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As Good As It Gets

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Visually, it was okay. Editing was good. The main story I understood. It was about "Rain" having these nightmares about her mom's boarding school. A priest who put her mom in a mental facility, wants to do the same to Rain. Why? because of the atrocities priest & nuns did to Native kids at the school many years ago. I got lost & confused & had questions, many questions. What is Bradley Cooper doing in this film? Why did a Native kill a white government worker? Why?! Was Adam Beach a real police officer or just an idiot? He was accepted into the FBI academy but didn't know Law or how to investigate? Rain was in a car accident & John said she had a bump on her head. Where was it? My list of questions go on..., Georgina Lightning wrote, directed & starred in this. A feat in itself. I hear she won all these Indie awards. For what? My questions continue...,

Lets get this out of the way, the movie was just OK. But the story, the history... congratulations to Lightning for helping get this story out. I read many comments about "boarding schools" and "1970s" and the "US." It's important to note that Lightning is Canadian. The truth behind the fictional story presented here is very much Canadian. As is always the case, it was a Canadian story set in the US to sell it better (see ARGO). The residential school system existed until 1996! Alberta, where Lightning hails from, had the greatest concentration of these institutions. The Residential School system is widely referred to as "Canada's Holocaust" due to the cultural genocide perpetrated against First Nations people by various Church organizations and the Canadian government. So again, congratulations Lightning for helping to raise awareness for this important subject. Too bad the truth is so buried below a sub par fictional story and an unnecessary Americanization of Canadian history.

The story told in this movie made me feel so connected to the intensity of the pain caused to Rain and her family and the children, by those who tried to destroy their way of life in all past, present and future. Rain and all the characters were forced into the dark secrets of the past because it had found their way into their lives and inescapable. I enjoyed how the movie was thought out, visually, conceptually, and with some sit on the edge of your seat suspense. Further more I applaud the development of the characters continuously going deeper and watching them change on the screen, to accomplish all those angles so timely makes it like another world to look into with all the players both in Rain's life and on the reservation, feeling like I get to see the big picture. The fluidity of the many circles and connections seen in the film make the final story such a great accomplishment, and a great conversational piece.

I can hardly express my disappointment in this film. A premise with lots of potential was utterly wasted by a plot line that was both underdeveloped and meandering, soapy dialog and acting that was....just awful.Worse yet, though, was the inescapable feeling that the director was trying to grind an ax. I won't go into details because I don't wish to enter spoiler territory, but it was pretty obvious that this film was less about a story than it was an agenda. The cheap, unbalanced potshots at all-too-easy targets were tiresome and trite over a decade ago; in a contemporary film, they were just plain sad. In the end, I felt angry, but not at the film's intended targets.This film would have been a waste of money had I not seen it on Netflix, but it was still a waste of time. Nothing much to recommend it.