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6 Pleasantly Surprising Things About Silver Linings Playbook

If there’s a dark horse with a real chance in this year’s Oscar race, it might just be Silver Linings Playbook. Now everyone’s saying it’s going to be Argo because everyone loves Ben Affleck all of a sudden, or rather they always loved him and found all the hatred to be just SO UNFAIR and now that he has done things that aren’t absolutely terrible we’re therefore going to give him every award there is to give a person. There are some who contend that Lincoln is still the pick to beat because it has the most nominations, it has the Spielberg factor, it has the Daniel Day-Lewis thing, and it has the topical advocacy aspect that if only government acted this way Obama would be able to save the country like Honest Abe did way back when. Hollywood has a tendency for delusions of grandeur. The delusions portrayed in Silver Linings Playbook, though, are one of the many charms about the movie that help maintain its place in the awards conversations.

[h2]5: David O. Russell May Have Found His Groove Again[/h2]

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This director was a hot indie commodity in the late 90s, finding his greatest success in Three Kings, which I should really re-watch since it’s been so long. Then it took him 5 years to release his divisive comedy I Heart Huckabees (I fall on the side that finds it brilliant and hilarious and possibly the best work Mark Wahlberg has ever done). Then, he took a 6-year hiatus, only to return with the smash hit The Fighter, a reunion with Wahlberg and the biggest success by far of Russell’s career.

Silver Linings Playbook marks a return to the prolific output Russell was once known for, coming 2 years after The Fighter, and he’s apparently working on a new project that could see a release at the end of this year. Not only is he producing these excellent works at a remarkable rate now, he’s speaking candidly and clearly in interviews about his desire to find emotional connections in his movies, something that may have been lacking in previous work, particularly Huckabees, which was one issues detractors had with it. There’s a tendency among film people to sort of raise one’s nose at movies that are dramatic and emotional rather than an intellectual exercise, but this snobbery is counterproductive to the creation of lasting art that people will find meaning in beyond studying it in a classroom vacuum.

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