One of the Best Films of 2012

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2012)

This is one of the best films of 2012. There will be awards nominations for deserved excellence. Excelsior! The Weinstein Company has become the Oscar brand name for award-winning performances, as excellence and quality seem to be the only criteria for the producers.
The real surprise for me was Bradley Cooper, who always plays the funny, handsome guy in movies like "The Hangover," "The Hangover Part 2" and "The Hangover Infinite Sequel." Here, Cooper plays a disturbed man who is released from a mental facility. He has some court problems and a restraining order or two hanging over him. He plays the edgy, off-his-meds guy very convincingly. This is a good film for him. He shows us things we have never seen him do.
Robert DeNiro is always interesting and fun to watch. He plays Cooper's father, an OCD Philidelphia Eagles fan who performs a series of strange rituals while watching his team. He worries about the team's Mojo constantly, and bets heavily and dangerously on them.
The characters are all wonderfully quirky in this script. The question of sanity is explored in an unusual way. We know, at the outset, that Cooper's character is more than a little bit off his rocker, but as the story progresses, we see an entire cast of characters who have their own issues. Cooper plays Pat, who was sentenced to the mental hospital after an incident involving his wife. He wants desperately to get back his old life, but we see how unlikely he is to recover what was lost. We see that his obsessiveness, which caused the incident, is driving him harder to make things right. We know it will not work. His friends and family watch him make the same mistakes again and again.
Jennifer Lawrence, as good as she was in "Hunger Games," really creates a new character in this film. You can't take your eyes off her when she is on the screen. She is a combination of crazy, sexy and intense. She erupts out of nowhere and virtually stalks Pat through the first half of the film. She is funny, also obsessive and equally as intense as Pat.
The script is excellent, and, even though the ending is telegraphed too far in advance, the film goes where you want the story to go.
This is one of the best films of 2012. There will be awards nominations for deserved excellence. Excelsior! The Weinstein Company has become the Oscar brand name for award-winning performances, as excellence and quality seem to be the only criteria for the producers.