Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt won the Academy Award for Best Male and Best Female respectively for their roles in this bittersweet romantic comedy movie.

Melvin (Jack Nicholson) despises everyone around him – animals included. He works from home, irritates his neighbors and says every negative, offensive and borderline criminal thought that runs through his mind.

He’s not the sort of person one makes friends with, which also means he’s the last sort of person single mom Carol (Helen Hunt) needs in her life. She fights against her cranky regular, Melvin’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and rudeness, but Carol soon discovers his hidden qualities. However none of this even close to offsets his bad ones.

The more time Carol and Melvin spend together the harder she finds it to tell whether he is enormously sweet, or an enormous asshole. Sooner or later Carol has to ask herself if it even matters. Perhaps one can’t have it all, perhaps this is as good as it gets.

The opening of this movie was performed really well and by this I mean we immediately got a sense for Melvin’s character. it was both funny and eerily believable you almost couldn’t help byt love him based on his authenticity.

As it’s a 90’s movie my jaw did drop a few times at Melvin’s less than PC comments about… well pretty much everything, from black people to the gay community. Sure, I still laughed because it was funny, but it also made me think about how far we had come as human beings. I don’t know – weird side note I suppose.

Next to Melvin’s give a shit personality my second favourite thing about this movie was just how nice it was to have older characters going through the romantic experience. It cut out a lot of bullshit as they weren’t making the mistakes of the ‘good looking’ characters normally half their age we’re used to seeing, who have becoming staples in the genre.

Overall as far as a finally watched – I could as well have never seen this movie. It was enjoyable and I really enjoyed for once having an almost irredeemable misanthrope as a main character, however I think there are a wealth of better rom com options. This, is not as good as it gets.

Last Finally Watched: Donnie Brasco
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