Being John Malkovich
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Movie Reviews of Being John Malkovich
Movie Review: Very Quick
Summary: 5 Stars
I had no problems with this seller - my purchase came right away.Movie Review: 4.5; delightfully original
Summary: 4 Stars
I have a theory: audiences are getting smarter. Whereas before a big Hollywood movie with a massive marketing push would've been all the rage, now people are starting to know better. They're realizing that a terrible movie's a terrible movie no matter how often we can see Julia Roberts deal with more romantic comedic mishaps or much stuff Michael Bay can destroy. So when a movie comes along like Being John Malkovich, or Memento or even visually impressive like the Matrix, we stand up and take notice. Building a career largely from inventive music videos, first time director Spike Jonze comes out of the gate with probably the most unconventional comedy you'll see.
Loserly Craig Schwartz (John Cusack, always good) is an aspiring puppeteer who can't get any work. Then he has his dishevelled looking wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) leaving in their small New York apartment with pets everywhere since Lotte's a pet store worker. Craig, due to his puppeteering skills gets accepted at a company located, amusingly, on the 7 1/2 floor, complete with cramped ceilings. He also has a strong attraction to one of his co-workers, feisty Maxine (Catherine Keener). One day while working, he discovers a small day and going inside he finds out he can see the world through John Malkovich's eyes for 15 minutes with an unceromonious dump on the New Jersey turnpike ditch.
Craig and Maxine get an idea: charge 200$ for people to experience being John Malkovich which is a novel idea until Lotte goes through and feels a deeper connection, especially around the idea of Maxine. Then we have a bizarre love square or star or something since Craig loves Maxine who loves Lotte but only when Lotte is inside John Malkovich...'s head. Try not to wrap your head around it since it's better explained in the movie and after awhile you don't even worry about stuff like vessels or portals, you just go with it.
Casting is of course important and no one seems wasted, even Diaz, who I normally can't stand. The real treat though is of course Malkovich since at times you almost can't tell if he's acting or if he's really that quirky. Then there's the comedy which is subtle to the first-was-funny-but-now-it-ain't like the 7 1/2 floor and the small ceilings but then the film shows you what happens when Malkovich steps through his own portal and it becomes not only a technical marvel but one of the flat-out funniest things I've seen lately. Only problem with the story is that at a certain point it shifts gears and the film almost speed walks to its climax rather than lurching forward, like it was shot in the foot.
Like the Amazon review says, I don't know if the film can warrant repeat viewings and you can get more out of it every time you see it but that first viewing is quite something.
Movie Review: It lacks some finesse
Summary: 4 Stars
The film is deeply funny because of the grossness of the concrete realization of the argument of the plot. It is muddy, dirty, crawling in a corridor, perverting in the most grotesque way Alice in Wonderland looking through the looking glass and sharing an apartment with an ill-mouthed parrot and a chimpanzee. The hole in the hedge is a rat hole in the wall and the only attractive thing in it is the glass doorknob. Then the plot is absolutely funny. It is based on one person being able to crawl inside another person and impose his or her personality onto that other person. That's strange but very fast it becomes ah ah because of the identity of the person inside and the identity of the person with whom the inhabited one is having relationships, discussions, rapports, even intercourse of course. In a way it is perverted since a woman can live her love for another woman by accepting her to be in the man that is the vessel of that intruder or invader. If the man is invaded by a woman and has a personal relationship with another woman, the two women are making love, to the point of procreating a girl, their daughter. That's definitely ah ah. Then the film deals with phantasms in the heads of Western men and women. Everyone wants to be able to make their desires and emotions towards anyone whatsoever real. But after all you have to keep some appearances, as a British TV series about a certain Mrs Bouquet used to say, and that's how the inhabited human vessel can enable so many possible connections to take place. Then it shows that success in our society does not depend on the value you have but on the value the public persona you are living in has. If you live in the body of a great person anything you will do will be successful and seen at once as great. Finally, and that's the punch scene at the end of the film, this possibility to transit from one person to another will enable some old people to get into younger bodies and live forever. The very fundamental myth of the Western world, but a myth they have never dared to realize in a religious belief or philosophical theory. The Buddhist did it but not the Christians, nor the Moslems, nor the Jews, the three Semitic religions. So Hollywood is playing the role of the provider of eternity to the few who will believe it because they have always dreamed of it. Blessed be the gullible, ... So all in all a funny film that makes you feel at times kind of ill at ease.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: if you love surrealism....
Summary: 4 Stars
I love surrealism so I liked this movie. It's freaky, it's wierd, people don't look like themselves and there are unexplained pieces all over it. Puzzling bits. Unanswered pieces. Even the puppets add weirdness.
Craig (Cusack) is a brilliant, unrecognised puppeteer, who lives with his animal collecting wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz). I have to say right off that her hair was *hideous* and gave her character a waif-like incompetent look. She urges Craig to get a job after he gets hit by an offended dad while he's performing on the street in front of her shop. He goes to work as a file clerk, inexplicably in offices that take up only 1/2 floor, populated by employees who are just, well, odd- some are lechers, some think the whole world has a speech impediment and others are just wierd.
Craig discovers a "tunnel" and follows it into John Malkovich's brain and he and his freaky co-worker Maxine (Keener) decide this provides a fantastic opportunity to make extra cash. Like the good puppeteer he is, he needs to go further than just visiting Malkovich. Lotte, OTOH, finds the experience overpowering and overwhelming, with some interesting side effects in her relationship with the freaky Maxine.
I was uncomfortable with the scenes when Craig put Lotte in the cage- other people who are appalled by domestic violence will find that unamusing as well. Of course, people appalled by same sex couples will have issues with the evolution of Maxine and Lotte's relationship.
As and actor, John Malkovich has always fascinated me. Some other reviewers- who didn't like the movie- wondered why he would "lower" himself to the level of this movie. I, OTOH, would see it as a wonderful opportunity. How many actors get the opportunity to play themselves, yet, not really themselves? To be in a scene where every single character is *themself*? eeek! Hard to imagine what that would be like!
The whole entering-through-the-portal-and-living-forever aspect was left largely unexplored- or unexplained. We, the mere viewers, will just have to wonder about all those people who went into the tube and congregated together- for how long? and how many people were in each of *them*? *shudder*
The puppetry is amazing. Anyone interested in puppets needs to see this movie- they need to *buy* it to support the art of puppetry.
The interview with Spike Jonze is priceless but raises more questions than it answers. ***evil laugh***
Movie Review: Seriously strange
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a seriously weird movie. The frustrated puppeteer, Craig, prostitutes himself by becoming a file clerk at a soulless office on floor 7 1/2. It's straight out of Dilbert. The weird things Craig finds there seem to me to point up the bizarre things we do in our real offices every day. (I work in a windowless office myself, where hardly a day goes by without management coming up with some new way of making my job harder.) The movie only gets stranger from there. For no apparent reason, Craig falls in love with his heartless co-worker Maxine, a woman whose most striking trait is a willingness to do anything for money. Craig's wife Lotte falls for Maxine as well, and they carry on a love affair by taking trips through the head of John Malkovich. All the characters in the film are completely off their rockers.The send-up of our society's obsession with celebrities is hilarious.
The fact is, in the U.S. today we are living in a society that has gone completely bonkers. The standard of living in America has declined an amazing amount in the last few decades, yet we still hear lots of rosy figures about economic growth. We line up to apply for 30 years of debt slavery in exchange for a suburban Colonial with a two-car garage, then drive an hour and a half each way to get there every day. We sell off our planetary birthright for a cheap toaster from Wal-mart. Our politicians fall over each other to spend money the country doesn't have for a war we don't need. Even after New Orleans, people seem to believe that global warming isn't a big deal. The fact is, the party that cheap oil brought us is coming to an end. If you think life in the U.S. is crazy now, wait and see what it will be like in ten years when the population has grown by another few million and the resources are running out. (For more on this, see Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency.")
When I look at America today, I think of the movie Being John Malkovich. We have invested our country's lifeblood in a suburban lifestyle with no future. Are we going to wake up, or are we just going to keep on going down this road to nowhere?