an ungainly display of Sixties counterculture nostalgia.

The premise is that Puritanical British government-controlled radio refuses to play more than a few nanoseconds of rock-and-roll per day, and so the stimulation-starved populace listens to so-called "pirate" radio broadcast from ships anchored in international waters. Unable to prevent the broadcasts by legal means, the British government eventually enlists the help of a secret U.S. Army program in which common soldiers have been trained in psychic combat.

The pirate radio ship is populated by central casting Sixties-ites, who are interested in nothing other than sex, drugs and, obviously, rock and roll. The psychic warriors turn out to be warriors for peace, specializing not in fighting the enemy but in finding lost people or objects, gathering information, and spiking their regular-Army counterparts' breakfast with LSD. Taken together, these characters prove more adept at spouting slogans like "rock and roll will never die" and "give peace a chance" than at generating any audience sympathy.

That sympathy would never be tested anyway, though, given the lack of any real tension in the film. There are a few scattered tense bits, to be sure, such as when a rogue violent psychic threatens his commander with a gun, or when the pirate ship is involved in an accident and sinks. But you know nothing actually bad will happen, because anything bad happening as a result of the characters' irresponsibility and moral failures might puncture the film's Utopian vision. Technically, "Pirate Goats" should be styled a "comedy." The only problem with that designation is its dearth of laugh-inducing moments.

Rumor has it that this movie was once two separate films, one focusing on the "Pirate Radio" aspects and an entirely separate one in which goats play a central role (in the final version, the goats only enter the picture when the psychics, switching sides, help the pirates escape the authorities by mentally cloaking them as the little cloven-hoofed beasts). The fractured plot lines of the resulting movie expose its dual roots, but thematically the admixture is seamless.