Revival by Stephen King

Photo: The book's cover art, from its Wikipedia page

Another compulsively-readable book by Stephen King, Revival is one of his recent best.  A mish-mash of Frankenstein (thematically) and Lovecraft (in plot, Otherness, and The Angry Ones, as well as some fairly fearsome Gods) and Hieronymus Bosch, it reads like a first-person confessional (which is a well King has tapped for some time now) and it ends with one of the more horrifying things that King--or anyone I've read--has ever written.
 
Especially if it's true, if that's really what's waiting for us Afterwards.  If you've ever seen Bosch's Seven Deadly Sins or his Garden of Earthly Delights, you'll know what I mean.  Nasty, disturbing and memorable stuff.  This book's ending--and the potential ending for us all, good or bad--are just that: nasty, disturbing and memorable.  Frightening, because the "good" or "bad" doesn't matter.  The ending depicted here isn't the ending of the bad.  It's the ending of all of us.

In recent interviews, King has said that the views expressed by the narrator are not necessarily his--a fact that any reader is well aware, in anyone's writing.  But he has also said recently that he thinks about Death and God a lot (which King fans have always known), and that he does believe in God.  Sometimes he says that there has to be a God, because otherwise he would not have survived his accident or his addictions.  (This begs the question: Since others have not survived being hit by a car, or concurrent alcohol and coke addictions, does that mean there isn't a God?  Or does God simply not want them to live?)  Lately, King's been using Pascal's Wager to express his views.
 
(Pascal's Wager has always seemed like a cop-out to me, but it's really not meant to be.  And as I get older, and I contemplate that slab of stone more and more, Pascal's Wager sounds infinitely more rational.  Though I don't know how one can live a life as if one believes in God, which is what the Wager advises, if one truly does not believe.  But I suppose an agnostic like myself could pull it off.)

This is actually not much of a digression, as a belief in Something is very much at the core of this novel.  Picture an agnostic who grew up with devout, religious parents, and throw in some family tragedies, a wasted life of coke and booze, and some Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror, with Bosch's view of a potential eternity in Hell and a Frankenstein theme, and some hellish chaos on Earth at the very un-Stephen King-like end (after all the Frankenstein / Lovecraft / Bosch stuff), and you've just about got the narrator and his story.

There are some other horrors until then as well, neatly tucked into this novel.  There's a car accident you won't soon forget, and a dream about dead family members that those of us with dead family members will all relate to--and not happily.  And his ending after the ending (a writing style I've pointed out in my last ten or so reviews of King's work) is even more unforgettable.  It's debatable, in fact, if the first or second ending is more horrible.  Since I don't believe in the existence of the first, and since I very much believe in the existence of the evil--or of, worse, the tragic inexplicable--portrayed in the second, I'm going with the latter.  You watch the news, you see this.

The writing is as compulsively-readable as always, but--finally!!!--here are some horrors, terrors and chills, too.  If forced to rate out of five stars, I'd say this is a four--only if compared to his truly great stuff, like IT and The Shining.  But compared to his most recent stuff--some of it quite terrible, and sometimes, at best, rather pedestrian--Revival would get five.  Though the title refers to the revival of the narrator and a few of its almost-dead characters, it could well refer to King's horror writing as well.

Read it, regardless.  And then Wikipedia Pascal's Wager, if you have to, and tell me whether it makes more pragmatic, rational sense than it may have in your youth.

American Horror Story--Freakshow--Edward Mordrake, Part 1--Episode 3

Photo:  It's all over the net, but I got it from http://verumfabula.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/the-curious-case-of-edward-mondrake/

Some quick thoughts about this good episode:

--Michael Chiklis's Strongman (aka--Dell Toledo) never got around to telling his wife he was sorry to hear she was dying.

--Very nice opening with Ethel and her doctor.  I would imagine that alcohol would've killed a lot of carnival workers / "freaks" back in the day.

--Speaking of alcohol, the commercials pushing it during this episode: Coors, Yuengling, Jack Daniels, Sam Adams.  I think there were more.  That's just off the top of my head.

--Emma Roberts' fortune teller will end up actually being able to tell the future.  That's my prophecy, if you will.

--Sarah Paulson's Bette and Dot wouldn't have shared the same dream.  They have two heads and therefore two brains.  Of course, that's where the dreams are.  But it's nice symmetry to make it that way, anyway, especially if it's a nice dream for one and a nightmare for the other.  If the operation does happen, the one to survive will be the one who thought it was a nightmare, naturally.  And she'll act like she's the other one.

--Why is everyone talking about salaries and jobs?  And raises?  No customers = no money.

--Jessica Lange's (second) song montage was like a bad 80s video: people walking around aimlessly in a thick mist for no reason at all.

--How did Elsa Mars summon Edward Mordrake?  The story, as told by Kathy Bates, was that a performance on Halloween will produce him.  But Elsa Mars didn't perform--she practiced.  (Again, no customers.)  A rehearsal is not a performance.  At least, not from what I recall from my Philosophy of Art class, anyway.  Doesn't a performance mandate an audience?

--Why couldn't Kathy Bates's Ethel Darling just shave very, very often?  I'm just sayin'.

###  The remaining portion of this entry can be found on my American Horror Story Freak Show blog.  Thanks for reading.  Incidentally, which character on the show do you find the creepiest?

Nemesis--Book Review

Photo: Paperback cover of the book, from this website.
 
Yet another great Nordic Noir.  Nesbo is right up there with Mankell and (in the first two books of the series, anyway) Steig Larsson.  Mankell is a bit more abruptly gritty (still can't forget he had his main character make a brief mention of soiling himself) and Larsson was a bit more character-driven, but all three are giants in the genre, and deserve to be.

In this one, Hole is face-to-face with yet another ex-girlfriend (he's got lots of those, as he's a work-obsessed alcoholic), who apparently still holds some sort of grudge against him.  But she's beautiful, and Hole may, or may not, have had something to do with her dying.  This happens further into the book than you'd think.  Nesbo handles that well, though I suspect that a lesser writer wouldn't.  And Nesbo is successful enough to ignore the adage of agents: The crimes need to happen right away.

One crime that does happen right away is a bank robbery.  There've been more than a few of those over the years, with maybe the same M.O.--but maybe not.  Throw in a feud with another cop and an infamous prisoner related to the woman described above, and there's much going on here.

As with many Nesbo books, this one seems to end two or three times before it finally does, which became a little distracting for me here, but not overly so.  There was more to solve, and it's right that crimes like these don't get neatly solved and gift-wrapped quickly, like they do on TV and in the movies.  Plus, there's the slightly strung-together storyline with his on-and-off current girlfriend and her son to deal with.  (They'll come into play big-time in Nesbo's Phantom, to be reviewed soon.)

The crimes themselves shouldn't throw an established reader of this genre.  I had the bank robbery and the ex-girlfriend's demise figured out almost right away, though I didn't catch on to the signature in the emails.  (This is rather embarrassing, as one should always be able to explain the book's title in relation to the story.)  That is, I knew what had exactly happened, and by whom, but with no proof whatsoever.  Nesbo's books work well that way: For all the good writing, the characterization and description, it all boils down to a procedural.  Watching how Hole solves it all and gets the evil-doers despite himself and his flaws is the whole ride.

Memoir as Self-Punishment: My Dark Places by James Ellroy--Book Review

Photo: From the book's Wikipedia page.  This ain't the edition I read.  This cover looks terrible.  I get the reason for it, but there wasn't a better pic of him driving and investigating?

These are some very dark places, indeed.  This is a memoir / autobiography / crime procedural written in Ellroy's hyper, staccato style.  (Think of his Black Dahlia or L.A. Confidential, two classics of the crime genre--or of any genre.)  You'll learn more than you'd want to know about Ellroy as a young boy--and you'll be blown away by how honest it is.  These are things that even very honest people don't put in their memoirs, but I suspect that Ellroy likes the honesty of it, in a brutal, self-hurting, confessional kind of way.  I'm curious to know what he thinks he's punishing himself for.

The beginning portion chronicles his parents from a child's POV.  They get divorced.  His mother gets murdered.  His father becomes a useless drunk.  Ellroy becomes a nervous, high-strung, self-destructive kid who barely graduates high school.  After doing so, he learns how to B & E into his favorite girls' homes, and he doesn't do so to steal anything.  You can take it from there.  He later becomes an alcoholic / sniffer and homeless person.  He gets so bad that he develops an abscess on one of his lungs and almost dies from it.  This straightens him out.  Somewhat.

Fast-forward many years.  He becomes very successful and decides to re-open his mother's unsolved murder case.  He hires an ex-cop and they track people and things down.  Amidst all this is the most frank Oedipal writing you'll ever see, to the point that it made this reader a little uncomfortable.  Despite this, you can't help but marvel at the tremendous breath and energy of his writing, or the depth he plumbs of his feelings and thoughts.  It reads so fast, but so dense, that you wonder how he could top it with the author-read audiotapes advertised at the back of the book.  But I'll bet he does.

This book is not for the squeamish, for the crime scene descriptions, the murders detailed, and the psyche analyzed.  Ellroy doesn't come out of this especially likeable, but you'll be fascinated by his energy and writing--if you like the staccato style.  If you can't handle hyper people, you won't like his hyper writing, and you certainly won't like his hyper mind.  He comes across as a guy you'd love to have a beer with, maybe, or to talk to, because he's undeniably fascinating.  But you probably wouldn't want to be married to this guy, or to have to live with him for any reason.  I bet he'd wear ya down.  And that's me sayin' this--surprising, as I'm the most hyper and hyper-kinetic guy I know.

Anyway, his 50s L.A. is also fiendishly covered, as is the investigative process.  After the huge letdown of the unsolved JonBenet murder case I covered in my recent review of Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, this (still) unsolved murder was also a bit of a downer.  Seems like people are getting away with murder these days--literally.  (Or, in the late 50s and in 1996, anyway.)  But books like these show you what the cops are up against, and how easily a murder investigation can very quickly go to hell.  Most of the murders mentioned, covered and explained in Ellroy's book are all unsolved.  When a jury comes back with a guilty verdict for a guy from a 1950s cold case gone right, the 1996 investigators all have a party--and the reader feels like joining them.  This guy, at least, towards the end, is one that didn't get away.  But all the others do.

Ultimately, a reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle said it best when he wrote that Ellroy's My Dark Places was "...Both a harrowing autobiography and a disturbingly fixated love story...blunt, graphic, and oddly exhilirating." 

Damned If You Do--Book Review: If You Read It, You're [see title]

 Photo: Book's hardcover, from robertbparker.net. 

The real title is Robert B. Parker's Damned If You Do, but if you read my reviews, you know how I feel about using a name as part of the title, especially if he's dead, so I won't further go at it here.  But...argh...

And that's pretty much what I have to say about this book itself, as well.  This is a giant step back from the other two Brandman novels, neither of which were exemplary to begin with.  What a horribly written story!  The dialogue is wooden and preposterous.  The story is tired and distant.  It's told and not shown.  And it's got little writer edits at the end of some sentences, like Brandman's explaining it to us.  (Note to Brandman: Mystery and procedural readers like to remember such things for themselves.  Even if they're unimportant--because you don't know until the end what was important and what wasn't, right?)

There are too many examples to cite them all.  There were so many that I had to put the book down and do something else.  I actually groaned and complained out loud.  And I can't find the one now I really wanted to put here, so...From page 247, after Jesse Stone saw a character, who he'd liked, die: "He hoped that the scotch would accomplish what he was unable to achieve himself...He wanted it to erase the haunting look in her dying eyes from his mind and his heart."

First, that's just bad writing.  Second, that's telling, not showing.  Third, if you've read Parker's--and even Brandman's--Jesse Stone works before, Stone (and the 3rd person narrator) would never think or speak like this.  Fourth, we all know why people drink after they've seen someone they like die.  Fifth, we all know why borderline alcoholics (or former alcoholics, which Stone is) drink after such an event.  Sixth, that last sentence--melodrama, anyone?  And Stone, and Parker--well, they're so anti-melodrama that this is just blasphemy, in of itself.  And I know that comparing Brandman and Parker is unfair because they're different people--but Brandman is so obviously trying to emulate Parker's sparse style, and failing so miserably at it, that the comparison is just here.  I feel certain that Parker would be upset with this book.

And the action sequences are just as bad.  This from page 239: "Suddenly everyone was on the move.  Chairs scraped loudly and tables were overturned as people began to anxiously respond.  There were shouts of panic.  The crowd began a confused surge towards the exits."

Again, this is just bad writing.  The word "suddenly" was used tons of times in this book.  That's bad.  When chairs scrape, it's loud.  So that's redundant--and it tells.  And it overuses adverbs, which I learned in high school and college is bad to do.  When people are "on the move," what is that, exactly?  When settlers are on the move, they're just walking along, and slowly.  There's probably lots of dust.  And when there are "shouts of panic" and scraping chairs and overturning tables--that's not how people "anxiously respond."  That's chaos.  Stuttering is anxiously responding.  And notice the word "began" is used twice in this one short paragraph.  Nobody begins to do something.  That's a huge pet peeve of mine, and it's used a million times in this book.  You're either doing that thing, or you're not doing that thing.  In this image, the people were well beyond the "began to anxiously respond" stage, whatever that is.  They were panicked and running over each other.  By definition, a surge is an action in progress, so there's no "began" there, either.

Literally almost every sentence and every paragraph has an instance of lazy writing, bad writing, passive writing, and...Oh, man, it was just plain horrible.  What a disappointment!  I don't want the reader to think I'm just nitpicking here, or in a bad mood, or whatever.  I'm telling it straight--the writing of this book is that bad.

So bad I was shocked at its badness.

So bad it gives hope to all unpublished writers out there--if this can find its way into Barnes & Noble, your book can, too.

So bad I pictured Parker rolling over in his grave.

So bad it was a blight on all the Jesse Stone books I've bought and read before--all in hardcover, too.

So bad that if someone else hadn't bought this book for me for Christmas, I would've stopped reading it.

So bad that I can't even say to save it for bathroom reading, which is the advice I usually give for bearably bad books.  But this isn't even bathroom reading--unless you need to use its paper.  Which you probably should.

This is so bad that it reminded me of Dorothy Parker's quip: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force."

By the way, the characters and story are bad, too.  Stone, a police chief, tells a mass murderer that he feels "surprisingly comfortable" that he's watching his back.  I'm not kidding.  I actually disliked Stone at the end.

The best things about this book are the title, and the cover.  And that it ended.

Skip it, even if you have all the others.  It is worth having a hole in your collection so you don't have to put yourself through this.  It is that bad.

Don't even buy it in the remainder bin.  Don't start off the new year with this.  Don't do that to yourself.
   

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Photo: The book's cover, from goodreads.com

Eh.

That's really all I was going to write.  After months of anticipation, after all that time reading its 528 pages (well, okay, that took me just a few days), even after being the tome that drove me to the bookstore to write the most recent blog entry--yeah, "eh" was all I was going to write.

But then I got disappointed.  Really, really disappointed.  I mean, this is how Danny Torrance ended up?  Not bad, but...eh?  That's it?  After everything he went through in The Shining, this is the denouement of his life?  (Or, probably, the Act IV before the Act V resolution.)

Okay.  Speaking of The Shining, this book is obviously its sequel, and the comparisons, while impossible not to make, are unfair.  As King himself wrote in his afterword, "...people change.  The man who wrote Doctor Sleep is very different from the well-meaning alcoholic who wrote The Shining..."  True enough.  And on the same page, he makes the point that the first real scare will always be the best (He compared Hitchcock's Psycho to Mick Garris's good, but not as good, Psycho IV).  This is also true enough.

But the disconcerting thing is that I wasn't expecting the genius of The Shining.  I believe, as King said above, that that man is gone, never to return.  I don't expect the genius, the scariness, of The Shining, of IT, of a few others, ever again.  And that's not necessarily a bad thing.  The creepiness and the wistful and sad nostalgia of the last third of Insomnia (which I thought was a different kind of greatness) could not have been written by Shining's King, for example.  Other good parts of other better books could not have been written by 70s King, including Bag of Bones (which is very underrated) and any of the four novellas of Different Seasons.  So different and new is not always bad.

What is bad here is that this book does not scare.  At all.  In fact, only three small sections were even creepy--and I'm not sure if it's because of how he wrote them, or because of the imagination I brought to them, of how I interpreted them and imagined them.  I'm pretty sure that the images I gave myself after I read those three small parts creeped me out more than the parts themselves did.  So the book does not scare at all.  It only barely creeps you out.  And it's got a little of that sad nostalgic thing he's been doing for a long time now, but even that was miniscule.

Unfortunately, what it does do is judge.  There's a lot of author intrusion there, mostly upon the RV People.  (What else is there to call them?)  They're called lots of bad names, and often not just by the characters.  King often seems to jump in the fray and cuss at them, too.  Of course, they're killers (and, most notably, child killers), so you don't feel bad for them, per se.  But the way he draws them, what else could they be?  They're not really people, but they once were, perhaps, and there's the rub, maybe.  But maybe not.  Essentially, they were all once victims of somebody else, like a vampire who kills by sucking blood exactly, and only, because they were victims of a vampire themselves.  At that point, they're no longer fully responsible for what they have to do to survive.  Maybe such creatures kill themselves in Anne Rice's world (or in Stephanie Meyers' world), but that's not "realistic."  Something needs to be done about them, of course, but with such anger and hatred?  Very unlike King.  It's very distasteful.  Especially when you consider that King portrays them all as so human otherwise.  Some RVers are funny; some are smart.  Some are annoying.  A few are physical goddesses.  There's an old man who smells, and a computer geek who loves the newest technology, and a numbers guy who you'd love to be your own accountant.

And there's Andi, the victim that the book practically starts off with.  She's been raped and molested by her father for years, and then she finally kills him, and to survive, she steals money by (sort of) seducing men--who we're blatantly told she doesn't like--and while she doesn't kill them, she leaves a visible calling card on their faces that they won't soon (if ever) forget.  The problem here is that the reader sort of likes that about her, and when she becomes a victim of the RVers, we don't like it, and we wish better for her.  And then the book virtually ignores her as it focuses on the sex goddess in charge (see the cover), and we don't see Andi again until about 80% to 85% of the way through the book.  When we do, it's all over so fast that we wonder why we got to know her to begin with.  And if you're like me, you won't like how that happens, either, or the meanness behind it.

The three creepy scenes, for me, happened in the first quarter or so of the book, and the rest is just...this happens, and then this happens, and then this, and then...without fanfare, creepiness, chills or thrills.  Really, after the scene with the woman and her child after the first 25%, it's all plot, little character (except for the RVers, which is part of the book's problem right there), and---eh.  I hate to say it, but if you were to put the book down halfway through, you really wouldn't miss much.  Seriously.  Send me an email and ask me how it ends, if you'd like, but, I'm tellin' ya...

--A little aside: Maybe I can start a part-time business like that.  I read the books, and if people don't want to finish them, they email me for how it ends, because you always want to know that, right?  For this I charge a minimal fee.  You get your ending, I get my money, and I feel that I haven't totally wasted my time reading the book, since I'm also making money from it.  Maybe I could do that for movies, too.--

Anyway, I digress.  I just didn't like it.  I hate to say it like that, but there it is.  There are maybe three or four very good scenes--and, again, I don't know if that's more reader imagination than author's writing--and all the rest is just eh.  Not bad, exactly, but not really good, either.  Sort of like the difference between an A student, who tries very hard, and a C-, D student who wants to pass, but doesn't really give a damn.  The kinds who pass, but who don't learn anything.  The ones who sit there all day long, emanating eh.

You'll see Dick Halloran, and Wendy and Jack Torrance (the last at the very end, and huh?), but you'll see them for such a short time, and with such varying degrees of solidity that you wonder why they're there at all.

And here's where I have an answer I don't like.  I think King wrote this for three reasons--and in hopefully this order:

1.  He was actually seriously wondering what Danny Torrance was doing these days.  (Who hasn't been after they read The Shining?)

2.  He wanted to write about his alcohol and drug recovery.  (AA stuff takes up a vast majority of stuff space in the book.)

3.  He wanted to distance his characters from the Stanley Kubrick movie of the same name.

The first reason is solid.  The second reason is okay, too, but maybe not for the boy from The Shining.  Yes, his father was an alcoholic, and we learn that his grandparents, etc. were, too (though only the men, apparently).  But his mother wasn't, and neither was anyone on her side of the family.  And that story was more Jack Torrance's than his son's, anyway.  But if I'm Stephen King, and I'm curious about what Danny was doing, and I wanted to write about my own addiction and recovery, and that life, then why not put them together?  I didn't like the result, but maybe it was doable.  Okay.

But the last reason is maybe not as okay.  King notoriously dislikes Kubrick's movie, and I don't blame him.  I like the movie, but I don't love it.  I read the book first, and it's so unlike the book that I can only like the movie if I completely forget about the book.  Sometimes I can do that; others, I can't.  In short, the reason King and I both dislike the movie is that King's book is about a good, but very flawed, man, who has his weaknesses used against him by the evils of the Overlook Hotel, but who redeems himself by sacrificing himself at the end to save his son.  The movie is about an A-hole who becomes more and more of an insane A-hole before the movie ends.  Add into that the fact that Wendy Torrance in the book is a very blonde, beautiful, tough chick, and that Shelley Duvall in the movie was a sniveling whiner (and viewers need to give her a break, as that characterization was all Kubrick's, and he was literally driving her crazy) who nobody could stand (and the same might be said of the movie Danny as well), and there you have it.  King and I agree that the movie was visually stunning (as every Kubrick movie is), and perhaps worth seeing for that reason alone, but it's not the book, and the very spirit of the book is lost with it.  The book was a five-act Shakespearean tragedy (King himself describes it that way) and the film is a stunning movie with characters who didn't at all come from the book, which changes the texture of the whole thing.  And, considering all this, it must have been especially annoying for King when you realize that a great percentage of the movie's dialogue comes directly from the book.  I'm talkin' verbatim.

Having said all that (and sorry if I insinuated above that King and I have actually had conversations about this), Doctor Sleep ultimately fails because it also lacks consistent characterization.  Dan Torrance does not develop after about a third of the way through.  Once he settles in NH, it's all happenstance.  The characters who actually take over the character arc are the RVers, and this is yet another example lately (Under the Dome was the most recent, and don't even get me started on the bad book and the even worse tv show) of Stephen King focusing more on his antagonists than on his protagonists, as if even he is bored with what his main characters have become.  Notice that through the whole second half, the RVers are the only characters who change.

And are they really solid antagonists?  You'll have to be the judge, but I vote Nay.  They went not with a bang, but with a whimper.  And with relative ease.

So...that's it.

Huge disappointment.

Just.....eh.   

Silver Linings Playbook

Photo: movie poster, from its Wikipedia page

_____

[Note: The word "Crazies" here is used to denote the categorical, but not universal, behavior of the characters described, and the behavior of their real-life counterparts.  Never doubt that these behaviors cause these victims to suffer--especially when the self-realization and guilt hit.  These people are not crazy; they are ill.  They suffer, and they are victims--often of their own, often uncontrolled, behaviors.]

_____

Can two Crazies fall in love?  And if they do, is it really love, or are they just crazy?  Do Crazies know what love is, or is what they think love is just more of the obsessive behavior that embodies their craziness?

And does it matter?  Luckily, no, not at all.  Not in this film.

Believe me, I know Crazies (not going to go there), and I assure you that they are very much like the characters played by Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro--and yet nothing like them at all.  Will they scream bloody murder at each other and slap each other in public?  Yes.  Will the girl scream that he's harassing her, in public?  Yes.  Will she then turn on the crowd and the cop who respond to her yelling?  Yes.  Will she then lie to save the guy who she's just lied about to begin with--all of this still in public?  Yes.  Because that's what Crazies do.

But will the cop--who happens to be assigned to the Bradley Cooper character--walk away from this like he does in the movie?  No.  No, he won't.  And now the Cooper character, in real life, would have violated his probation, or whatever, and that's the end.

And there are a million more examples of this throughout the movie, examples of how Cooper and Lawrence represent real-life Crazies, yet not, at the same time.  The brilliance of this movie--especially to those like me who have been there, and who have, finally, walked away from them, and who have survived the hurricane caused by the damaging winds of their illnesses and personalities--is that you don't care about the discrepancies.  Maybe most audience members will wonder how someone can stay around people who are as much of a live wire as these two are--and possibly that's a great question, even without having to deal with someone like the guy's father, who's a Crazy himself--but the reality is that you can, for reasons we won't go into.

Granted, Cooper's and Lawrence's characters have things going for them that most bipolar obsessives with anger-management issues and lots of self-hatred and self-defeating behaviors don't have going for them--namely, an avoidance of drugs and alcohol; an avoidance of really nasty characters who don't have an avoidance of drugs and alcohol; and a large-enough support group, which in this case consists of a bipolar, obsessive and angry father, a counselor who doesn't advise his clients not to go to professional sports games where there will most likely be lots of alcohol and fighting (and who shows up there himself), a rather straight-laced brother, and some friends who don't run away from them, although they do things like wake up their parents at 3 a.m., throw books out of windows at 3 a.m., walk out of social dinners in the middle of the dinner, and spout whatever's on their minds, at a million miles an hour, without a filtering system of any kind (Cooper's character).  Or, they do many of the above things, and sleep with the entire office and half the town on top of it (Lawrence's character).  These support groups don't leave because they, somehow, don't suffer from the antics of these characters.  In real life, they would leave because such characters, ultimately, and after possibly many years, leave them no other choice.  Everyone gets injured, but you wish them well.

But that's not the reality of the movie here, and by the end of it, despite all this, you're rooting for them despite yourself, because they are sweet, and endearing, and they mean well, which isn't exactly reality, either, but whatever.  You want it to be the reality, and so it is, at least for two hours.  And that's the genius of this film: That despite the (many) conventions, and despite the (many) breaks from reality, the writing and, especially, the acting--from Cooper, Lawrence and De Niro--are so outstanding that they draw you in, and you root for them, and when the two Crazies fall in love at the end (because Cooper's character walks away from his film-long obsession, which such a real-life person wouldn't do, or at least not without the emotional devastation that would accompany it), you buy it, and you forget that these people are suffering from an illness, because you like them so much that you don't want them to suffer from the illness anymore, and so they don't.  And they live life happily ever after, in each other's arms and in each other's laps.  Smiling, laughing, and drinking beer, which real-life bipolar victims and obsessives simply would not do, not if they ever wanted to recover, to manage their illness, and to live something close to a real life.

Happily, real life is not what this is, and you'll love it as I did, so go see it.  (And don't think too much of the title.)

P.S.--Normally I'd blanch at a movie that makes the thirty-seven year-old (Cooper's age at filming) main character fall in love with the twenty-one year-old (Lawrence's age at filming) love interest, and vice-versa.  But these characters are supposed to be ageless; you're not supposed to consider their ages just like you're not supposed to consider that real bipolar victims' lives don't (and won't) work out this way.  It's a fantasy movie in which such people could live like this, and suddenly reverse illness and behave like this, and fantasy characters are ageless.  Jennifer Lawrence's performance, surely one of the year's best, transcends her real age anyway, and she more than holds her own with De Niro, never mind Cooper.  If I hadn't just mentioned it, you might not have considered the ages until movie's end, anyway.  I didn't.

P.P.S.--This from the movie's Wikipedia page:

Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph . . . describes the lead character as a "rambling headcase", his mental illness passed off as a lovable quirk and complains that Tiffany's reasons for being interested in him are largely unexplored. [Jennifer Lawrence] does manage to create a complex character from thin material, but he criticizes Russell [David O. Russell, the director] for ogling her.

(Me again.) All true, but I disagree with Collin about one thing: none of it matters.  That's how good the film's suspension of disbelief is.  So go see it.  (But while watching, you can't help but notice how often the film's mise-en-scene is Lawrence's butt, or chest, mostly during the dance rehearsing scenes.  That did weird me out a tiny bit.)