So much average

Pretty Good

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Quirky gay kid fears his boozer dad and admires his arty mom... until he hits the age of reason and begins to see his life for what it really is: a surprise. At age 14 the protagonist begins dating a 35-year old man who becomes his step-brother -- one of many oddly engaging scenarios in this film which is based on an allegedly true memoir. Trouble is, for all its star-power and meticulous set design, the story lags and drags, becoming more about the memoirist's mother than about the lead character, who gets eclipsed by the zany shuffling of too many eccentric weirdos. As for being funny, it has its moments, but often the actors seem to be trying too hard to make the audience laugh. Kudos to all people involved for taking the story so seriously. And shame on whoever allowed this movie to over-ripen. Trimming 20 minutes from its running time could've probably salvaged it from the depths of mediocrity.

Wes Anderson could have turned this quirky, bizarre, surreal and sometime heartfelt story into a little treat. Not that is was that bad, but it wasn't that great either. All the elements were there, but I just couldn't get into the strangeness of it all, even if it was all true. It just needed someone that little bit twisted to tell a truly weird and wonderful tale.Annette Bening perfectly got into the quirkiness, as did Joseph Fiennes and most of the cast. The main lead Joseph Cross almost delivered the goods, but fell short and I guess that's all got to do with the messy script that didn't know what genre it wanted to be. (But it did make me want to read the book.)With all the perfect elements in the book and the cast, it just didn't quiet deliver the goods in the celluloid form, which was a shame because the potential was there.

The title suggests something edgy, something bold, something dangerous, something interesting. Alas, Running with Scissors is a monumental bore; a dispiriting and inconsequential film detailing wacky, zany, trippy, kooky or any adjective ending in 'y' ("e"), people going through hardships for our black amusement. As the film rambles on down a tangent of sprawling content and uninvolving, borderline psychotic people, it got more grotesque and less interesting. The film is devoid of any sense of comedy; humour; study; substance or intelligence, a witless, pathetic effort in its attempts to document the falling apart of a dysfunctional suburban family and the supposed rehabilitation that the mother and son of that unit go through in another family who're even more dysfunctional. Terribly directed; grossly uneven in tone; a film that makes no attempt to garner anything out of its impressive cast; obsessed with painting alienating and unsympathetic portraits of the central characters, whom we ought to be behind but just cannot stand when on screen for longer than a few seconds, as well as just being generally repetitive when it isn't either cataclysmically eccentric or 'pull your hair out' annoying; we have, in Running with Scissors, one of THE misfires of recent years.The film covers young Augusten Burroughs, of whom wrote a book in 2002 detailing his exploits as a young child of divorce growing up with psychiatrist Dr. Finch (Cox), himself of whom struck me as someone that either belongs on the couch or in the padded room rather than be allowed to treat patients in either locale, and his family in wife Agnes (Clayburgh) and daughters Natalie (Wood) and Hope (Paltrow). We begin in 1972, and young Augusten is just a child as his parents argue and bitterness resonates. The year of 1972 is brightly lit, their home colourful and quaint but underneath father Norman (Baldwin) is a dishevelled teacher whom enjoys a drink and mother Deirdre (Bening), whom will unwelcomingly feature much more later on, is a writer that cannot quite nail what she wants to do linked to magazine The New York Publisher. When the film flicks forward a few years to 1978, everything is less rosy in its colour palette and cinematography than what it was and while Augusten is older, the parents have stuck to their prior guns in their animosity with the desaturation of the home locale crucial in that Augusten is perhaps older and now able to notice the sorts of behaviour his parents engage in than what he was when he was in his infancy.What transpires from here is a divorce and the moving out of Deirdre and Augusten to the aforementioned Finch family; thus kick-starting a spiralling, tumbling, falling decline into all things sordid and nasty for either of these two, whilst Norman is seemingly off unaffected dating other women. This new family is a rag tag bunch; a group whom live in their own filth as it apparently pains them to tidy up and freely hurl insults at one another. The fact the film thinks these sequences are funny is unfortunate, the oddball tone it instills into proceedings coming back to trip the film up when we're lead to believe it now wishes to flick into a tale of a sordid descent down into a lifestyle of booze; cigarettes and homosexuality on Augusten's behalf, all whilst he's still relatively young. Where divorce and dysfunctional living are adult; mature and serious items that need proper attention, Running with Scissors laughably believes some brief excursions into underage drinking and a little sub-plot to do with a boyfriend will suffice in detailing the harsh realities of what happens to a young male mind in the fallout of what transpires in the boy's childhood.The thread bare plot, running on a rather dull premise, combined with an ensemble cast of some of the most unlikeable; most disgusting; most unrelatable characters ever put together for a film results in a near excruciating watch. Where we're systematically asked to laugh at all this off the wall, zany content in-which-nobody-really-knows-what's-going-on-and that's-apparently-really-funny(!) but then bring everything down a notch or three for Augusten's own decline in well being as we weep for the failed writer in Deirdre, we are left agasp at what's left in front of us. The film has none of that measured, slow burning maturity of something like 2004's Imaginary Heroes as a family gradually comes apart at the seams following something more tragic than a divorce in a suicide; and the blame, whilst I have not read Burroughs' book which may be the tale delivered in an equally misguided, equally adolescent manner, has to fall to American director Ryan Murphy, who adapted said text and, crucially, has since gone on to carve somewhat of a career within the medium of television. In between having his characters pause every now and again so as to spout daft philosophical musings amidst the eccentric babbling and charging around, Murphy really jumps the shark when he has his homosexual lead plus boyfriend go to see a "French" film high on "metaphorical" content because, as we all know(!), males that crave something a little 'higher' in their cinematic diet than the norm are grossly confused with their sexuality. In short, it is ridiculous; as is the film as a whole as is the fact we're expected to find any of these people interesting; their tales dramatic and the way the film goes about telling them engaging.

I think this is literally the worst movie I have ever seen. A meandering "story" about a bunch of 70's flakes too busy feeling sorry for themselves and popping pills to pull their own heads out of their asses. There was no one to root for. After two hours, I just kept praying that someone, anyone would die or be killed. I hated them all and they all got exactly what they deserved. If anyone ever tries making you watch this, RUN AWAY. Was I supposed to feel sorry for these people? I just hated them all. They were all a product of their own stupidity. Never have I seen a film so devoid of likable characters. Who gave the green light for this odious piece of dog waste?