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Page 1 of 7November 28, 2012

By Gregg KildayComedy was king on Tues-day as Film Independent announced the nominees for its 2013 Spirit Awards, with Wes Anderson’s Moon-rise Kingdom, a winsome tale of young lovers on the run, and David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, a mentally- unbalanced romantic comedy, dominating the field with five nominations each.

They will compete for best feature award alongside Beasts of the Southern Wild, an imaginative look at the occupants of a Louisiana delta community; Bernie, a dark comedy about a small-town funeral director; and gay relationship story Keep the Lights On.

Moonrise, which also scored noms for director Anderson, its screenplay by Anderson

and Roman Coppola, sup-porting actor Bruce Willis and Robert Yeoman’s cine-matography, is on something of a roll. The Focus Features release, which debuted in May at the Cannes Film Fes-tival, was also named best feature at the 22nd Gotham Independent Film Awards,

which were held Monday night in New York.

Four of the Spirit best fea-ture nominees also popped up in the best director category. In addition to Moonrise’s An-derson, they included Play-book’s Russell, Beasts’ Benh Zeitlin and Lights’ Ira Sachs.

Playbook, Moonrise Lead Indie Spirit Award Noms

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Inside:silver pictures picks up spec straight edgePAge 2

lawrence to be feted by sbiffPAge 2

zucker in talks to head cnnPAge 4

1492 pictures, rise ink dealPAge 6

movie review: playbook PAge 7

The Contenders 2012An annual series of the best films of the year

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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART11 WEST 53 STREET MoMA.ORG/FILM

Silver Linings Playbook’s Bradley Cooper, left, and Moonrise Kingdom’s Bruce Willis earned Spirit noms for actor and supporting actor, respectively.

movie newsPage 2 of 7November 28, 2012

Bernie’s director Richard Linklater was odd man out. Instead, the fifth helming slot went to The Loneliest Planet’s Julia Loktev.

Playbook’s two lead actors — Bradley Cooper and Jenni- fer Lawrence — both earned nominations in the acting categories. The Sessions, the account of a man, living with an iron lung, who seeks out his first sexual experience, also picked up two acting noms — one for lead actor John Hawkes and another for supporting actress Helen Hunt. And mother-daughter pic Middle of Nowhere was represented by three acting noms, with Emayatzy Cori-nealdi in the actress cate-gory, Lorraine Toussaint in supporting actress and David Oyelowo in support-ing actor.

Another of the big acting surprises proved to be Mat-thew McConaughey, who was not only nominated as lead actor for playing the title role in crime pic Killer Joe but also as supporting actor for emceeing a club full of male strippers in Magic Mike.

Rounding out the list of lead actors were Bernie’s Jack Black, Lights’ Thure Lindhardt and Four’s Wen-dell Pierce. The lead actress contingent also included Return’s Linda Cardellini, Smashed’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Beasts’ young Quvenzhane Wallis.

On the documentary front, the Spirit noms singled out David France’s How to Sur-vive a Plague, which looks at the gay community’s response to the AIDS crisis; Matthew Akers’ Marina Abramovic:

The Artist Is Present, a por-trait of the Serbian perfor-mance artist; The Central Park Five, an account of injustice in New York City from Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon; Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War, which investigates rape within the military; and Peter Nicks’ The Wait-ing Room, which examines the health crisis by focusing on one public hospital.

In the best international film category, two of this year’s most celebrated films from Cannes — Michael Ha-neke’s Amour and Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone — will compete with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, from Turkey; Ursula Meier’s Sister, from Switzer- land; and Kim Nguyen’s War Witch, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which also happens to be Canada’s submission for the foreign-language film Oscar.

Film Independent also announced that it will give its annual Robert Altman Award, which recognizes a film’s director, casting di-rector and ensemble cast, to Sean Baker’s Starlet.

Among distributors, Fox Searchlight could boast of the most noms. It collected nine mentions for Beasts, Sessions, Ruby Sparks and Sound of My Voice. Music Box Films also had a surprisingly strong showing with seven noms spread among Lights, Abramovic and Starlet. IFC Films, Focus and Sony Pic-tures Classics each collected six noms.

Winners of the Spirit Awards will be announced Feb. 23 at the annual awards

luncheon held in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica. The ceremony will be broad-cast that evening at 10 p.m. ET/PT on IFC.

Click here for the full list of nominees.

silver pictures acquires spec from XXX scribeBy Borys KitIn a deal that might signal that Joel Silver is going back to his 1980s smart-mouthed action movie roots, he and his company, Silver Pictures, have pre-emptively picked up the spec script Straight Edge

by Rich Wilkes.Wilkes is

best known for writing XXX, the anti-Bond spy movie that starred Vin Diesel. He also

penned Iron Fist for Marvel and wrote a draft of The Dirt, Paramount’s adaptation of the Motley Crue biography.

Silver will produce Edge with shingle president Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman, who recently was promoted to exec vp production.

Edge is a Los Angeles-set actioner that revolves around a heist gone wrong and follows a slew of color-ful characters, ranging from corrupt cops to Southland gang members.

Those who have read the script describe it as harking back to the edginess of 1982’s 48 HRS. and 1987’s Lethal Weapon, both early Silver hits, and the attitude of Shane Black’s 2005 cult fave Kiss

Kiss Bang Bang. Silver is packaging the pic

with a filmmaker and cast. It’s not clear at this stage whether the project will go through the company’s new distribution deal with Univer- sal or be taken on by another studio or finance entity.

Silver Pictures has hit the ground running since parting with Warner Bros. in April. It’s in production on Non-Stop, a thriller starring Liam Neeson that will be released via a distribution deal with Universal. It also has attached Sean Penn to Prone Gun-man and acquired several new scripts, among them The Outsider and Sanctuary. Gunman and Outsider are being eyed for 2013 starts.

Wilkes is repped by Verve and Management 360.

lawrence will get sbiff honorBy Scott FeinbergThe Santa Barbara Inter-national Film Festival said Tuesday that Jennifer Law- rence, the beautiful and char-ismatic 22-year-old star of this year’s summer block-buster The Hunger Games and new awards season dramedy Silver Linings Playbook, will be presented with its Out-standing Performer of the Year Award on Jan. 26 at Santa Barbara’s historic Arlington Theatre.

“Ms. Lawrence impressed us earlier this year in The Hunger Games, but has now left us moonstruck with her career-defining performance in Silver Linings Playbook — recalling classic turns by Lom-

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Silver

movie newsPage 3 of 7November 28, 2012

bard, Stanwyck and Colbert,” SBIFF executive director Roger Durling said in a state-ment. “Naming her our Out- standing Performer of the Year is an understatement.”

Prior to this year, Law-rence was best known for her gritty perfor-mance in the low-budget indie Winter’s

Bone (2010), for which she received a best actress Oscar nomination. She was just 20 years old, making her the second-youngest person ever nominated in that category.

First presented in 2004, the Outstanding Performer Award has previously gone to Charlize Theron, Kate Win-slet, Heath Ledger, Helen Mirren, Angelina Jolie, Penel-ope Cruz, Colin Firth, James Franco and Viola Davis.

The fest’s 28th edition is set to run Jan. 24-Feb 3.

universal sets release date for thriller purge By Pamela McClintockThe ethan Hawke and Lena Headey thriller The Purge will open in theaters May 31.

Universal is financing and releasing the micro- budgeted film per its deal with Jason Blum, who pro-duced Purge with Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes.

Written and directed by James DeMonaco, the pic is set in an America wracked by crime and overcrowded prisons. Every year, the

government sanctions a 24- hour period during which any and all criminal activity — including murder — is legal.

When an intruder breaks into the gated community where James Sandin (Hawke) lives, he sets off a sequence of events that threatens to tear Sandin’s family apart as they try to survive the night without turning into the mon-sters from which they hide.

Producers are Blum, Bay and Platinum Dunes’ Brad Fuller and Andrew Form, as well as Sebastien Kurt Lemercier.

So far, Purge has the May 31-June 2 weekend to itself. The weekend before — Memorial Day — sees the debut of Universal’s Fast & Furious 6 and Warner Bros.’ The Hangover Part III.

dreamworks in talks to acquire oceans rightsBy Borys KitDreamWorks Studios is in talks to pick up the movie rights to The Light Between Oceans, the debut novel by M.L. Stedman.

Heyday Films’ David Heyman, who produced the Harry Potter series, is pro-ducing with the company’s Jeffrey Clifford.

The Scribner-published book, which came out July 31 to stellar reviews, is set on an island off the coast of Western Australia after World War I. A lighthouse keeper and his wife find a 2-month-old girl and a dead body in a rowboat and decide to raise the baby as

their own. But what seems like a blessing soon turns tragic, as morality and love are tested.

Rosie Alison, who brought the book to Heyday, will exec-utive produce.

“I was deeply affected by M.L. Stedman’s powerful and primal story of human choices and their conse-quences,” Heyman said in a statement. “It’s a novel which tackles grand emo-tions, but everything is rooted within an intimate yet universal story of mari-tal and parental love.”

Nick Marston of Curtis Brown with Sue Armstrong of Conville and Walsh are repping Stedman in the dealmaking.

X-men sequel adds familiar faces to castBy Borys KitBryan Singer is uniting the X-Men.

The director is combining James McAvoy, Michael Fass- bender, Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult with Ian McKellen and Patrick

Stewart in X-Men: Days of Future Past, the sequel to X-Men: First Class.

Stewart and McKellen portrayed X-Men founder Prof. Charles Xavier and renegade mutant leader Magneto in the original X-Men movies, the first two of which Singer directed and produced.

McAvoy and Fassbender played Xavier and Magneto in First Class, the 2011 reboot of the franchise which was set in the early 1960s.

Future Past is a classic story-line that unfolded in two issues of Uncanny X-Men in 1981, from writer Chris Claremont and artists John Byrne and Terry Austin. The story was partially set in an alternate future where sur-viving mutants have been penned in concentration camps, giant robots named Sentinels patrol America and most of the X-Men have been hunted and killed. In the present day, the X-Men were forced to stop a key event from unfolding in order to keep that future from occurring.

With First Class using different X-Men than the 1980s comics, fan specula-tion on how the storylines will translate and combine is sure to run wild.

Also up as a question is whether Hugh Jackman, who starred as Wolverine in the first trilogy and made a cameo in First Class, will come back for Future Past.

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The book by M.L. Stedman hit stores in July to rave reviews.

Lawrence

McKellen

Stewart

tv newsPage 4 of 7November 28, 2012

By Kimberly Nordyke and Alex Ben BlockCNN is close to a deal with former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker to take over the reins of the struggling net-work, The New York Times reported.

Zucker, who currently exec-utive produces Katie Couric’s new daytime talk show, would replace Jim Walton, who announced his decision to step down from his longtime post as president of CNN Worldwide in July. Walton officially will depart the Time Warner-owned company when his contract expires at year’s end.

Several sources close to Zucker told the Times that an announcement is expected soon. However, the report cautioned that a deal could still fall apart.

Other potential candidates for the job had reportedly in- cluded Mark Shapiro, former CEO of Dick Clark Produc- tions. Zucker and Shapiro also had been reported as possible candidates for the CEO post at the beleaguered Tribune Co. earlier this year.

CNN declined comment.Zucker has a news back-

ground but has been out of the game for a while. He first joined NBC as a researcher in 1986 but quickly rose up the ranks to become the young-est executive producer of

Today in 1992, when he was 26. During his tenure, Today enjoyed a solid lead as TV’s most-watched morning show.

Eight years later, Zucker was named president of NBC Entertainment and continued to add responsi-bilities before being named president and CEO of NBC-Universal in 2007.

While overseeing NBC, he played a key role in the network’s negotiations with the Friends cast for a 10th season and signing Donald Trump for The Apprentice, which became a breakout hit.

But his tenure also was marked by some disappoint- ments, including the Jay Leno-Conan O’Brien Tonight Show debacle and NBC’s losing its No. 1 ranking, dropping to fourth place. Zucker left the company in early 2011, following its sale to Comcast, and later re-teamed with his former Today co-host Couric to launch her new daytime talk show.

Zucker spent more than a year leading up to the launch of Katie, helping set it up with a distributor and working on the launch. Once it was sold to ABC and on the air in September, he became executive producer, overseeing the operation.

Zucker did not have the usual deal of an executive producer. He was a partner in the venture with Couric and was in line to split the $20 million ABC reportedly

committed to pay them for the show.

Katie has not been a huge breakout hit in the way The Oprah Winfrey Show once was, or Judge Judy is currently, but her show has been the best performing of the five major syndicated talk shows that started this season. She has remained the No. 1 new talk show among newcomers including Steve Harvey and Ricki Lake for all of her first eight weeks on the air.

After seeing Katie’s ratings go up and down, they have stabilized recently, and she hit some seasonal highs in October.

The season-to-date average for the show is a 1.9 rating in total households (an aver-age of 2.4 million viewers a day). In the key demographic group who advertisers pay to reach on daytime TV, women 25-54 years old, Katie has averaged a 1.1 rating (an aver-age of 65,000 viewers a day). That makes it the sixth-highest-rated talk show in syndication in total viewers and in women 25-54.

Couric, whose show has a two-year commitment from ABC and other stations, has known for a few months that Zucker might leave earlier than originally envisioned. A search began more than a month ago for a new exec-utive producer, but it is un-known what the status is of that quest.

Zucker will probably stay

with the show until the end of this year. To separate, he will have to negotiate his way out of a contract that prom-ised to pay him a reported $8 million. It is unclear how much he will walk away with leaving this soon.

nbc developing period drama from fellowesBy Michael O’ConnellDownton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes has a new stateside project. Fresh off the season-four renewal of his U.K. hit, which airs on PBS in the U.S., Fellowes has signed with NBC and Universal Television to develop a period drama.

He’ll write and produce The Gilded Age, a Downton-esque series about the mil-lionaires of 1880s New York.

“We at the network are all so thrilled to be working with the immensely talented Julian Fellowes, who is uni-versally admired for his critically and commercially appealing productions,” said NBC Entertainment presi-dent Jennifer Salke. “Having him on our team represents a major creative coup, and everyone is looking forward to his first NBC project in The Gilded Age.”

Salke announced the news with Universal Television executive vp Bela Bajaria.

“Having been thoroughly impressed by Julian’s wit, eloquence, vast historical knowledge and collaborative nature in my past develop- ment experience with him,

Report: Zucker Near Deal to Run CNN

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Zucker

tv newsPage 5 of 7November 28, 2012

I’m thrilled to be continuing our relationship at Univer-sal Television,” said Bajaria. “The opportunity to work with him again was a goal of mine at Universal Television, and I’m very excited about this potential new series.”

Said Fellowes of the proj-ect: “This was a vivid time, with dizzying, brilliant ascents and calamitous falls, of record-breaking ostentation and savage rivalry — a time when money was king.”

Downton has been an international success since its 2010 debut. In addition to his duties on the series, Fellowes penned the recent Titanic miniseries and wrote the screenplay to the up-coming movie adaptation of Romeo and Juliet starring Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld.

Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes had a simi-lar New York period drama, Gilded Lilys, in contention at ABC earlier in the year. It went to pilot, but the net-work ultimately took a pass.

If Gilded Age goes to series, it will be Fellowes’ first origi-nal in the U.S.

amc orders pair of drama pilotsBy Lesley GoldbergAMC has doubled the num-ber of drama pilots in its development pipeline.

The cable network on Tuesday ordered 1980s tech effort Halt & Catch Fire as well as period spy piece Turn to pilot.

Halt is created by Chris Cantwell and Chris Rogers, with Breaking Bad’s Mark Johnson and Melissa Bern-stein on board to executive produce. Set in the early ’80s, the drama revolves around the personal computing boom and is told through the eyes of a visionary and an engi-neer and prodigy whose innovations directly confront the corporate behemoths of the time. Their partnership will be challenged by greed and ego while charting the changing culture in Texas’ Silicon Prairie. The effort hails from AMC Studios and Gran Via Productions.

Turn, based on Alexander Rose’s book Washington’s Spies, hails from Nikita’s Craig Silverstein and is executive

produced by Barry Joseph-son. Set during the summer of 1778, the drama centers on a New York farmer named Abe Woodhull, who bands together with a group of childhood friends to form the Culper Ring, a group of spies who turn the tide in America’s fight for inde-pendence. Also from AMC Studios, Silverstein will pen the project, with Josephson executive producing via his Josephson Entertainment.

Halt and Turn join the previously announced Low Winter Sun and the untitled Richard LaGravenese-Tony Goldwyn project at the cable network.

“These additional pilot

orders demonstrate AMC’s investment in our original scripted programming,” said Susie Fitzgerald, AMC senior vp scripted develop-ment and current program- ming. “Both of these projects take the audience into unique worlds through compelling characters told with an orig-inal voice. We are so fortu-nate to be working with such exceptional talent on both of these projects.”

AMC exec vp original programming, production and digital content Joel Stillerman, Fitzgerald and senior vp production Jason Fisher will oversee the devel-opment and production on both projects.

The network, home to dramas The Walking Dead, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the last of which is nearing the end of its run, has several other projects in its develop-ment pipeline. Among them are an adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s latest comic Thief of Thieves, Area 51 from Gale Anne Hurd, football drama The Real All Americans, a po- tential Goodfellas series and a diamond drama from Ridley Scott, among others.

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iPhone & AndroidGet it today!

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Period spy drama Turn is based on the book Washington’s Spies.

business newsPage 6 of 7November 28, 2012

By Alex Ben BlockChris Columbus’ 1492 Pictures has signed a five-year deal with Michael Witherill’s Rise Entertainment to develop and finance films including an adaptation of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord.

For Colum-bus, whose hugely success-ful pics have included Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Night at the Museum, Home Alone and Mrs. Doubt-fire, it is an opportunity to sidestep the studio system and make movies he wants to make when he wants to make them.

“I get very impatient,” said Columbus, whose com-pany is based in San Fran-cisco. “As I get older, it’s not that I want to relax. I want to do more films and I do get impatient at the snail’s pace that Hollywood tends to move. It’s something that’s been frustrating throughout my career.”

While he won’t say how much Rise has committed to invest in his films, Columbus said it does help him break that logjam. “This deal enables us to actually green-light a lot of pictures and make films we’ve been dying to make for the last couple years,” added Columbus. “It really is a dream come true.”

Columbus said the deal positions his company as

“a mini-studio and hopefully not so mini in a few years.”

There is no domestic or international distribution set up on any of some two dozen pictures 1492 has in various stages of development and preproduction. Columbus said the company will seek studio partners as it makes the pictures. That could be traditional deals in which 1492 partners with a studio or a rent-a-distributor deal where it pays lower fees and the studio takes less risk.

“We want to make a big im- pact in terms of the amount of movies we make a year,” said Columbus. “The first films we’ve listed are only the tip of the iceberg.”

The first three films to be financed by Rise are:n Lord, based on Anne

Rice’s bestseller about Jesus Christ when he was seven years old. It is described as “a sweeping tale of faith and fear, danger and discovery as the boy Jesus and his family return to the war-torn Holy Land.” Betsy and Cyrus Nowrasteh wrote the script, and Cyrus Now-rasteh will direct. 1492 will produce with Rise and CJ E&M. Principal photogra-phy begins in March in Italy. Columbus said it won’t nec-essary require the casting of big stars, and the company hope to make it on a fairly reasonable budget.n Home Front, which

Columbus will direct as his

next project and for which he has written a screen adaptation based on the best-selling book by Kristin Hannah. Scheduled to shoot next summer, it is described as a “profoundly honest look at modern marriage and a dramatic exploration of the price of war on an ordinary American family.” Colum-bus said there are great roles for the lead actress and actor, for which 1492 will seek stars. The period piece also will have a reasonable but not small budget.n House of Secrets, the

first of what Columbus en- visions as a movie trilogy based on a series of three novels he is writing with Ned Vizzini. The first novel is finished, and he is work-ing on the screenplay. He said they will start the sec-ond novel in a few weeks. Columbus will direct from his screenplay. The book sold pre-emptively to Harper-Collins and will be published in the spring. It is an adven-ture story about three kids lost in a fantasy world trying to find their way home. Prin-cipal photography begins in January 2014.

For Columbus, the book harks back to one of his ear-liest and most admired pics, 1985’s The Goonies. He said he always is surprised that most people he meets tell him their favorite of his films is not Home Alone or Harry Potter but Goonies. They

always ask if he is going to do a sequel. “I don’t know if there is a sequel but I do know that world and that particular genre and terrain really well,” said Columbus.

He said Secrets will have “the feeling, the flavor and the spirit of Goonies ... that was the inspiration behind these books.”

Columbus said he met Witherill only a few months ago. He said Rise has sig- nificant money to fund the slate, none of which comes from a hedge fund or foreign investors.

Witherill is partners in Rise with William Andrew, Tracy K. Price, Alex Witherill and Guy Inzalaco. Pics they have financed include Law Abiding Citizen and The Ston-ing of Soraya M. Earlier this month, they began produc-tion on Frontera, produced by Rise and starring Ed Harris, Michael Pena, Amy Madigan and Eva Longoria.

“Clearly, films directed by Chris and produced by 1492 Pictures have a track record that speaks for itself,” said Witherill, who is based in Arizona. “We view ourselves as the supporting cast to fuel the unparalleled creative tal-ent of the guys at 1492.”

Columbus — whose most recent studio deal was at Warner Bros., followed by a deal with South Korea’s CJ Entertainment — added that he is thrilled with this new pact. “It gives us a tremen-dous amount of indepen-dence,” said Columbus, “and the ability to say yes to movies that sometimes would take two or three years to make.”

Columbus and 1492 were represented by WME.

Columbus’ 1492 Signs Finance Deal With Rise

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movie reviewPage 7 of 7November 28, 2012

silver linings playbookBy David RooneyWhile David O. Russell’s foray into conventional drama with The Fighter was a richly sat-isfying knockout, it’s a joy to see him back in the off-kilter comedy realm with the wonderful Silver Linings Playbook. Cheerfully yet poi-gnantly exposing the strug-gles, anxieties, disorders and obsessions of ordinary people, this is a film as odd as it is charming. It brings out the best in a superlative cast led by Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, both showing unexpected colors.

Adapted from Matthew Quick’s well-received 2008 novel, the comedy in many ways recalls Russell’s early brush with a screwy family, Flirting With Disaster. And Pat Solatano (Cooper) is a similarly driven central character to the one played by Ben Stiller in that 1996 film, just quite a bit more unstable. There’s a degree of dysfunction in almost all the characters here, but this comes off as the affection-ately observed foibles of real people, not calculated movie eccentricities.

A longtime sufferer of un-diagnosed bipolar disorder, former high school teacher Pat has spent eight months in a psychiatric facility on a plea bargain after a violent incident when he surprised his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) hav-ing sex with their co-worker. Released into the care of his parents, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) and Dolores (Jacki Weaver), he is determined

to put his newfound hospital wisdom into practice.

“I’m remaking myself,” he says, vowing to find the sil-ver lining in every situation. Pat remains convinced this is the way to win back Nikki, who has filed a restraining order against him.

Initial signs are not prom-ising, however, as Pat reacts badly to the trigger of their wedding song (“My Cherie Amour”) and gets manic as he tears up the house look-ing for their nuptials video. In the most hilarious of the early scenes, as he’s reading Nikki’s teaching syllabus to be supportive, he wakes his parents at 4 a.m. to rant about Ernest Hemingway’s refusal to end A Farewell to Arms on a happy note.

Cooper gives filter-free Pat a desperation that’s both painful and funny, assert-ing his positivity and growth while at the same time emit-ting alarm signals. The actor’s work becomes even more appealing once Lawrence enters the picture as Tiffany. A young widow depressed since the death of her cop hus-band — and possibly before — she’s every bit as volatile and blunt as Pat and also tainted by her own dark meltdown.

Remaining fixated on the

absent Nikki, Pat ropes Tif-fany into helping open com- munication channels by de-livering a letter. In exchange, Tiffany insists that he partner her in a dance competition, requiring long rehearsal ses- sions in her garage studio. The loveliest of these scenes is set to the melancholy waltz strains of “Girl From the North Country,” sung by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, which typifies Russell’s idio-syncratic music choices.

The action is shot and cut with the same nervous energy that hard-wires the two central characters. It’s no mystery where their rela-tionship is headed, even with all the clashes and mutual disappointments. But the crazy ways the film gets there feel fresh.

Russell is working in an ab- surd, comedy-of-awkward-ness vein, but he captures genuine vulnerability in his characters and their vari-ous degrees of imbalance. This pertains in particular to Pat’s father, who shows that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Having lost his job and his pension, Pat Sr. runs a small betting operation, which he hopes will finance a cheese- steak joint. His love for his

home football team, the Phila- delphia Eagles, is a consuming passion fueled by distinct OCD traits and governed by superstitions. Given that his father has been banned from the stadium for repeatedly starting fights, Pat wonders in therapy why his single vio-lent episode is considered so much worse.

Pat Sr. is a gem of a role, and De Niro hasn’t been this alive and emotionally engaged onscreen in years. A scene in which he melts while con-ceding to Pat that he might not have been the most nur- turing parent is an extremely touching moment. Australian actress Weaver (Animal King- dom) is daffy and warm as Pat’s salt-of-the-earth mother, who frets about her son being able to keep it together.

While the pic’s entire en-semble is sharp, their work would be nothing without two such deftly anchoring lead performances to bounce off. Cooper brings enormous heart to a role that easily might have veered toward the abrasive, and Lawrence shows off natural comic chops that we haven’t seen much from her. There’s self-exposure and risk in both these actors’ work here, which makes for rewarding comedy.

Opened: Nov. 16 (Weinstein).Production: The Weinstein Co.Cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Anupam Kher, Chris Tucker, Julia Stiles, John Ortiz, Shea Whigham, Dash Mihok, Paul Herman, Brea Bee.Director-screenwriter: David O. Russell, based on the novel by Matthew Quick.Rated R, 122 minutes. thr

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence try to get back on their feet in Silver Linings Playbook.