{"id":8285,"date":"2007-05-15T19:35:35","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T23:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=8285"},"modified":"2007-05-15T19:35:35","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T23:35:35","slug":"the-pursuit-of-happyness-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/15\/the-pursuit-of-happyness-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pursuit-of-happyness-in-spirels\"<\/a>So, why was this such an easy film to review, and like? Because hell, I\u2019ve been through situations very similar to this. Trying to get by, almost being thrown into the streets, being forced to watch parents suffer to ease their children\u2019s. I\u2019ve seen it all. And in the end of the film, it\u2019s still a situation that\u2019s happening to thousands all over the world. \u201cThe Pursuit of Happyness\u201d is an admirable every man tale about the working man\u2019s attempts not to make it big in the world, but in his attempts to just get by. Smith plays Chris Gardner with a lot of gusto offering up a truly solid performance.<\/p>\n

Gardner is a very interesting character and his life is filled with constant failures that seem to turn up thanks to his relentless attempts to keep from letting his son down. He seeks constantly to keep his son at his side, and does almost anything to prevent the misery from projecting onto him. He makes homelessness into a game, starves himself, and loses sleep, all for the purposes of keeping his son Christopher from feeling the same pain. His aspirations aren\u2019t beyond his grasp, and yet he\u2019s knocked around throughout the better portion of his story. Are we still on the clich\u00e9 that somehow finishing a Rubik’s cube can somehow identify an undiscovered genius?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Pursuit of Happyness\u201d takes place during a time when the Rubik’s Cube was very popular, yet it also helps to provide an excuse to use the clich\u00e9 quite prominently. \u201cThe Pursuit of Happyness\u201d would be entertaining if it weren\u2019t so blatantly sentimental and sappy. It resembles a typical Hallmark original film where plot devices come by at just the right time. As our character Chris is forced to write down an important number, to which he can\u2019t find a pen, a friend comes along and begins muttering numbers which conveniently confuse him. His dream job features some of the nicest people you could ever meet.<\/p>\n

And most of all, we\u2019re never truly given a full impact of homelessness. The two always manage to find a place to be that\u2019s never as dirty or gritty as we\u2019d suspect. \u201cThe Pursuit of Happyness\u201d many times borders on fairy tale territory in the vein of \u201cIn America,\u201d in which our characters are always in the area of danger, but never in life threatening danger. Thus, any suspense or realism is lost in the sea of predictability and clich\u00e9s. In the end, I\u2019m pretty indifferent toward Smith\u2019s dramatic effort. While Smith and son pull in strong performances, \u201cThe Pursuit of Happyness\u201d is really just a glorified Hallmark movie of the week with a bigger cast. Sap, sentiment, and hokey plot devices bog down an otherwise down to earth story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, why was this such an easy film to review, and like? Because hell, I\u2019ve been through situations very similar to this. Trying to get by, almost being thrown into the streets, being forced to watch parents suffer to ease their children\u2019s. I\u2019ve seen it all. And in the end of the film, it\u2019s still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,138,302,340,752,874,1190],"class_list":["post-8285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-adaptation","tag-biography","tag-drama","tag-family","tag-p","tag-romance","tag-will-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}