Saving Norman (2013)
Saving Norman tells the story of a hypochondriac ex-ping pong player who missed the biggest tournament of his career because of a cold. Now years later he lives a hermetic existence with his parrot Norman. But, when Norman seems to be suffering from a case of bird narcolepsy he calls in pet psychic Belinda who soon realizes that in order to help Norman, she'll first have to help his owner.
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Wonderfully offbeat film!
The first must-see film of the year.
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
In South African writer-director Hanneke Schutte's 10-minute short film Willem Dafoe plays a loner who still isn't over the fact that he could not compete at the table tennis Olympics several decades ago due to a simple cold. That is why he never leaves the house. When his bird gets sick, a young female vet diagnoses that he is just reflecting his owner's depression. So she gets the original Olympics Gold medal winner to the house and Dafoe's character finally gets his big say. Of course the vet has a father with interest in table tennis, so she makes this personal. And of course, Dafoe's character goes immediately out of the house after staying in for 10 years before (according to his neighbor) and not even being able to get the newspaper properly.In the end he recovers and so does the bird. Nice little story if you don't think about it in depth, but as a whole it really felt a bit superficial and ridiculous occasionally. I'd only recommend this to Dafoe completionists and fans of the series "Awkward!" for Nikki Deloach.