By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to David O. Russells critically acclaimed 2012 Oscar winner Silver Linings Playbook, starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver.
When in doubt, move the camera. It’s a theory employed by an inordinately large number of hack filmmakers, who obviously think that if you shake, wobble, and swoop the camera all over the place, you’ll confuse the audience into thinking that there’s something interesting going on by creating a “sense of immediacy.” Yeah, whatever.
A hectically moving camera is only good for a couple of things: exciting hipsters, and once sending late Aussie legend and esteemed movie critic, David Stratton, into fits of rage. Obviously believing the use of hand-held camera to be a form of evil rivaled only by Hitler’s Final Solution, Stratton practically imploded whenever a director threw away the tripod, launching into an hilarious tirade of huff-and-puff that would make The Big Bad Wolf proud. The Butcher is kind of with good ol’ Stratts though on this one: hand-held camera work sucks.
On 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, everyone’s favourite arrogant, tantrum-throwing director, David O. Russell (who made his name with Spanking The Monkey, a movie about a real motherfucker), sends his camera shooting off in all directions, basically to hide the fact that he’s essentially making a shitty feel-good dance movie…Dirty Dancing with a few screws loose, if you will.
Sure, Silver Linings Playbook is about two crazy, messed up people (played by two incredibly beautiful and not-crazy-looking-at-all actors in the form of Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) who “find love against the odds”, and Robert De Niro is in it for a little instant credibility, but this critically creamed-over Oscar winner is just a suburban dag dolled up in hipster rags. It’s about a dance contest, for God’s sake! Yes, a dance contest!
All you have to do is sub Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence with, say, Zac Efron and Amanda Seyfried, change the songs on the soundtrack, put Chris Tucker in it (oh, wait, he’s already in it), and you’ll slowly start to get a picture of the kind of cheesy, predictable chick flick that Silver Linings Playbook really is once you shave away its hipster exterior.
