Crazymaking

What they never tell you in therapy school* is that you can be crazy without being crazy. Case in point: Bradley Cooper in the Silver Linings Playbook.

Yes, DeSean Jackson is in the house.

In the last two weeks I decided that the start of football season was an apt time to review a movie about the sport. As you might have guessed from the above image, Silver Linings is that movie.

But this is not a film just about football. No--it's about obsession, about wanting something so badly it blinds you to what is right in front of your eyes.

Released in 2012 just in time for Oscar season, the film features Cooper as Pat Solatano, a man in a mental hospital for assaulting his wife's lover. He suffers from bipolar disorder and a really, really bad  motto: Excelsior, meaning ... what does it mean?

Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow recently fired from her job for sleeping with the whole office, is the woman he meets after being released.

Jennifer Lawrence.

It's difficult to tell who is more crazy. I mean, when they meet at a diner he orders Raisin Bran and she orders tea.

For the record: Raisin Bran, every time.

Pat, still in love with his ex-wife, resists this premise. He thinks that she is the crazier one, until he's forced to acknowledge that in the bundle of insanity that is Pat and Pat's family and Pat's life, Tiffany Maxwell may be the only thing about it that makes sense.

Tiffany has her own life and her own persona and yet she's still willing to reach out and ask for what she wants, in addition to indulging the insanity that is football fandom. Listen to this video and tell me that this is not a girl who has thought through her argument:

That said, having seen it several times what keeps me coming back to Silver Linings is not actually the football or the crazy '80s style dance routines. No. What I like about this film is its acknowledgement of the obvious: that we are all crazy. We are crazy in love, we are crazy in fandom, and we are just plain crazy.

And that's okay.

EXCELSIOR.

How to say anything

Ladies and gentlemen, John Cusack

Sometimes there's no good way to say what you want to say. Or the meaning gets lost in translation, even when you try to translate.

Say Anything... is not a movie that has this problem. Released in 1989, it has since turned into one of the great cult success stories of the eighties. The film starts with John Cusack at the height of his powers as hyper-articulate slacker Lloyd Dobler, who happens to be in love/lust with a girl named Diane Court. Even the names in this movie have impeccable grammar.

Ione Skye, aka Diane Court

When Diane actually agrees to go out with Lloyd everyone is surprised, inspiring what I will argue is the greatest bit of dialogue between three teenage girls ever filmed:

DC: Hey, I know this is a strange thing to say, but maybe Diane Court really likes Lloyd.
COREY: If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd? [pause] Yeah.
DC: Yeah!
REBECCA: Yeah.

I mean, feel free to fight me on this, but I feel I have a pretty solid case.

So. They go out. It's a date, it's a scam--whatever it is, it's magical. It's that instant connection based on romantic gestures and charm and incredible attraction. It's great.

It's also a movie.

By which I mean that it misses the mark, in terms of brutal honesty. It doesn't say just anything; instead it says very specific things about very specific circumstances. Like the fact that Lloyd doesn't want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything as a career. And the fact that Diane has a theory of convergence. And the fact that jukeboxes cost about 9000 dollars. (Or did, anyway. This was the late eighties.)

There's something really unbelievable about all of this. For one thing, real relationships aren't montages. They require effort, and the willingness to have difficult conversations. For all their articulation sometimes when I watch Lloyd and Diane talk I am not sure they are really saying anything after all. They are talking to each other, not with each other.

That's the problem, isn't it? When you talk to someone, you aren't listening to them.

What brings me back to this movie over and over again isn't the infatuation or Lloyd's boombox. It's the last scene, when they are just sitting quietly on a plane, waiting for a sound.

*

The Hanks Conundrum

What happened to the trope of women booksellers? It feels like one day we all just woke up and instead of female leads shelving books in libraries and male leads drafting on architecture tables we had something called "Marketing Associate."

Of course, we all know what happened--

It was the 2000s.

--but that doesn't mean we have to give up the ghost entirely.

You've Got Mail (1998) was practically formed off the combination. Kathleen Kelly, otherwise known as the inimitable Meg Ryan, is a bookseller about to go out of business when she meets Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Her rival's son.

Except it turns out that they've already met -- on the internet.

Dial-up, yo

AOL Instant Messenger is the centerpiece of the movie, and the undoubted inspiration point. I can only imagine the buildup was similar to when that guy wrote that script for that film that was going to be "about Facebook."

What redeems the movie is the chemistry; Hanks in particular is as sharp and clever as he ever gets. But let's be honest. The man could have good chemistry with a sock.

Or some chairs.

It's not even the best Hanks-Ryan combo--that would be Sleepless in Seattle, which is too perfect to critique.

What You've Got Mail is, really, is an antique. I say this because it so perfectly captures a moment in time--the late '90s, when AOL was just starting to become a thing--that to look back on it is to look at something so perfectly comprehensive as to be absolute. I mean, people who were zero years old when You've Got Mail was released are now sixteen and watching it still feels like yesterday.

Like Cary Grant, it's aged well.

It does make me wonder: how will filmmakers portray Tinder? (A word which, though I am the target audience, I had to check the spelling of twice.) Will it be a romantic tale of two people connected by the mere swipe of a thumb, or will it be humdrum and pedestrian? I hope the former, because in fifteen years a lot changes.

Heart, though. That stays the same.