AS GOOD AS IT GETS **** OF **** grade is A-
Jack Nicholson gave one of his best performances in the James L. Brooks masterpiece Terms Of Endearment. Now almost 15-years later Nicholson is back with Brooks in As Good As It Gets, a wonderful new film. The audience is so used to Jack's face that almost every time he raises an eyebrow we erupt in laughter.
Nicholson plays Melvin an obsessive-compulsive writer of more than 60 successful romantic novels. His next door neighbor is a gay artist named Simon (Kinnear) who is financial trouble and has one cute dog. Nicholson eats every day at a restaurant and will only be served by Karol a waitress with a chronically ill child.
The acting in this film is great, but the brilliance of As Good As It Gets lies in the writing. This film is by co-written (and directed) by James L. Brooks, a man that I cannot over-praise. He has proven to be one of the very best comedy writers alive. This film's dialogue sparkles and the main story maintains max quality while never falling to sitcom shenanigans.
Many critics knocked the ending of this film, which maintains the fact that As Good As It Gets is a romantic-comedy. The entire film is unique and uncompromising until the ending that is a bit of a let down. It almost has the feeling of studio handled end, that comes about after a negative preview screening. The ending doesn't stop the film from being great but it does make it fall short of Brooks' 80s masterpieces.
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