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As Good As It Gets

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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.

This is a collection of nice looking scenes with high quality visual design and some fairly good acting. Hooray. And yet the story is ridiculous, and it just doesn't hang together. By the time you get to the clichés that serve as an ending, you'll want to slap something. The garish color and playful effects really do work as individual moments, but the story line is more a serious of dots that start to connect up and then veer into some kind of weird scribble. The waste of acting talent here is particularly odd. Annette Benning is rocking it for much of the film, until she morphs into Laurie Anderson. Downey is only in part of the third reel, and he's fairly restrained but effective. Rea has it dialed way down, to the point where there's almost nothing to it.

Claire Cooper dreams strange things from time to time. She dreams about a little girl being taken away by a stranger, in her neighbourhood. When her own daughter is kidnapped and murdered only a little later, Claire is sure about the chilling truth that her and the killer's mind are connected to each other in dreams. But nobody believes her ability to foresee the killer's next steps, as she could with her own daughter. In addition, the nervous breakdown she suffers gets her into a mental facility after a suicide attempt. And here, she dreams of her husband being murdered...You could open up a whole can of worms when you analyse this piece from Jordan. Many have stated that it's the worse film ever made, but that's just a joke. As someone once said, someone's trash is another's treasure, and whilst Jordan has really gone over the top in some aspects, his genius is evident in several scenes.Apples here are the order of the day, is it referring to Snow White, as the play suggests at the beginning, or is it the forbidden fruit? After all, Claire's husband nearly strayed off the path, and Vivian's forbidden fruit is obviously his mother, as he has Freudian issues with her.Its a unique version, and some scenes are very disturbing, but it's certainly a visual treat, even if some of the narrative is a little off par, but then, one could argue, that the whole film consists of dreams within a dream, within a dream, and so on, so this is why the film will be heralded as a masterpiece to some, and a dogs dinner to others.Bening is great as the grieving mother, but once again, Downey Jr is wonderful, in some scenes he looks like the pre transformation wolf in Jordan's The Company Of Wolves, which this film reminded me of from time to time.Whether she dreamt it all, or it was reality, it's still a curiosity piece indeed, and worth watching more than once.....

I was watching a previous programme, left the recorder hard drive on.. started watching near the start without realising it was.... SO..OK.. I fell in love with the lead character. Gorgeous..but.. I'm not sure the write up of the film in the TV guide was right.... I got the wrong impression.. NOW I know.. ah!! If you start at the beginning, and I watched it again after it finished thinking.. eh? Did I miss something. Actually no.. the film leads you into the story nicely, interesting obviously flooded town for a reservoir.. OK.. it IS a film you have to see from the start. You'll get confused as heck if you don't. Shes brilliant.. the daughter, cute of course.. hubby, OK.. one is reminded of Medium the TV series but this hubby isn't used to coping. Thats part of what makes it sad.. she really gets a 'bum deal'. One feels for her, even if one doesn't fancy her..(ahem).. but what is real? I didn't like the end but having seen it twice, it makes sense.. its NOT spelled out. I did get drawn in and it kept me up much later than intended.. that to me is good. WHAT the hells going to happen. The stunts..very well done and if one is going to do a major..stunt.. for me, not enough was shown of it happening.. a recent Steve McQueen TV/film stunt was shown from many angles to MAKE you realise they did it for real.. and how well it was done.. this time.. I'm not sure. I didn't like the end, but where this film is concerned.. I suppose it couldn't end any other way. Yes it could.. no it couldn't, excuse me.. pantomime time soon. Anyone who wants the story spelled out, no.. it doesn't, and thats what makes it intriguing, if you haven't patience to stay with it to find out.. like some said they almost did.. in the cinema? What a shame, such a bril film wasn't appreciated. We do get so many of these on Brit late night TV in the UK..BBC, uninterrupted, and that helps. WISH they were on EARLIER!!!

** SOME SPOILERS ** There are a handful of directors out there - Brian De Palma is another - who believe that the way to make a convincing psychological thriller is just to steal wholesale from Psycho. Neil Jordan goes further and steals not only from De Palma's famous Carrie ending too, but also the red-obsession and drowning themes of Don't Look Now and the dripping red wallscrawl of The Shining, plus all the usual lunatic asylum clichés. He also reckons that by attaching a Roy Orbison song onto the end of the movie the effect will be as chilling as a David Lynch film, rather than just plain funny.In Dreams wants to be an intelligent and adult thriller, but like a director with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Jordan just can't help himself loading his film with meaningless clichés and nods to his favourite horror movies.The early domestic scenes are effective, as is the gut-wrenching murder which takes place a short way into the film; but once Bening is committed, the film takes a turn for the usual, and instead of being interesting, incisive or intelligent, just throws a lot of MTV tricks and regurgitated movie moments at the screen hoping that some of them will stick.By far the worst thing about the film is Robert Downey Jr., who undoes anything remaining to keep the viewer interested by his cartoonishly camp turn, and we're treated to yet another mother-obsessive lunatic with a penchant for cross-dressing.This is a good film to watch if you have an apple fetish or enjoy being untroubled by original ideas.