terrible... so disappointed.

Let's be realistic.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

An underachieving writer plagiarizes a novel which turns out to be a best-seller. The actual author privately comes forward telling the background story. The plagiarist is torn between his false success and conscience. He unsuccessfully tries to correct things but it's too late to turn the clock back. The original author dies and the plagiarist moves on. This is a good and engaging story told in a multilayered fashion. While the acting, directing and cinematography are in general good, Jeremy Irons arguably shows his class among the cast. Despite its nonlinear narrative, the plot is not convoluted and easy to follow. The emotional story involving Jeremy Iron's young life sounds genuine with the exception of the final scene: his former wife's new life seems too perfect for a traumatized person and overly dramatizes his story. However, this doesn't take away much from the movie. It's not clear what the outermost layer adds to the movie with Dennis Quaid's lead except that it gives some kind of unnecessary ambiguity to an otherwise perfectly closed case.

I put off watching this because of all the terrible reviews out there but I actually really enjoyed it. The Words is a layered romantic drama. A story-within-a-story-within-a-story is the best way I can describe it and its cleverly done, following Bradley Cooper as a struggling writer who finds an old manuscript in a bag and before he knows what he's doing writes the entire thing up on his computer and then passes it off as his own. 'Rory' rockets to fame, credited with writing the next great American novel but experiences a crisis of conscience after meeting the man whose work he stole, in fact life, as we flashback to the real author as a young man and discover his heartbreaking autobiography. Meanwhile a greasy Dennis Quaid has written a book about a famous author stealing another man's work. I think everyone will get something different from this, its layered, engaging and filled with good preformances. A surprise hit for me, I thought about for days afterwards.

The movie has not been received well by the critics. Not surprising at all. The public, on the other hand, likes the movie. This is a movie that tends to cause one to overthink it when it's structure is pretty obvious. This is where it falls apart. A story about an author who writes a story about and author who breaks the one rule no author should break when he steals the work of another unpublished author. Working backwards, the movie works until it fails to resolve the top level story. Leaving very obscure clues is not enough. Having a character without any connected background or confirmation of why they are in the story is the Missed it by "This Much." Open ended is fine but unresolved is not. Two of the three stories are profound but they rest on a shaky foundation that the viewer must now decide for themselves. "At some point, you have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but they never actually touch." says Clay. Yes, we must decide whether it is life or fiction but, yes, the two do touch. Who is who is almost explained but not quite. The redemption which Rory seeks for his sins is obscure and the writers make it so because they do not want to be accused of being trite or cliche. Well in this one part, they are. The two inner stories would hold up just fine without the smoke that Daniella brings to the movie. In fact, remove all of the scenes in Clay's condo because they really do nothing for the story. It does nothing to conclude that Daniella's objective is to bed the famous author she has a crush on. We can be thankful that although she almost succeeds, she doesn't, at least not in this fiction. The critics who blast the movie because of its lack of literary acclaim are typical of critics who see only their version of the way things should be. Perhaps the fact that the final resolution is not so open-ended as it is simply confusing and leaves gaping holes in the story. We find 90% of the movie profound and enjoyable and actually very realistic. It's the 10% at the end in Clay's roost that we are left dangling without sufficient clue. The baseball is not enough.

Loved the messages, pacing, scenery, and overall emotional content. But the plot was unnecessarily cumbersome with the story-within-a-story layering. The Dennis Quaid plot added nothing; it may have actually detracted by slowing things down and removing the immersion in the fuller story. It was also painfully obvious that the producers simply looked for opportunities to include pretty women, without giving them much else to do. This movie likely failed the Bechdel test, as a result. Saldana has some powerful scenes--but she's really doing far more than she should need to with the limitations of the role.