Dancing with PTSD

Rating: 2/10 (23 January 2013)

Dancing with PTSD
The Hollywood solution to mental problems. And WOW about everybody in this movie has mental problems. And that is probably the only thing I found realistic in this film.
The rest is so filled with clichés. First of all the two lead characters are super good looking. What else do you expect? We cannot have average looking people afflicted with bipolar or depressive disorders, can we?
And while in the real world people who have been diagnosed with bipolar and have been committed to a mental institution have a hard time to keep friends, the guy in this movie still has the support from everybody,but his ex-wife and her lover. Another astounding thing is that a lot of the main characters are out of work and seem to exist without problems. The answer may be that the father (De Niro) has turned bookie after losing his job. And I have to admit that I know so little about betting that the whole segment about the bet eluded me. I also have never been to a football stadium or watched a game (I guess, it was football) and after seeing the scenes at the stadium I certainly never will.
Now we get to the part where dancing becomes the therapy. While I completely agree that physical activity is very important in coping with mental challenges, I seriously doubt that somebody without any dance experience can enter a competition, again, I am not familiar with these kind of competitions, but after what they showed it was not a segment of "So you think you can dance", where anybody gets a go. The dance scenes reminded me of that unfortunately also Oscar nominated movie "Black Swan" where the camera only showed the dancer waving her arms because she obviously was not a trained ballet dancer, and in this movie the dance scenes are so chopped that you get no idea what the girl wanted to achieve with her choreography. And then of course we have the typical Hollywood ending . Everybody is happy and boy gets girl, and daddy wins his bet and gets his diner and they live happily ever after screaming at each other. Because as Dr. Phil always likes to point out , you can always judge a person by his past behavior. I have no idea why this movie got all the nominations, but that is not the first time, that I am clueless.