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Being John Malkovich Customer Reviews (13 - 15 of 67 Reviews)

A review from the author of YEARS OF RAGE

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999) has been touted as a masterpiece, but it's difficult to see why: 1.) The narrative is absolutely preposterous---not to mention obviously "media-critical" (everyday losers disappear into the head of a celebrity and see the world through his eyes); 2.) The film is very poorly lit---and please don't tell me that this is "deliberate." It's simply poorly lit, whether "deliberately" or not. 3.) The film is poorly directed by an MTV video jockey who has been dubbed as "mysterious" for reasons that are mysterious to me. (Who cares if he is "mysterious"? On the basis of this film, the man's no artist.) Almost every shot is static and lifeless and conventionally set up. 4.) The film is EXTREMELY pretentious, much like other psuedo-counter-mainstream mainstream American films from the same period (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and THE RULES OF ATTRACTION). 5.) The film is simply dour. Not emotionally powerful. Not disheartening. Just saggy and soggy and dour.

Apparently, I am one of the few who think that this is a terrible film, and I don't expect anyone else to agree with me.

Preposterous, poorly lit, poorly directed, pretentious, dour.

Joseph Suglia, the author of YEARS OF RAGE, the novel inspired by the Columbine High Massacre



Uh-oh, here's an AUTHOR!
Homeboy, shut the f-ck up and go back to diddling your laptop. Also, none of us gives a f-ck about your lame-ass book. Advertise elsewhere, this is a forum for CINEASTES ONLY. If you weren't so obsessed with writing words, you might be able to understand them, and decipher the genius of BJM. So where's your tour-de-force script just days away from getting shot, you're so well-respected and more learned than us? Oh, that's right, you just wrote it beneath my retort. F-ck off, assh-le!

"Being JM" is incredibly original thanks to cast, screenplay
"Well, there's this guy...." That's all that some viewers could really come up with when asked to describe "Being John Malkovich", the latest film starring Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and John Cusack. Oh...and John Malkovich is in it, too. This movie is so original, I can't even begin to explain this movie, other than that it was intelligent, fascinating, and hilarious. Because of the originality, it is completely unpredictable: you are so completely in the dark trying to guess what is going to happen next, that you end up not even bothering to guess-which makes a great movie-going experience.
Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a puppeteer who believes he is not just a puppeteer, but an artist. Diaz, in a wig that makes her nearly unrecognizable, plays Schwartz' animal-loving wife, Lotte. Cusack, upon the realization that he might not make it as a puppeteer, decides to get a day job, at a place on the seventh and half floor of a New York skyscraper. It is here at this odd office floor, that Cusack stumbles upon a portal to John Malkovich's brain-where he is allowed to experience what it is like to be a celebrity for 15 minutes, and then be spit out somewhere outside the New Jersey turnpike. Hilarity ensues, and metaphysical questions are asked.
This movie is like a dream-and not in the sense that it's an incredibly great movie, although it is. It's like a dream because of the way that the logic is formatted. Things that have seemingly little significance, have a large significance by the movie's end. We are whisked away from plotline to plotline, that soon the rhythm of the rapidfire plot becomes catchy. Things that would not make sense in most movies makes complete sense here. Being John Malkovich's intentional irrationality make this a dadaistic masterpiece, a trend that I am unsure if I would want duplicated, because perhaps then motion pictures would become a medium for the insane.
The writer, Charlie Kaufmann, is quoted as saying that he wrote it not thinking that it would ever turn into a film. In response, John Malkovich said that only a writer who did not think that their script could become a film would write such a script. I'd have an inclination to agree with Malkovich, unless it has become hip to produce scripts that are risky, odd, and seemingly drug-induced. This may well be the one movie that you should see this year. Josh Bob says check it out. Five stars.

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