Logging

Film:  Silver Linings Playbook

A good, solid movie.  Small.  Pretty similar tonally to The Fighter, but lacks the scale.  Best scene in the movie and one I will think about for a long time is when Jennifer Lawrence comes in and explains to De Niro in his own superstitious, gambler logic why Bradley Cooper should come to her dance competition and how she didn't jinx him.  It was the best De Niro moment in a movie in a long time and a scene than O'Russell can make work better than any living filmmaker.  The asides from other characters in the room "She's right." "Uh, huh's," etc are amazing and give this lively texture to a family scene and gathering that is so often missing from these type of scenes.

I listened to O'Russell on the Treatment yesterday and in a tiny aside he mentions "he writes for a living."  The thought occurred to me, directing movies isn't really a job.  It's an expensive hobby.  Even directors like Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson -- an argument can be made -- they produce and/or write movies for a living and hire themselves to direct.  They don't really get hired to direct movies and they have to perform all these functions of a producer - finding material/script, arranging financing and distribution, all this other work in order to direct the film.

I think guys like O'Russell and Alexander Payne basically doing writing jobs to pay the bills and then direct when they find the right project.  Perhaps you can look at a guy like Fincher as a director exclusively, but I imagine he still does commercials and things to buy himself time to do these big projects.  And these are all guys at the top of their games.  Maybe film schools talk about this, but I don't think the students hear it.  You hear people saying all the time "I want to be a director," which is like saying "I want to collect stamps" for all practical purposes.