Manic

Rating:
Summary: Sea Sick, Yet Still Docked
Review: After 20 minutes of watching this movie I was completely sea sick. How many movies have been made with a steady cam by a drunken camera operator already? It has been done to death, and no matter how much you move the camera around the acting isn't going to be any better. The distracting camera work and week acting take away from what I feel cold have been a decent movie. Although I like the actors in other things they have done, the entire time watching this movie, I felt as though they lacked something real. They just seamed to be trying too hard.
The story line is good, about a kid with some anger problems working in a group with other teens with similar issues, who are completely different from one another, much like "Breakfast Club meets One Flew Over..." It is real life, and what many kids go through. I just wish it would have been done in a way where the story was the focal point, not the cliché early 2000's style of camera work. This movie will NOT stand the test of time. It wasn't worth the time to watch it.


Rating:
Summary: "Mom, tell 'em I'm not crazy!!"
Review: After bashing in the head of a classmate with a baseball bat Lyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward for troubled teens. Throughout his life Lyle has been expressing anger as a result of being beat up by his father when he was younger. But now that he is committed he doesn't let go of his ways easily as he feels that his anger is rightly justified. It takes some time for Lyle to let down his guard and befriend the other troubled teens. He eventually forms a close friendship with his roommate who is charged with molesting young children and a lonely big-eyed girl who suffers from terrible screaming nightmares every night. There are lots of scenes showing the mundane activities of life of patients inside the psychiatric ward. When they aren't playing basketball, reading existential philosophy, or slam dancing to Rage Against the Machine they are often found in group therapy. Each patient has their own story to tell including histories filled with suicide attempts, drug abuse, cutting, extreme violence, and other self-destructive acts. The method of filmmaking is experimental and can put some viewers off. Often the frames are shaky and unstable and appear to be filmed with a handheld device. This appeared to give the effect of being a personal observer inside the ward. This aspect didn't bother me at all but what did bother me was a general feeling of uneasiness when the film was over. I felt as if the pieces of the plot puzzle failed to come together properly. I was strangely unsettled about the lack of explanation of the motivations of Lyle. It seemed as if in one scene he is lashing out his anger, the next he is a saint while trying to calm down others, and then he returns once again to betting up others - and all this happened without any proper explanation. As a result his actions often came off as being unrealistic and one-dimensional. In addition, I had trouble with the overall plot and the intentions of the filmmakers. If there was an intended message of this film it dearly failed. I felt that it didn't do anything but continually spinning its wheels. I've been anxiously waiting for MANIC to be released on DVD but now that I've seen it I hate to admit that I feel let down. I was expecting so much more.

Rating:
Summary: Teen manic depressants: A misunderstood population
Review: I recently saw this movie and, overall, I thought it was good. It is about America's troubled teens who, unfortunately, have issues with suffering from biopolar and depression.

My own thoughts are that many of the youths (movie) come from unfortunate circumstances, i.e., emotional, physical, sexual and, later in their lives, they carry some of those "negative learned behaviors" in critical life stages, such as, early teens, early adulthood, and, for some who are unfortunate, into their adult lives.

In the movie, the troubled teens are in a residential facility for behavioral treatment (counseling, therapy, medication). And they all struggle with their physical and emotional conditions. It is, if anything can be said of these youths, a very difficult condition to treat; it is going to take time and a great deal of patience.

Don Cheadle performs well as a child psychologist. I enjoyed his interaction in keeping it real, despite all the turmoils and outbursts. I take off my hat to him for doing a great acting job; I also hold the opinion that the youth actors did a great job in their respective roles.

Rating:
Summary: Boy, Interrupted
Review: I saw this a couple of years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival, and it was pretty much your standard nut-house flick. There is a token goth chick, a token bully, a basketball game used as a bonding moment, group sessions with mildly amusing topics and, of course, a little "incident" where someone gets hurt. It was like watching a remake of Girl, Interrupted, just with a little better script and acting. The plot is predictable, and the whole cinema vérité style (shaky camera and all) gets really annoying, but it was still pretty interesting. There has been a lot of buzz over Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance (yes, the kid from 3rd Rock), but I didn't think it was anything special. Don Cheadle was great as always though -- any movie with him in it is worth watching.

Rating:
Summary: A great film most will not see
Review: I've been waiting on Manic since it was in production, so I've had a long wait. I must say it was worth it.

I really have no complaints about the film; the acting was great, especially from Joseph Gordon-Levitt- who really proves what a good actor he is, Don Cheadle, and Zooey Deschanel. The story seems very accurate, haunting, and at times heartbreaking, as it paints a very realistic picture of teens with problems. There's no fluff here.

Direction was great. Jordan Melamed's debut proved to be a good one- and I look forward to more by this unknown director.

Rating:
Summary: The "Real" Anger Management Movie
Review: In a day when armed guards lurk in our schools and teens get tried and sentenced as adults, the film Manic opens a portal into teen rage, pain, and the existential demands of growing up. The acting, script, and phenomenal cinematography come together to grab the viewer's guts with razor talons-this is an easy movie to avoid, to turn away from, but those who dare to watch it, and to find their own anger and rage challenged, cannot watch it unscathed.

The movie opens with Lyle (3rd Rock's Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays a phenomenal role in this movie), in his late teens, having wounds sutured and his facial bruises attended to. He's anxious to go home with his mom, but two burly psych techs grab him, pump him with a tranquilizer and cart him off to a youth psychiatric unit.

Intense as this may seem, the opening credits disturb the viewer even more intensively. Lyle is in the clinical therapist's office, being interviewed. Between each question, the screen goes black and a set of credits is posted, while the sound of a fight turning into a beating runs in the background.

This sets the stage for a movie that uses digital cinematography, fast cuts, cine verite, and unexpected color to portray the chaotic life of the disturbed. Scene color schemes were actually drawn from several key van Gogh paintings, one of which plays a key role in the movie. Story lines and subplots develop. Lyle's murderous rage surfaces over and over again, challenged, each time, by his therapist. In one particularly charged scene, the therapist smashes a chair during group and asks, "Does that feel better? NO! So now I have to smash something else!" He hurls another chair, "Feel better yet? NO! So now you have to do what we all have to do, you have to live with the feelings!"

Ironically, this movie is more about anger management than the movie, Anger Management. This has all the intensity of a gritty, no-holds-barred war movie. And that's no accident, it's about the war within, the battle between a teen and his pent up rage. Ultimately, it's an existential movie, examining the choice to live or to die, made in the solitude of one's soul. Whatever the situation, whatever our escape plans are ... "wherever we go, there we are." Manic suggests that the only place freedom can be found is locked in engagement with oneself.

Although does go a little "Hollywood" at the end, this is not one of those horrid dramas which suggest that once the hero confronts a key past trauma in a cathartic moment everything turns around. In fact, the therapist, played by Don Cheadle, explicitly denies this: "You may have some epiphanal moment about your father and escape your rage. It's more likely you're going to have it all your life, and have to learn to live your life without destroying yourself or others."

If the movie has a major shortcoming, it is that the psych staff is too helpful. My experience with locked wards finds it highly improbable that Lyle would have been allowed to continue in his room, with his group, after a violent outburst. Most psychiatrists and therapists don't have the courage of Don Cheadle's character, to allow potentially dangerous situations to continue in this litigious day and age. Lyle would have been lugged off to a higher security ward, possibly sedated, and denied the interactions he needed to begin his healing process. But I criticize the mental health system, not the movie, here.

Finally a movie that dares to tell the truth. It never falls into the cliche of trying to be a One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it beats Girl Interrupted and 28 Days in intensity and veracity. Carl Jung wrote "enlightenment consists not in the seeing of luminous shapes and visions, but in making the darkness visible." Manic has the courage to show us a piece of that darkness, yet in gazing at it, we find a certain luminosity. In the last analysis we're left with a movie about rage, about having the courage to feel the pain behind the rage, and daring to go on living, finding freedom not by banishing the demons within, but by learning to live with them.

Rating:
Summary: Curious to what the song being played during the Mosh Scene?
Review: It took me TWO hours to find out what song was being played in the movie, Manic, during the mosh pit scene.
It originally was Rage Against the Machine's Freedom for the Sundance Festivel until some legal issues.
BUT NONETHELESS Headup by The Deftones was THE SONG IN THE MOVIE MANIC!

Rating:
Summary: -
Review: Manic is experimental and unique. The acting was superb as was the writing. The characters were believable and not too perfect to seem made up. It was imaginative and creative which means that most of the people who actually do see the movie will not be able to understand or appreciate it completely.

Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: The guy who played Lyle, the lead that the camera is ultimately following, acted great in this part. He portrayed an extremely violant ticking time bomb of a person - Proving he can really act. That this seems like the worst run psych hospital can be overlooked... Everyone acted really well from the doctor to the most crazy patient in the yard.
The camera movement was documentry like and very annoying for the most part but gave the movie the feel that the directors were most likely going for.
This is hardly a happily ever after movie. There are no anwers for anyone. But there is a feeling of hope.

Rating:
Summary: I liked it
Review: The story line is alright.Good acting from everone.That hopital situation is pretty unreal.I've been in alot of hospitals so I was really looking forward to this movie.Crazy stuff happens alot.It's a differnt perspective about mental hopitals most are run more tight knit than that.Damn good movie you should get it.