Roughly six hours ago I went into David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook (Weinstein Co., 11.21) thinking “I love Russell but the trailer made it look a little schizzy and grating…here’s hoping but I don’t know.” I came out two hours later going “holy shit, this is one of the fastest, smartest and most satisfying love stories I’ve ever seen. Wow!…didn’t see it coming.” But what a kick when it happens.

Belle of the ball, surrounded by well-wishers, etc.: Jennifer Lawrence at Soho House after-party for The Silver Linings Playbook — Saturday, 9.8, 10:55 pm.

Serious romcom fans allegedly like stupid and sappy, so maybe the girly-girls who like Kate Hudson movies will hold back just a bit because Silver Linings Playbook is too smart and probing and raggedy-jaggedy, but I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make at least $100 million.

Nobody knows who’s going to win anything at this stage, but you can count on the following for sure. One, it’s a lock for a Best Picture nomination (and is way more promising in this regard than Argo, Sasha Stone!), Russell is a likely nominee for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Jennifer Lawrence is a cast-iron lock for Best Actress, Bradley Cooper delivers the richest and most naturalistic performance of his career and may be in line for a Best Actor nom, Robert DeNiro gives his most touchingly emotional performance since you-tell-me and is almost certain to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and….I’ve said this already, right?…the film is going to make money hand over fist.

Should I take two or three steps back and calm down? Maybe I should. Maybe I should take a Xanax. But I know what I saw and what I felt, and I felt the room, man.

And I’m telling you the energy pouring out of Roy Thomson Hall was ecstatic. Everyone knew they’d just seen some kind of romantic home run — something touching and original and kind of aggressively amazing. Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling and I were walking toward the Soho House after-party and we couldn’t stop talking about what a surprise it was all around. I must have said “wow!” five or six times.

“Jennifer Lawrence, man…she’s so amazing! She’s like Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment or…who else, Cher in Moonstruck, right? Only better. She owns the second half of this film. I think she’s gonna win, right? Who’s gonna beat her?”

Silver Linings Playbook director-writer David O. Russell.

Set in a Philadelphia suburb and based on Matthew Quick’s novel, it’s about two manic nutcases who’ve taken huge emotional hits and ingested their share of meds (Cooper, Lawrence) who gradually fall for each other, and embark on a path fraught with mistrust and anger, but leading ultimately to healing and happiness. And it’s also about their families and football and gambling and dancing and all kinds of ins and outs.

It’s fast and snappy like His Girl Friday and a mad whirl, all right, but one that wraps it all up at the end with humor and wholeness and happiness and even a kiss. And it works. It’s a surprise that it all comes together as well as it does, but it does. Really.

Calling The Silver Linings Playbook a romantic mental-health dramedy doesn’t do it justice, but that’s at least part of the deal. It’s not a stretch to say that it delivers on the level of Moonstruck, When Harry Met Sally and The Apartment. I know, I know — I’m harming it by over-praising it, but it’s one of those very rare romantic films that hits the fastball hard and strong….thwack!…out of the park. But it doesn’t really start paying off until the second half, and really the last third. And the trailer barely hints at what’s in store.

I liked Silver Linings so much that I’m going back to see it again tomorrow morning at 8:45 am.

Silver Linings Playbook star Bradley Cooper, Harvey Weinstein at after-party.

(l. to r.) Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, Weinstein Co.’s Dani Weinstein, L.A. Times film guy Glenn Whipp.

Russell chatting with L.A.Times columnist Steven Zeitchik.

The people behind Pieta, the South Korean film that has won the Venice Foim Festival’s Golden Lion, must feel dispirited in view of reports that the jury, led by Michael Mann, intended to give the prize to The Master but changed their minds in order to hand out a critics award plus acting awards to Joaquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

As I tweeted last night, The Master is “a bear,” adding that “we are ALL bears!” And a lion too, at least for a while.

I flinched this morning when I read a riff by Deadline‘s Pete Hammond that called Joe Wright‘s Anna Karenina “risky” and “a roll of the dice.” Those are code terms that mean “beware, 62 year-old Academy members…you may not like this exciting new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy‘s classic tragedy because it doesn’t traffic in typical historical realism and therefore you and your friends might have a difficult time with it.”

Keira Knightley in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.

I despise that way of absorbing and processing films.

Wright’s decision to present Anna Karenina as a “ballet with words” is the kind of outside-the-box manuever that true cinema lovers live for. God, please let me live in a world in which a brilliant director will at least occasionally be daring or different or nervy enough to try something like Wright’s Karenina, and God protect me from a movie-watching realm in which films like Karenina and guys like Wright are never seen or heard from.

The innovation and spirit that pumped life and blood and greatness into Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger‘s The Red Shoes and into the better films of Ken Russell is the same that animates and energizes Anna Karenina, and I despise the fuddy-duddy mindset that would look at this film and go, “Uh-oh…might be dicey! Feels like a risk!”

Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines is basically an upstate New York crime story about fathers and sons. It’s also about cigarettes and bank hold-ups and motorcycles and travelling carnivals and nobody having enough money and anger and bullheadedness and the general malaise that comes from living in the pure hell and suffocation of Schenectady and those Siberian environs…I’ve been up there and it’s awful so don’t tell me.

It’s also about men and their lame cock-of-the-walk issues in Cianfranceville, or the Land of the Constant Macho Strut and the Eternally Burning Cigarette, and if you can swallow or suck this in, fine…but I couldn’t.

Guys like Movieline‘s Frank DiGiacomo and Variety‘s Jeff Sneider were having kittens over this movie last night on Twitter, and I was like “what?”

Boiled down, Pines is about the conflicted, problematic, sociopathic or otherwise questionable tendencies of two fathers (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper) and how their sons (Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, respectively) are all but doomed to inherit and melodramatically carry on that legacy and that burden, so finally and irrevocably that their mothers (respectively played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne) might as well be living-room furniture, and the influence of schools, community values and/or stepfathers matter not.

If you can roll with this world-of-Cianfrance view — i.e., wives and mothers are good for sex and breeding and cleaning and making meals and running errands and occasional guilt-tripping but when it comes to the issue of a son’s character and destiny, it’s all about dad — you might be able to roll with The Place Beyond The Pines. But I wasn’t able to. I respect Cianfrance’s ambition in telling an epic, three-act, multi-generational tale that spans 15-plus years, but I don’t respect or believe what he’s selling.

Except for the bank-robbing and road-chase sequences I didn’t believe a single moment in this film. I couldn’t buy any of it. Okay, I bought some of it but only in fits and starts.

You can’t have Gosling play a simple-dick man of few words who entertains audiences with his talent as a motorcycle rider and then turns to bank-robbing on the side — that’s way too close to his stunt-driving, getaway-car character in Drive.

(l. to r.) De Haan, Cooper, Mendes, Gosling and Cianfrance before last night’s screening.

Plus I don’t respond well to movies with female-voiced choral music (i.e., a caring, all-seeing God is watching over us) on the soundtrack plus other musical implications of doom and heavyosity.

Plus I hate movies about blue-collar knockabouts and greasy low-lifes and teenage louts who constantly smoke cigarettes. The more a character smokes cigarettes the dumber and more doomed and less engaging he or she is — that’s the rule. If you’re writing or directing a film and you want the audience to believe that a character is an all-but-completely worthless scoundrel or sociopath whom they should not care shit about, have that character smoke cigarettes in every damn scene.

The principal theme of The Place Beyond The Pines is the following: “Dads Are Everything and Mothers Don’t Matter, but Cigarettes Sure Run A Close Second!”

In short, I thought the movie was unreal, oppressive, dramatically forced bullshit, although it receives a shot in the arm from Dane DeHaan (In Treatment), who looks like a mixed reincarnation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as they were in the mid ’90s, although he’s a lot shorter (5’7″).

I also felt that Mendes and Byrne are too hot to live in Schenectady. Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where the power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule. There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State, and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.

Read this classic paragraph from Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth: “With The Place Beyond The Pines Derek Cianfrance has now placed himself in the canon of great, contemporary American filmmakers like James Gray, Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers. This is a film that desires to say something about how we relate to each other, and how the often overlooked consequences of our actions can refract down avenues we could never expect. [It’s a] brilliant, towering picture [and] a cinematic accomplishment of extraordinary grace and insight.” Amazing! Planet Neptune!

It’s going on 9 am and I should have awoken two hours ago. I had three alarms set on two devices, and in my dissolute slumber I blew them all off. That means the body was in dire need and insisted, and you just have to accept this when it happens. And I didn’t even bang out a reaction to Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines, which I saw last night at 6 pm.

9:50 am update: For the sin of missing the early morning screenings (there were three worth catching) and because there’s nothing reallly showing at noon or thereabouts I’m either wide open or flatlining (depending on how you look at it) until the 3:30 pm public screening of Martin McDonagh ‘s Seven Psychopaths, and then comes an hour’s worth of filing until the 6:30 pm Roy Thomson Hall screening of David O. Russell‘s The Silver Linings Playbook (and I hate the RTH acoustics — way too echo-y). And that’s all — two films for Saturday. Slacker.