I wonder, boys and girls, if Bradley Cooper secretly hates writers. Not on a conscious level, mind you, but in some dark corner of his soul where his id fantasizes about slaughtering us all in our sleep. It's the id that has all the dark business, isn't it? I say this because he seems to delight in playing writers that are rather dreadful human beings (or perhaps a more charitable person would just say they are particularly susceptible to human frailties). First it was Limitless - where the writer took a magic pill that let him write his book in one night and then go on to be a TOTAL SCHMUCK for the rest of the film. Now it's The Words. Oh, The Words.
I should not have gone to this movie.
Oh, by the way SPOILERS AHOY! MAD HUGE SPOILERS. I'm not even going to try to contain the spoilers so, you know, you've been warned.
Plagiarism. Isn't that a happy topic for a movie? But it's a movie about a book and it had a cast I enjoy (Oh, Jeremy Irons, why? Why did you do this to me?), so I thought, perhaps there will be a good message in the end and it will delight me. The previews said it was the first Must See movie of the year. Lying punks who make previews. I shake my fist at them.
I thought the moral was going to be Plagiarism Is Bad, which I can get behind. But then the moral seemed to skew to somewhere between You Can Plagiarize And Get Away With It! and The Worst Thing About Plagiarism Is the Guilt Poor Poor You Will Feel. And don't tell your wife, because if you do, she will leave you, so if you are going to plagiarize, be secretive!
If you've seen the movie, the ONLY thing that even comes CLOSE to redeeming the SUCKAGE of these two messages is the line about how maybe the old man didn't really exist - which makes it a question of either 1) he plagiarized and the old man was a figment of his guilt that ruined his life OR 2) he wrote the book then couldn't accept his own success (ooooooh, right?) and invented the plagiarism thing to cope with his own imposter syndrome, which would be a really cool movie. I just don't think this was that movie.
I was also kind of squicked out by the young girl coming onto him when he was his semi-older Dennis Quaid-self, because I couldn't figure out if she was supposed to be his daughter. And then they were making out and I was like, DEAR GOD I HOPE THAT IS NOT HIS CHILD. But maybe I wasn't supposed to think that, but she knew a lot about his life and Olivia Wilde could potentially be the love child of Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, right?
So the book The Words with no name on the cover was supposed to be his literary form confession that his younger self plagiarized? And he was successful but it was an empty success because his wife left him when he told her that he had stolen the book? Is this really your protagonist? Am I really supposed to relate and/or feel sorry for him? REALLY? No. He had a thousand opportunities to come clean and he didn't. Why do dramas always want us to root for the jerkface douchebags?
You know who I can root for? People who don't plagiarize. That's who.
/rant
I should not have gone to this movie.
Oh, by the way SPOILERS AHOY! MAD HUGE SPOILERS. I'm not even going to try to contain the spoilers so, you know, you've been warned.
Plagiarism. Isn't that a happy topic for a movie? But it's a movie about a book and it had a cast I enjoy (Oh, Jeremy Irons, why? Why did you do this to me?), so I thought, perhaps there will be a good message in the end and it will delight me. The previews said it was the first Must See movie of the year. Lying punks who make previews. I shake my fist at them.
I thought the moral was going to be Plagiarism Is Bad, which I can get behind. But then the moral seemed to skew to somewhere between You Can Plagiarize And Get Away With It! and The Worst Thing About Plagiarism Is the Guilt Poor Poor You Will Feel. And don't tell your wife, because if you do, she will leave you, so if you are going to plagiarize, be secretive!
If you've seen the movie, the ONLY thing that even comes CLOSE to redeeming the SUCKAGE of these two messages is the line about how maybe the old man didn't really exist - which makes it a question of either 1) he plagiarized and the old man was a figment of his guilt that ruined his life OR 2) he wrote the book then couldn't accept his own success (ooooooh, right?) and invented the plagiarism thing to cope with his own imposter syndrome, which would be a really cool movie. I just don't think this was that movie.
I was also kind of squicked out by the young girl coming onto him when he was his semi-older Dennis Quaid-self, because I couldn't figure out if she was supposed to be his daughter. And then they were making out and I was like, DEAR GOD I HOPE THAT IS NOT HIS CHILD. But maybe I wasn't supposed to think that, but she knew a lot about his life and Olivia Wilde could potentially be the love child of Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, right?
So the book The Words with no name on the cover was supposed to be his literary form confession that his younger self plagiarized? And he was successful but it was an empty success because his wife left him when he told her that he had stolen the book? Is this really your protagonist? Am I really supposed to relate and/or feel sorry for him? REALLY? No. He had a thousand opportunities to come clean and he didn't. Why do dramas always want us to root for the jerkface douchebags?
You know who I can root for? People who don't plagiarize. That's who.
/rant
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