Being cheated out of awards.

Rating: 10/10 (25 April 2000)

Well, the story repeats herself once again. Last year this happened to the unforgetable `The Truman Show' and this year to `Being John Malkovich', probably the best film directorial debut for a video commercial director. What both films have in common is a unique originality, unpredictability and involving, seductive, irresistible subliminal monsterous tone that spoke of big issues in an unrepeatably subtle, and yet direct way.

Obviously, they weren't long enough, or something, for the Academy's taste. I hold that they both deserved the Academy Award for best picture, because that is, I think, the only way American movies have a bright future  if awarding ultraoriginal creations, magnificantly and spectaculary constructed, uniquely written and powerfully and impressively performed. And that's exactly what `The Truman Show' and especially `Being John Malkovich' are.
Charlie Kaufman's screenplay has enough originalities for two dozen other movies, but, togather with director Spike Jonze's certainty, they reveal them slowly and neatly, always in a well-argumented manner and with good balance. The plot keeps surprising you from the beggining to the end, never going over the top or losing it's direction.
It's hard for me to even imagine how much effort the creators had to put into making this movie, and how hard it was to write it in the first place and then edit all that rough material at the end. I can't remember them failing anywhere, which is very rare in American filmmaking in general nowadays, and when it even happens in a movie like this, it's a miracle.
This movie is even so endlessly inventive and unpredictable it kept surprising me even more in the last quarter than in the first or the second one. Or the third one  maybe the most original one. And when even that happens, and when it's not done in a one-invention-on-top-of-the-other-with-absolutely-no-order-or-reason manner, like it isn't here, then you have a great motion picture.
`Being John Malkovich' talks wisely, funny and instructively about a lot of subjects that all come from the one in title, and the message is that they should not. Jonze managed to devise a very specific, strange atmosphere that he drags throughout the movie and adapts it to the situations. The result is one of the most stirring movies I've seen in the last few years.
An endless number of words could be spilled out about this film. Not one could describe how good it was to me and how truly entertaining it is. Maybe it's not as emotionally moving as his last year's partner in pain `The Truman Show' (both of the movies received best director and best original screenplay nomination, and were deprived for acting nomination  Carrey last year, Malkovich here), but it probably is even a little better performed and better balanced (or edited).
Both of them were best pictures of the years they were released in. But obviously not long enough.