As Good As It Gets

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A fine mockumentary production which reflects faith in good old, down- home, painstaking hard work and passion.No idea why this languishes in the IMDb 6.x ratings doldrums; I can only guess it has to do with a kind of genre "offset"; like there's a ceiling for the cred due to any mockumentary.This is a marvelous production; and I'm not just trotting out that word gratuitously: I literally marveled ceaselessly from beginning to end. Productions of this nature are burdened with an expectation of almost supernatural ingenuity, and this flick carries that burden with a kind of iron-fisted grace. It's tough satirical medicine, reaching over the wall of your sensibilities to surprise you and get a dark chuckle out of you, and seems to do so with finesse and agility. It's a rollicking cavalcade of expositional ingenuity.Lovely tech work; sound, editing, emulation of "period" media, and all the rest of it.The only (possible) remonstrance might be in the area of acting: There's lots of either bad acting, or skillfully rendered bad acting by wonderful actors. And this contrasts with direction of "real" persons (typically on-screen historical experts, or politicians) which is done with aplomb.Check it out!

He produced this one, but it's filled with his touch: 'CSA' is graced with all the subtlety and intelligence of a surly chimp squatting in a mud puddle. At some point, satire must be based on something like reality. So the South takes over and REQUIRES everyone in the country own slaves? Things are gonna get crowded for all them po' folk in Manhattan studios and one-bedrooms. This isn't satire; it's malicious propaganda by a lackluster filmmaker elevated to star status not because of his artistry or even popularity, but because his vision matches the stagnant 'progressive' worldview so beloved by corrupt, creatively arid Hollywood. Do yourself a favor and pass on this. We've been told that ANYTHING bashing white people is "brilliant" and "insightful". Buy into that crock, and you'll looove this charmless garbage.

You want laughs? You want controversy? You want to pick a fight? Invite your friends over to watch this. This is amazing, thought-provoking alternative history. Go on, critics, harp on its historical inaccuracies and its not-at-all-veiled agenda. Or just come right out and insist that Spike Lee and Kevin Wilmott are racist and that the film was amateurish and crude and could never have happened. I'm not a big fan of the Spikester myself. But I really enjoyed this flick, pretty much from beginning to end, and I'll freely admit that there were a couple of times I just squirmed uncomfortably at the sight of some of the things portrayed. Good films do that. Could those events have really happened? Probably not. Does that detract from their impact? Not one iota.A recommendation: Harry Turtledove's "Guns of the South" offers another perspective on how things might've been, and does it through a SF plot twist. If you liked CSA, you'll probably appreciate it. Not surprisingly, it has an equally checkered review history...

I found this gem on Netflix.Other reviews are criticizing the improbability of events depicted in the movie, starting with the involvement of France and the UK in the Civil War. That's why it's fiction: the precipitating events *did not happen*. It's a "WHAT IF" work of fiction. The film maker presupposes a few alterations to history, and then examines what would happen as a consequence. Chaos theory indicates that just about any imagined set of consequences of a few initial changes to a system are as plausible as any other. This movie is essentially "alternative Earth" fiction. It's fanciful by definition. It has a lot more in common with something like the sci-fi series "Sliders" or the "barbarian universe" riff in Star Trek than it is to be taken as a serious critique of modern US society. It's essentially "historical science fiction", with the aliens being the citizens of the "US" (CSA) in a different reality.I also really did not feel that it was liberal or minority grievance agitprop (it was pointed out at the end of the movie that "Aunt Jemima" and "Uncle Ben" are major US brands, but I don't need to be preached that they are somehow embody racist evil.) What CSA is, is an exploration of where the US would be if certain of the values of the antebellum South had been captured through the expanding US, and had then evolved to the present day as mainstream US values. How would the US relate to the rest of the world? What would become of the Americas? What about WWII, Nazi Germany, and the cold war? What would the major political dynasty of our time be in such a country? The film explores a fascinating series of possibilities that could have resulted.The film is only "ha ha funny" for the commercial segments. The meat of the narration is a bit satiric. The historical figures that the film portrayed, including Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, and minor figures like Judah P. Benjamin and doctor Samuel A. Cartwright, show a serious effort to take one implausible assumption (the Union forces lose at Gettysburg to combined Confederate, French and English forces) and run with it to many logical or at least plausible conclusions.What I found very implausible has not been mentioned by most reviewers. Given that the CSA was born as a xenophobic and virulently intolerant society, I don't see a CSA type nation as having accomplished most of what the US has done, particularly in terms of the sciences, militarily, and economic development. The white supremacist establishment would have rejected and marginalized many of the most productive and brilliant members of "real world" US society. IE, would a CSA ever have developed the resources to conquer most of the Americas? Would the CSA have been in a position to plant a confederate flag on the moon? (Great sight gag, BTW.) Would a CSA have invented radio, TV, atomic fission, and the internet? "CSA" only got this diminished society aspect partially right by showing that the arts and entertainment flourished in the Canada of the film, and therefore arts in the CSA were stunted and mostly tended to government propaganda.The part that I felt rang very true was how values are transmitted from one generation to another. Supposing that abolition had never happened, and also supposing that it a preference of the government - what else could you say about the society? So in CSA, women in 2004 do not yet have the vote. And Canada is despised for "stealing" the CSA's slaves.If you have an open mind and a small interest in US history, I highly recommend this movie. It's fun. It's good when it is over, and you can breath a sigh of relief for our flawed but still superior real life world.