My ticket stub says that I saw Silver Linings Playbook but it can't be the same film everyone else has seen. It just can't be. This one was supposed to be charming, enjoyable, fun even. It won the TIFF Audience Award. It was supposed to have great characters. Cooper and Lawrence were supposed to have given wonderful performances. DeNiro, it was said, was back. Jackie Weaver, wait, was she in this?

The film I saw was bland and boring. I checked my watch when I found myself engaged: it was 8:50. The film started at 7pm.
So I had plenty of time to just kind of watch the film go by and notice stuff. I imagined the checklist of things…

What a triumph. Worthy of all the praise it has been getting and then some.

I was baffled by how moved I was by this film. I generally do not like this type of 'boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love against all odds' storyline. And even though this is essentially just that, there is so much more to it.

This is a character driven piece and we are given a host of superbly written protagonists, who are for the better part of the film, their own antagonists. It is their nature that makes this film so intriguing and the slowly developing relationships and character arcs so compelling and refreshingly original. These are not characters easy to identify…

I can’t remember the last time I was quite so apathetic towards a film.

David O. Russell’s awards bothering movie is perfectly decent, but is it anything more than that? For me the answer is a disappointing no. It’s easy to see why it attracted such attention during awards season as it deals with mental illness (a voter’s favourite) whilst wrapping it up in the safe comforting embrace of a feel-good romantic-drama. Even the loud, showy performances seem carefully engineered to play into the hands of voters.

Despite the spiky central relationship between the bipolar Pat and depressed slutty widow, Tiffany, this is a crushingly conventional story that never strays from the well worn romantic-comedy formula. Whilst it might subvert…