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As Good As It Gets

The acting in this movie is really good.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Jonathan Safran Foer (Elijah Wood) is a peculiar guy. He collects the most mundane everyday personal things. He is Jewish. After his grandfather's death, he goes to Ukraine in search of the ancestral home town of Trachimbrod. He hires an anti-semitic cranky old man and his American pop culture loving grandson Alex to guide him. Alex's translating ability is limited. History is long forgotten. Nobody has heard of the place he's looking for.Director Liev Schreiber is trying too hard to be quirky without actually achieving any laughs. It's weird for weird's sake. Schreiber doesn't have the necessary skills to make it fun. I sit there like Wood's character with his googly eyes staring unblinkingly. For the most part, the movie is a slow weird procession. Then the movie gets to the place and it achieves something poetic. I wonder if these characters are more real, would the story be more poignant? I think the story got a bit overwhelmed by the quirky mannerisms.

There are tons of things to quibble with in the film if you are familiar with Eastern European history and culture. The portrayal of Alex and his family is overly primitive and dysfunctional but part of that problem is due to the adaptation of the book where Alex winds up leaving. In the film, it appears that this behavior is normal and perpetuates the stereotype of the violent Eastern European family. Also, the behavior of the Ukrainians that they encounter on their road trip also are a bit one dimensional. The awkward lingo or grammar that the translator uses is a key element to the humor and insights of the film, but slightly off. A translator wouldn't use overly complex words to express himself when a simpler one in a dictionary would do, for instance.Finally, there's the necessary adaptation where the myth of the village that they are seeking is replaced with a more simplistic holocaust story. If you've seen Schindler's List or Sophies' Choice, you won't be terribly surprised.Now, all of that said, put together much like a bunch of common ingredients from your kitchen, it can come out surprisingly tasty. Elijah's acting is superb and his comic and dramatic timing impeccable. The scenery of Odessa and the Ukrainian countryside alone was worth the price of admission. Alex's style and attitude was a perfect example of a typical Odessa man. Even where I could quibble with a lot of the elements, the way everything tied in together at the end was touching. My wife started the film laughing her head off and sobbing at the end.Thing to look out for: The railway station where Jonathan is picked up, "Lviv Central", is NOT the railway station for Lviv. I know because I spent a lot of time there. They must have had a need to film somewhere else and put up the signage on another, less used, station. Also, it's rather strange that he would fly into Poland, presumably, and then take rail into Ukraine. It would have been a lot easier for him to just fly into either Kiev or Odessa directly. I suppose it was done to add an element of drama to the film rather than him going through the airport (although if you have flown into an airport in Ukraine, that has a lot of drama too!)

The film is rather empty. I didn't like it despite all positive references here. Humor is rather strange. The story line is not definite. The main characters are not clear except the Jonathan. May be for foreigners it seems OK, but for people speaking Russian, film, people and their actions look strange. The only thing which is good reflected there is beautiful Ukrainian nature, fields, traditions. The scene with food is absolutely wrong, because a lot of people in Eastern Europe don't eat meat and this tradition has big history. Also the personage of grandfather is not clear at all for me. I expected much more from this movie.

"Everything is Illuminated" is an embarrassingly bad stinker on almost every count, with two exceptions: Eugene Hutz is weirdly, wildly charismatic as Alex, a goofy young Ukrainian who imagines himself a hip-hop star. And "Everything Is Illuminated"'s score is excellent, consisting, as it does, of authentic Eastern European folk music.The first half of "Everything Is Illuminated" consists of g-rated versions of "Borat" jokes. Ukrainians are funny because they try to be cool like Americans. Ukrainians are laughable because they speak English in a simple-minded pidgin, calling "African Americans" "Negroes," for example, and saying "repose" for "sleep." Ukrainians are funny because of their sex lives. Ukrainians are also dirty, irrationally and by nature violent, they hate Jews, they wear unattractive clothing; the men are ready to beat up any newcomer to their town naïve enough to ask for driving directions; the women are either cowed housewives married to husbands and fathers who lead with their fists, or slatternly, sullen, obese waitresses; goat-herding Ukrainian children engage in mindless vandalism like flattening car tires. These folks are so debased that even their dogs are ugly, stupid, and vicious. Yup, there's even a creepy household pet. Of course these comically stupid, ugly, crude yokels are responsible for the Holocaust. At one point, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, insists that the Ukraine was as bad as Nazi Germany.This nasty stereotype is not the invention of Liev Schreiber, the director and script writer. Schreiber and Safran Foer, the author of the book on which the film is based, are merely exploiting, not inventing, hateful ethnic stereotypes. The image of the brutal Eastern European peasant has been around for centuries. Americans are most familiar with this stereotype from Polak jokes and the film "Borat." Eugene Hutz is genuinely funny in his thankless, Eastern European "Amos-and-Andy"-style role. He acts the Ukrainian dunce with as much grace and dignity as possible, and is the only thing worth watching in the film. Some scenes are laugh out loud funny, especially when Wood lectures Hutz on the use of the term "African American." But "Amos and Andy" was funny, too.After about an hour of Bohunk jokes, "Everything Is Illuminated" abruptly turns off the comedy tap and turns into a turgid, static Holocaust film. What little action there was in the film, provided by Hutz's kinetic mugging, shuffling, and jiving, or by Ukrainians punching other Ukrainians, stops. Characters stand still and offer speeches about horrible things that happened in the past. Jonathan and Alex arrive at the one pleasant house, with the one dignified resident, in all of Ukraine. The colorful cottage is out of a Disney fairy tale. Clean laundry snaps on the line. Orderly rows of sunflowers surround the home. The peasant woman living in the cottage is gracious and lovely. Aha. She's not really Ukrainian. She's Jewish.On the other hand, Elijah Wood, as Jonathan Safran Foer, a modern American Jew, comes off no better than the stereotyped Ukrainians. He, too, is a stereotype: the uptight, obsessional, neurotic, socially backward, weak, frightened, passive Jew. Wood, as Jonathan, is so stiff he could be playing a corpse. A writer and director should have a very sound aesthetic reason for making the Jewish character in a film about the Holocaust a passive Jew. Scheiber has no good reason. He's just playing two stereotypes against each other, insisting that one needn't learn anything from one of the most horrendous crimes in history in order to make a film about it. Given that there is a very self-destructive death of another Jewish character in the movie, Wood's passivity is even more troubling.The Holocaust is never honored by "Everything Is Illuminated." In the unlikely event that this is the only Holocaust film the viewer ever sees, that viewer would have no idea what the Holocaust was. As slow, pretentious, and ponderous as this film is, it never for one moment manages to convey the monumental horror and heartbreak of the Holocaust.Again, I'd love to see Eugene Hutz in just about any new film; meanwhile, I've been watching youtube videos of his band, "Gogol Bordello." Hutz sings and dances like a man who has vowed to live fast, play hard, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.