“Silver Linings Playbook” – Crazy for you

Dir. David O. Russell
(2012, R, 122 minutes)

Silver Linings Playbook made a strong impression at the Toronto Film Festival, where it won the People’s Choice Award. I’m markedly less enthusiastic. It’s a generally pleasing but mostly by-the-numbers comedy about a couple whose romance follows a trajectory we expect from the start. Often the characters behave more like players hitting their marks than people in organic relationships. There are few surprises. Many of the plot complications are contrived.

“He’s Just Not That Into You”: The rules of the game

Dir. Ken Kwapis
(2009, PG-13, 129 min)
★ ★

The trailers and TV ads teased a romantic comedy for the information age. They repeated, as a mission statement of sorts, a clever line of dialogue about the culture of BlackBerries, email accounts, social networking sites, and cell phones: “Now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”