Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Nayan Gough
A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Kirpianuscus
not great. only perfect. for the story, mix of different lines. for cast. and for the meet between Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck in a last scene who impress again and again. it is a masterpiece . for the opportunity to discover a lost age of Hollywood in the best version. for the desire, and the reasonable result, to make a different western. and for its...humanitarian perspective about love and family. sure, I am far to be objective about it as admirer of Lillian Gish and Gregory Peck . but it is real good film. maybe, obvious, perfect.
Fred Caccia
I would say, bluntly, that this film has aged terribly and had better not to show anymore, such an old Hollywood actress. The ambition of Selznick, his sickly pursuit of Oscars, his "Gone with the Wind 2" fever, forces production to sink in an outdated grandiloquence, which could impress the backward audience at the time but fails to delight cinephiles from today. "Duel in the Sun" offers a clumsy thematic treatment, grotesque characters, and a hell of Tiomkin score worthy of a Max Steiner's brass band. As for the direction, this is a dire rigidity and a drought that casts despair over the aficionado of this highly fertile cinematographic genre. The film is more a piece of crap than a western.
utgard14
A half-Indian girl named Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is torn between the two sons of a wealthy cattle baron. Jesse (Joseph Cotten) is the educated, mannered 'nice' one. Lewt (Gregory Peck) is a ladies' man and a bad boy. We can tell which is which because the good one typically wears lighter colors and the bad one wears darker colors. Helpful. Pearl just can't resist Lewt no matter how bad he treats her. Leave your political correctness at the door, folks. This one's got a little something to offend almost everybody.Extravagant "epic" western from David O. Selznick was an attempt to achieve the same success of Gone with the Wind. It's pure tawdry hokum. Yet another starring vehicle for Selznick's protégé (and future wife), Jennifer Jones. I've never been a huge fan of hers. She's certainly attractive enough, with her high cheekbones and radiant smile. I even find her lisp endearing. But she was a very limited actress. Usually she was cast in sensitive parts where she spoke most of her lines in a whispery tone while soft music played. Here she plays to the rafters, hamming it up so loudly she makes Hedy Lamarr's performance in White Cargo seem subtle. Starring with Jones are Gregory Peck and her frequent costar, Joseph Cotten, one of the few male leads the jealous Selznick trusted around his lady love. Cotten is perfect (when wasn't he?) but Peck is miscast and overacts even worse than Jones. The absurd ending with those two is justifiably infamous. The rest of the cast is made up of exceptional talents like Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Walter Huston, Harry Carey, and Herbert Marshall. The Dimitri Tiomkin score is fantastic. The sets and costumes are lavish, as they should be given the high production values this one had. The Technicolor is gorgeous. The script is laughably awful. Some of the dialogue these poor people have to say is just cringeworthy. Overall, it's a movie low on substance but high on spectacle. It keeps you interested throughout, despite its flaws (and maybe because of them). Definitely warrants a look but not everybody's cup of tea, for sure.
timmy_501
This is a rather unusual Western. It has one of the most excruciatingly ignorant main characters I've ever seen in a movie. I know that the idea is that she hasn't had much education but I don't understand how anyone her age could possibly be as stupid as she is, especially given her close relationship with her supposedly well-educated father. The other interesting thing about the film is that it portrays the traditional masculine cowboy in a negative light, instead favoring this character's non-violent intellectual brother.So at first I was annoyed by how stupid Pearl is but eventually I started to understand where they were taking this idea. We're meant to see her develop from a typically weak and powerless female living in a pre-feminist society to an empowered but conflicted heroine. I still think that exaggerating her ignorance to such a degree was a big mistake on the part of the filmmakers and actually even her development feels like what it is, a contrivance of the plot to lead to a climactic showdown.Lewton McCanles fits into the typical hard-riding alpha male archetype that's so familiar from countless other Westerns. Instead of possessing a rough hewn morality, though, he's really a terrible person who seems to delight in causing trouble for others. The real problem with this character is that he has no nuance, he's very predictable and uninspired. His brother also falls into an unsurprising pattern fairly quickly but his role as the one truly admirable character is surprising given his lack of willingness to do whatever it takes to beat the villain. This is where the snubbed heroine's interesting side comes in as she eventually seems to realize that she has to put a stop to the villain's reign of terror before he makes things even worse than they already are.What I really liked about this film was the sense of the inescapability of the past of the characters. Mrs. McCanles's choice of husband pretty much destroys her life and her unresolved feelings for another man sow the destruction of her family both from the conflict within the nuclear family itself and without from her other suitor's daughter. This film is nearly as epic as the oddly long prelude leads you to expect it to be.
