MOVE - Hector and the Search for Happiness

R (1:54)

Limited release 9/19/14

El Con - by myself - 10/9/14

RT Critic:  31  Audience:   66

Cag:  6/Awesome  5/Loved it  4/Liked it a lot  3/Liked it  2/It was okay  1/Didn’t like it

Directed by Peter Chelsom

Relativity Media

Based on the book by Francois Lelord

Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgard

My comments: This is a movie that stays with you.  It's stayed with me - for days now.  I've created my own list, trying to figure out what makes me happy.  The movie?  I loved it.  I really loved it.  I'd like to go back and see it again.  It didn't get good reviews from critics, and I haven't even read them.  This will go down as a favorite movie for me, I think.  Definitely quirky.  Off-beat.  Tongue-in-cheek.  Clever.  Absurd.  
       There was one, somewhat disconcerting element.  Two days before I saw this I saw Gone Girl, where Rosamund Pike is a psychopath.  She has a pretty-decent-sized part in this story, with an entirely different persona.  It was hard not seeing her as the psychopath!d  She did a wonderful job, though, I almost wish I hadn't just seen her play such a seriously different part.

RT Summary: Hector (Simon Pegg) is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara (Rosamund Pike), he feels like a fraud: he hasn't really tasted life, and yet he's offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results. Based on the world-wide best-selling novel of the same name, Hector and the Search for Happiness is a rich, exhilarating, and hilarious tale.