Lost in inner space

OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie

Crit

Bud Clayman is about the most appealing struggler with mental illness imaginable, at least for a documentary, and his story is more funny than sad, more inspiring than distressing. As he tells us in the opening moments, this is not a film about hand washing—his OCD has to do with "inappropriate" (violent mostly, but also sexual) thoughts that most of us have but don’t much fret, but his condition makes him gnaw on them like dog with a poisonous bone, and then too the other baggage enumerated in the subtitle don’t make things any easier for him. And yet he tries, and his trying is a triumph in itself.

This is also—is this going to be a persistent theme of my post–Scary Normal set life?--a film about filmmaking, complete with a visible boom in one shot, a nicely edited greenscreen scene, and an awkward pause to record room tone (though they cheat this one, giving a voiced-over reading of Bud’s grateful email to his crew).

Safety Not Guaranteed

Crit

Yeah, we could made this. OK, maybe we'd have needed another grand or two for cheesy special effects, but we coulda done it if that had been our screenwriter/director's vision.

A sweet, smart indy romcom, with Repo Man perched securely in its family tree. A small gem.

Trailers

• To Rome with Love--Why bother even showing me a trailer? I think it opens here Friday--hoping for an appropriate postwork showtime.
• Anna Karenina--Hadn't heard that this was coming. It's not Baz, but it has a Bazian feel about it. Unusual trailer in that it tells us who the screenwriter is (Tom Stoppard) but not the director (Joe Wright), though little of the language we hear sounds either Stoppardian or Tolstovian.