Pajiba

That does seem to be a terrible title. "It's sort of a good movie, if you like that sort of thing."
Meh on toast.

Glad to hear Keir Gilchrist did well in his role, but it's a bummer he wasn't given a better project. As soon as I saw this preview with him in it, I was excited because I love him on U.S. of Tara.
Ah well, hopefully there will be many more opportunities for him, because he seems to have quite a bit of talent.

This isn't a knock against you, seriously, I'm just using this as the place to vent about this, but I really dislike that every movie review ever written is basically at least 40% summary of the plot. A little summary is fine, but unless it's an essential element for the reader to know which film is being discussed or you're summarizing something in the film for the purpose of commenting on a particular moment, plotline, or scene, I see no reason to give me what's essentially a DVD's back cover description of a film.

Again, not just you. You're doing as you're trained to do, and doing so better than most.

i just have to add here, any treatment or epiphany that leads someone from doing something useful and productive into going to art school, is pretty fucking criminal.

We live in a paradoxical world that is on the one hand, a leisure class disney land of arts and entertainment, like we have a thousand year stockpile of A&E, while on the other hand, we live in a dieing world, rife with environmental degradation, overpopulation, rape level capitalism, war, energy crises, medical issues, failing infrastructure, blah blah blah and the last message we should be sending out to the youth of tomorrow is "follow your fucking rainbow".

I grew up in a generation of folk that felt being a welder, or doctor, or sitting on city council, or studying chemistry or even just voting was just plain square, and that what people really needed was more theatre, film, performance art and shitty assed me-ism.

I have no patience left for any movie about someone troubled who just needs to find their creative side and be free. that's called finger painting and you master it in kindergarten. there's actual real and important shit that needs doing by the adults and doesn't get done when we all want to paint or write screenplays or deconstruct text.

find yourself on Sunday afternoons, during the week, do something fucking useful. making the world work isn't someone else's job, it's everyone's.

I'm not against the finer things, in fact they make my life quite meaningful and keep me from despair. but they are the top of the pyramid and come after you cover the rest of your bases, and as a culture we seem to have elected to be 14yrs old indefinitely and want to pine and wax poetic, or play video games assuming someone else will make twinkies fall from the sky and pick up the poo afterward.

crap, i don't know how that whole rant boiled out of one line(art school) in the review of a film I will never see. please excuse my shortness, it has been a long week.

as i said, i am not opposed to art or bald-faced crapola entertainment. and i do spend a lot of my idle moments either watching film, or treading pajiba waters.

What bothers me is when there is a critical momentum of people who think their mission in life is to be creative and nothing else, regardless of talent or saturation in the market. seriously, all the folks in creative writing courses that might have put their energies into something necessary that is neglected?

more generally, it is the loss of the citizen, replaced by the self-fulfilling individual. and shit, that's awesome when we get a christopher nolan or leo tolstoy. Just not when everyone wants to be christopher nolan and no one wants to look after agriculture, or city planning. Goethe is best known for his artistic works, but he also worked full time in the civil service and side-lined as a scientist(naturalist). Aside from his other work being useful, it would have also lent experience to his outlook, his worldview, shaping what he felt was important. he wasn't focussed on self-expression or fame. he didn't think entertainment was the prime goal.

but again, like i said, a lot of what should be my peer group went into really self-indulgent driections and professed either scorn or disdain at anything remotely practical. they are the same people that whine about the state of the world and want to stage puppet theatre protests, but would never think of being politically engaged, working inside the system, or simply getting trained in some contributing profession.

and i understand them, they grew up in the wealthiest generation ever in history, past or future, and they were trained to feel like special snowflakes.

the people coming of age now, you would think they would feel uncomfortable, whether it is the shortage of trained electricians, or response to a reactionary neoliberal government that hollows out everything from the community other than the right to shop, or even the fact that so much of everything is crumbling around us from lack of attention, and crumbling at the worst moment due to environmental factors.

at a time when people really need to wake up and say "what can i do to help make things work, I am just miserable about a movie whose theme is "you aren't crazy, you just need to go to art school and find yourself, don't listen to the pressures of your elders or the world around you"

I know how that scam played out.

Yet when film reviews don't do anything but provide the most cursory glimpse at the plot before diving into merit, the reviewer is criticized for alienating the reader or accused of not seeing the film. Online film critics cannot win.

Uh, gee thanks, Fuggle, for dumping on my gift.

Haha, it's okay, but what the frig are you doing here if city planning equates to wholehearted selfish douche-baggery in your books?

Same damn thing I told that art teacher in college - Plato's Republic would never survive without city planners and civil engino-whoosits. It is the search for the perfectly planned city that is prime in the story of humanity, and distinguishing disparate characteristics - religion through city planning, literacy via letter characters and icons, country through shared totem and lore - that via city planning, separates us from the hive mind. God, this is tough even to copypasta, the pretension is rending my soul.

You like your haircut? City planning! Your coffee? Your comfy pants? Your car? Your couch? Your poster? etc.

Whew...done.

Anyone who doesn't understand that the world needs city planners as well as playwrights as well as baristas as well as sanitation engineers as well as pilots as well blah fuckity blah blah doesn't understand humanity. We're all in this together, we're all cogs in the machine, and of course we should try our god damndest to do what it is that we love. Sometimes what we love is also necessary, and most times we don't get to do everything we want because that's just how life is. It's short, it's full of suffering, disappointment, and failure. If Johnny D'Bag wants to go to art school, more power to him. He'll most likely end up helping me find a book at Borders, but that's important, too.

We ought to be more concerned about motivating youth into appreciating and loving math and science instead of stomping of their dreams of becoming an artist, or what have you. There's value and necessity in both, and they don't have to be mutually exclusive. But, in a single individual they can be, and that's not bad, either. We can't all be fucking Renaissance Wo/Men.

Idleprimate - Your message is not a popular one, but it's important. At its heart, IMHO, is the reason why Americans are at the bottom of math and science achievement when we used to be at or near the top...30 years ago.

Yes, the world needs ditch diggers too. No, it's not glamorous or personally fulfilling work, but ditches get water and sewage flowing through city systems. Without them, we'd be dry and full of shit.

Golf clap, Idleprimate. Golf clap.

Salad, you missed my point entirely. I never said city planning wasn't important, I had said that unless you enjoy city planning (OR ANY OTHER JOB), ending up doing that job is going to suck for you.

Which is why you get movies like this - because no one wants to feel like a loser. And some people get to have jobs they enjoy, doing something they like. Seeing that, if you don't get one of those jobs, then some escapism is nice.

My point is while you, and Ildeprimate, speak something of truth that you need all sorts of jobs - unless you can fill the required number with people who enjoy it, you're going to face a lot of discontent unless people drink (literally or metaphorically) or metaphorically stockholm syndrome themselves into not caring or noticing it. And as a consequence, you're going to get a lot of reactive or anticipatory reactions in entertainment against this creeping personal doom.

And yes, I'd be thoroughly surprised if you took all the mundane and the dehumanizing and the dirty jobs and it was what most of the people doing them honestly wanted to do, instead of it being what ended up paying their bills and then the product of rationalization into something resembling drunken comfort.

It's not to say that those jobs aren't necessary, they absolutely are. It's also not to say that people can't enjoy them, or that there's something wrong with people who do - they can, and that's fine. It's to say that simply saying "these jobs are necessary" ignores the natural consequences on the populace of needing more people in them than that want to do it.

And if your response to that is just "boo hoo, too bad", may you too be poxed with ending up with your best career prospects being in jobs you at best care nothing for, too.

Just putting it out there: some of us go into the arts in order to do something productive and to change shit. One example is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal Another is the folks with whom I work who use arts techniques as educational tools, or therapeutic tools for the mentally ill (or elderly, or incarcerated). So beware of lumping all us artists into the selfish "Me First!" navel-gazing category. There's a whole world of artists/performers who are using their skills to enact social change with tangible results.

/end soapbox

[this movie still sounds disappointing, though - art school won't solve suicidal depression. If anything, it'll make it worse...]

this review is spot on. i saw it today and was sadly disappointed. i grew up reading ned vizzini and was stoked about the casting choices but they never got you inside the craig's brain to see how messed up he was. the book starts off with this really great scene where he's trapped in the bathroom-not physically trapped but like mentally he can't leave and face everything...but anyway. yeh. MEH. is accurate

When a film breaks into a music video for no apparent reason you know you're in trouble.

Good to see Galifianakis stretch a bit, but the review nailed all the reasons why this film is so mediocre.

And, yes, a teen with loving parents, a good friend and enough money to buy cool stuff (most likely) is tough to feel pity for ...

Every time someone goes, "When I become a parent, I'm never going to make my kids do __________" I want to strangle them. The reason we are the way we are is because our parents pushed us to be that way. Someone's a gifted pianist? Who paid for the lessons, drove you to recitals? Someone excels at architectural planning? Who was there to help you with your Legos?

Granted, these are hypothetical situations, and are banking on the fact that you had parents who gave a shit. But future generations are only the product of the effort we put into them now.

Also, Sandman reference ftw. He's one of my inspirations to write, and Dave McKean is always an artist's treat.

IMO, it was one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. I could see how somebody could have been bored by this but I'm hard-pressed!

This reviewer obviously went in wanting a completely different movie closer to one flew over the cuckoo's nest with drama, excitement, hilariously insane dark characters.
This is not that movie.The reason for all this is the unit he went to which was a mental health SHORT term facility. This movie sent subtle hints where it was trying to differentiate itself from those movies. See the mental health setting is very different from the long-term insitutionalized setting. Here problems aren't dealt with on a very deep aspect. They stabilize the patient, and get them out of there. Lots of pt's there have anxiety concerning group homes. Lots of mental disorders on display, but the importance was placed more on the interactions and the journey rather than the reasons. They tried to explore what life was like on the inside without trying to explore the how's and why because that's not necessarily what somebody who suddenly finds themself there is wondering about.
The whole thing was about how tiny events can make a subtle but strong change in somebody's life. And that was the point.
Also props to showing the mental health staff in a positive light. Somebody obviously did their research on this movie. Note the DSM books. It wasn't meant to be scary, frightening, or dramatic, or outrageously funny. It was meant to be an experience.
Everytime the character seemed to want to know more, it was brushed aside because that wasn't the point of the movie.
The little they showed about the character's mind were actually rather big reveals. However, its weakness was that somebody not versed with mental disorders may not have gotten. I say that, not to be snobby, but just because these disorders are complex and many.
Anyway, the point wasn't to show his mind but to show how he responded to the therapy/challenges.
A lot of people with mental disorders do not get cured but the small changes that happen are important for that person. I think the most clear example of that was Zach G. Spoiler alert!: Got to spend some time with the kid. Still estranged from his partner. Suicidal stuff hasn't been solved but his "vacation" was good for him.