Totally neat and fun movie, but *not* the 23rd best of all time!

Rating: Null/10 (16 May 2000)

"Being John Malkovich" is one of those innovative films that come along only rarely. For reasons that become clear in the second half of the movie, there in fact is a "portal" that allows people to enter and spend exactly 15 minutes in John Malkovich's mind. What happens when a puppeteer enters and discovers he can learn to actually control Malkovich? What happens when Malkovich finds out about the portal, and actually enters his own mind?
This movie is total fantasy, no real "message", just fun entertainment. It is well-acted and well-directed. I personally give it "9" of "10" for total enjoyment. However, if one were really to get down to a ranking of recent movies, there are a whole host of recent movies (e.g. Shakespeare in Love, A Simple Plan, Fargo, Lone Star, The Matrix,American History X, Saving Private Ryan, etc) that, in my opinion, are in total better movies. Still, see "Being John Malkovich" if you haven't yet, it is really great fun!
I viewed the DVD. Although very nice, the "extras" are fairly lame by current DVD "extra" standards.