Uneven Comedy/Drama

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2016)

I saw "Joy", starring Jennifer Lawrence-The Hunger Games movies, Garden Party; Robert De Niro-The Intern, Wag the Dog; Bradley Cooper-American Sniper, Silver Linings Playbook; Edgar Ramirez-Point Break_2015, Deliver Us From Evil and Virginia Madsen-The Haunting in Connecticut, Sideways.
This movie is based on a true story about Joy Mangano, the woman who invented the Miracle Mop back in 1990. She also had a few other inventions but the mop is the one that got her started. Jennifer plays Joy. She grew up in Long Island and her family were the perfect definition of a dysfunctional family. Jennifer lives with her grandmother, her mother, Virginia and her ex husband, Edgar. Jennifer and Edgar have the perfect divorce; they get along better as friends than they did when they were married. Her father, Robert is having problems with his girlfriend and decides to move in, too. Robert and Virginia do not get along at all and they have verbal fights a lot. Virginia lies around watching soap operas all day; they do use some real soap opera stars in cameos. I know of Laura Wright and Susan Lucci and I'm sure there were others that I did not know. Jennifer's always trying to come up with an invention that will get her out of her dreadful life and the movie tells about her difficulties in reaching her goals, including developing an actual workable product, getting it produced in mass quantities and then getting it out to the public on cable channels, such as QVC and HSN. Bradley plays an ad executive that gives Jennifer her first TV break. It does have some good actors in it but it is a little uneven between being a comedy and being a drama; it is a little bit of both but not enough of either. It's rated "PG-13" for some language and has a running time of 2 hours & 4 minutes. It's not one that I would buy on DVD but if you are interested in the subject matter, it would be a good rental.