Directed By: Brian Klugman & Lee Sternthal
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Jeremy Irons, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde
Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and smoking
Run Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes
Synopsis: Clay Hammond is a celebrated author and has a new book called "The Words" about a struggling writer named Rory (Cooper) who finds an old manuscript, publishes it as his own and is then confronted by the true author of the story (Irons). During a public reading of his novel, Hammond catches the attention of a student (Wilde) who wants to know more about the book.
REVIEW
Andrew: Hello readers! Sarah
and I caught a late afternoon showing of The Words yesterday afternoon.
Starring Bradley Cooper (The Hangover), Zoe Saldana (Star
Trek), Jeremy Irons (Die Hard: With a Vengeance), Dennis
Quaid (The Parent Trap) and Olivia Wilde (Tron: Legacy), this is a
movie whose trailer we have seen a million times…
Sarah: Both in actual
trailer form and with those AMC “First Look” things they play before movies. So
we’ve been seeing about this movie forever.
A: And it didn’t come
out wide until just recently (or at least didn’t hit our neck of the woods
until recently) and is one that had our interest. Now that we’ve seen it I have
to say…I’m having trouble deciding how I feel about this movie. Because there
are parts of it that I really liked and then there’s one large thing about it
that total irks me and it’s throwing things up in the air for me.
S: I definitely have
mixed feelings on it, too.
A: The primary reason
for those mixed feelings, for me, is that in all the trailers and everything
else we’re lead to believe that the movie is about Bradley Cooper’s Rory, who’s
an aspiring novelist that has been rejected a few times and finds a manuscript
in an old briefcase while in Paris, he decides to publish the manuscript as his
own and is eventually confronted by an old man, played by Jeremy Irons, who actually
wrote the manuscript. We’re lead to believe that’s what the main story is about
and we never really know from the trailers how Dennis
Quaid and Olivia Wilde
play in to the plot.
Well the hook that’s throwing me for a loop
is that
Quaid plays a famous novelist named Clay Hammond who has written a book
called “The Words” and it turns out that Rory, his wife Dora (Saldana) and Iron’s
Old Man (he’s never given a name) are characters in Hammond’s book. So it’s a
storytelling device and it’s completely thrown me.
