Melvin Udall is a heartless man. He spends his days inside of his spacious Manhattan apartment writing romance novels. It also seems that Melvin will never change. One day he dines ar his favorite restaurant, and is a little TOO mean to his normal waitress (the only waittress that will serve him), Carol (played to perfection by a lovely and sexy Helen Hunt.) She threatens not to serve him if he doesn't shut up about her asthmatic son. he does shut up. To make matters considerably worse, Melvin has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. One day his gay artist neighbor Simon(Greg Kinear, of Talk Soup fame, in an Oscar-worthy role)'s dog threatens to dismiss himself at Melvon's door. The dog meets the garbage chute. Soon Simon is sadly beaten by thieveing burglars, and Ray (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Simon's agent, takes the dog, Verdell, to Melvin, so that Melvin can dogsit him. And through the dog and a rather heartwrenching car trip that involves Simon, Carol, and himself, Melvin learns to emerge from his cantakerous shell. Jack Nicholson gives yet another Oscar-caliber performance as the film's cynical lead, and is back at work, not playing a goofy U.S. president or a comic book villian, but instead playing Jack Nicjolson, and playing him full force. All of this adds up to this year's funniest comedy, a creative, witty, and scathing film from James L. Brooks, and Brooks gets award-worthy performances from the entire cast. A winner in every aspect, and a truly delicious slice of cyncial life.
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
MPAA CLASSIFICATION: PG-13
RATING: **** (out of four)
RUNNING TIME: 132 min.
(c) 1998 MSTFAN Productions
Jason Bacon
bacon4@bellsouth.net
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews