Let's be realistic.

As Good As It Gets

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Sometimes — and I think it is often with sculptural films — the essence of the movie is concentrated in a few elements. There is a lot of surrounding story here, but it is there for only two things. These are things that need that context to have power.The surrounding story is pretty sad: a man, someone who literally sells vision, lives with a woman, and next door to the woman he used to live with. He cannot help but hurt them, being emotionally incompetent; he has problems he carries about his dad. At the end, he facilitates a possibility of real love with another man for his recent lover. She has run away, scared by loss. It is slow. He has a sort of redemption.One bit with power is in the middle. Our hapless guy travels to the home where his estranged parents are, only to find them long dead. The house is occupied by a deaf old man and his 18 year old granddaughter, played by Alicia Witt. This was 1993, when in Hollywood, she was a sort of mystical token, following her use by Lynch in "Dune," and his wild pronouncements of her symbolism. This sequence has a tone apart from all else you see; more dreamy, more like Kusturica, the production of whose "Arizona Dream" overlapped with this. Alicia has her high point as a young actress here, desperately lonely with a man who cannot hear her.The other bit is contrasted with the lack of hearing. The desert is photographed with one intent: to provide something to lay lush sounds upon, as if to give us the richnesses the characters on screen are denied. The sounds are of three kinds: desert sounds; Gram Parsons songs from his period where he gave his life to this same desert out of similar loneliness; and a lovely girls choir with something merged from Indian chants, space music and aeolian chords.If you are not already desperately lonely, this will do the job.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Nick is a TV salesman who is discontented with his life with Beth and plans for them to move towns. Carol is Nick's friend and former lover who lives next door and Sid is a painter who has a crush on Beth. This film follows the movement of these generation X'ers as they affect each other's lives.Done at the same time as gen X movies were in vogue and on the back of Tarantino fever – Roth and Stoltz both benefiting from his success. This claims to have a story but it hides it beneath layer and layer of pretension, making it hard to get involved in. The story does have some clever parallels between the character's lives and Newton's rule that a body remains stationary until affected by another. However the characters are unrealistic and selfish – making it hard to care about them.The film is actually really dull – it's only 90 minutes long but it felt like a 3 hour epic. The story is really meaningless despite thinking that shots of cacti and using African music will somehow make this deeply profound!Roth, Fonda, Stoltz and Cates have al been good at least once. Here they're all hampered by bad characters and pretentious dialogue.Overall, meaningless, self-absorbed, pretentious and, worst of all, deadly dull. What a major disappointment.

"Bodies...", a well crafted flick with a good cast and good acting, is a non-story which looks at a couple of days in the lives of four ordinary young adults (2 males, 2 females) struggling with some rather pedestrian issues while depending on one question to hold viewer interest...Where's the plot? The whole film is a character study of people who are not sufficiently interesting to make the film a memorable watch save fans of the principals. Okay but lacking in substance.

I'm not for all those superficial cry baby movies. This is different. It touches you directly right there in your chest. A real character study with great performances (all four of them, but allow me to have a preference to Tim Roth). The ending is just wonderful! See it! A proud 8.