I wanted to like t more

Rating: 8/10 (22 February 2014)

Quite a jumbled up mixed bag of a movie here. Jennifer Lawrence won the Academy Award for Best Actress for this? That was not an Oscar winning performance. She was great at times, with a monologue or two that I can see helped seal the win, but Jessica Chastain was WAY better in Zero Dark Thirty. Overall, Ms. Lawrence was just very good but not exceptional. Bobby De Niro was great, I sure hope he was runner-up for Best Supporting Actor (if they have such a thing with the voters behind the scenes.) Bradley Cooper definitely deserved his nomination for Best Actor. So well done. But the movie lost me at the dancing and then seemed to take a whole different direction with the football. I've got nothing against either but they just didn't jive with the first half of the story. Because I am a man, I am not supposed to especially like romance stories but this one here works and I liked it a lot. Obvious, yes, but I probably like it because it was kind of discreet and sneaks up on the viewer rather than being so stupidly and grossly in your face the whole time. The story has much more to it than that. For some reason I wanted to like this more, and I still give it a fairly high grade, but a Best Picture nomination? If the Academy never idiotically expanded the field to 9 films, I sure hope this would not have made the cut.
7.5 / 10
--A Kat Pirate Screener