Good Will Hunting (1997)

It’s Not Your Fault

Today’s review comes as a combination of a request and a regret.  I wanted to see today’s movie for a while, but never really bothered to get around to it until it was suggested by my Friendboss Josh.  I don’t remember what the hell we were talking about that made him think to request this movie, but I managed to write it down in my phone so that I wouldn’t forget it along with everything else he’s requested of me.  And, with the movie available on Netflix streaming, I was happy to fulfill the request.  Also, I’ve heard Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier (who produced the movie) talk about it the few times on their podcast, Smodcast.  Today’s movie is Good Will Hunting, written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Stellan Skarsgard, Minnie Driver, Ben Affleck, Casey Affleck, Cole Hauser, and George Plimpton.

Will Hunting (Matt Damon) is a genius, but he’s also an asshole.  He’d much rather spend his time drinking and fighting with his friends Chuckie (Ben Affleck), Billy (Cole Hauser), and Morgan (Casey Affleck).  He works as a janitor at MIT and solves a complicated math problem (I think it was “1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 – 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 x 0 = ?”) that is put up as a challenge by Professor Gerald Lambeau (Stellan Skarsgard).  Will meets a Harvard student named Skylar (Minnie Driver) shortly before getting arrested for assaulting a guy.  Professor Lambeau gets him out under the condition that Will study mathematics with him and see a therapist.  After scaring off a number of potential therapists, Lambeau calls his old college roommate, Sean Maguire (Robin Williams), who is slowly able to get through to Will.

Despite this movie being a drama, I’m happy to report that I actually enjoyed this movie.  I thought the writing was very clever, and the story was very interesting.  And, thankfully, it has a happy ending, so this review won’t have to be a bummer.  I was not aware that reviewing this movie today would cause back to back Massachusetts movies, but that accent always makes me laugh so it wasn’t a problem.  I feel like I was uniquely able to relate to this movie because I too have lived life as a genius but choosing to waste my gifts.  I also chose to react to this by pushing anyone away that tried to get close to me, drinking a lot, and beating the shit out of random people.  Some or all of this may or may not be true.  The dialogue was also very intelligent, or it at least seemed that way.  I couldn’t tell if Will’s speech about History had any actual facts or truth in it, but it sure seemed smart.  A lot of the speeches were very well-written.  I especially liked the speech that Maguire delivers when he’s dissecting Will’s reasons for not trying anything in life.  I feel like all of the writing in the movie was fantastic.  The movie looked pretty good as well except for one glaring problem I had: the slow motion fight scene.  It looked super goofy.  They could’ve just had a couple of guys rolling around and punching each other in the face.  Instead, they decided to make parts of it slow motion, but the slow motion seemed more like guys acting like they were fighting in slow motion than film of guys fighting that was slowed down.  Close ups of people’s faces getting punched in slo-mo only works if it looks like it hurt and not as if a guy didn’t like the smell of some other guy’s knuckles.  It was a really goofy scene that shouldn’t have been, located in the middle of an otherwise great movie.

Almost every performance in this movie was fantastic.  Matt Damon knocked this shit right the hell out of the park.  It was wicked awesome.  I think the man deserves wicked praise just for being able to deliver some of the speeches he does in this movie, let alone the very real performance and a great couple of emotional breakdowns near the end.  He was a dick for the bulk of the movie, but still managed to keep real and likeable somehow.  His fantastic performance may have been overshadowed by Robin Williams though.  That guy was great.  He also had a couple of big speeches to deliver, and most of his were super emotional ones, especially when he would talk about his wife.  Stellan Skarsgard also put on a pretty great performance.  I wasn’t particularly impressed with either Minnie Driver or Ben Affleck until they had their required emotional speeches near the end of the movie.  That elevated my opinion of their performances to “pretty good”.

I was happy to finally watch Good Will Hunting, and even happier to find that it was really good.  I found the story to be very charming, the dialogue incredibly smart, and the performances mostly fantastic.  I’m only 15 years late, and if you are too then I recommend you fix that problem like I did.  You too can have your Friendboss recommend it to you on your review blog.  But if you plagiarize me I will fucking kill you.  Good Will Hunting gets “My boy’s wicked smaht” out of “Nail them while they’re vulnerable.  That’s my motto.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Psycho (1998)

12 Cabins, 12 Vacancies

I feel like I’ve made a mistake that I can’t rectify now. I probably should have watched the original of this movie before watching the remake, but I didn’t and I doubt I’ll be able to by the time this review comes out. Today’s movie is a remake of a classic Alfred Hitchcock movie, and I’ve never seen a Hitchcock movie before. Calm down, everybody! It wasn’t like I refused to watch them, it just never came up. And once I had started today’s movie, I started realizing that I should’ve watched the original first. But, in my defense, this movie could potentially have been hurt by everybody comparing it to the original, and I’m going in unbiased. Yeah, that’s a good excuse. I win. … The movie is Psycho, this version written by Joseph Stefano, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Vince Vaughn, Anne Heche, Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Anne Haney, James Remar, Rita Wilson, James LeGros, Flea, and Robert Forster.

Marion Crane (Anne Heche) has a fantastic boyfriend named Sam Loomis (Viggo Mortensen), who is married and in debt. What makes him fantastic? He is Viggo! You are like the buzzing of flies to him! Psst. I WILL make that joke for every Viggo Mortensen performance I review. You’ve been warned. Anyways, Marion works at some job that I never really figured out. Realty, I think? Anyways, she steals $400,000 from a guy who came in to talk with her boss and pay for something in cash. She takes it to get her boyfriend out of debt. She starts driving to California to see him. A cop wakes her up as she sleeps on the side of the road in her car and her skittish demeanor makes him suspicious, so he follows her. She trades her car in for a new one to lose him (even though she knows he’s parked across the street), and even though he comes up, sees her take the new car, and probably talks with the salesperson about her paying in cash, he does not follow. … Whatever, we just need her to get to the Motel, right? She gets caught in a rainstorm and pulls off at the Bates Motel. She meets Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), who owns the place. He has plenty of rooms because no one ever comes by. He apparently lives there with his mother, who is crazy. He seems nice enough until she suggests putting his mother in an institution, and he gets very upset. She goes to her room, where she decides to return the money the next day, and then goes to take a shower. Do I really haveta tell you how that shower ends?

I didn’t really like this movie, and that proves to me that I also won’t like the original. I HAVE SPOKEN! Even though I’ve never seen the original, I feel like I pretty much know it by heart because of parodies and just seeing scenes from it everywhere. I know the whole mother surprise, I know the shower scene, I know Norman looking through the hole in the wall, I don’t remember him masturbating as he did it, and I’ve actually been to the damned Motel on the Universal lot. That being the case, I feel like this movie stuck so close to the original (or at least what I know about it) that there really wasn’t any reason to make it. The only difference is that it’s in color and stars people I know. And if you aren’t going to add to it (but may potentially subtract from it) there’s no reason to do it. I did not, however, know there was a second half of this movie. I don’t know how I thought this movie worked out, being an entire movie leading up to a murder in a shower and cross-dressing revealed in the last 5 minutes, but I did. So it was interesting to find out what happened in the second half. I wish I had ever figured out what time this movie was supposed to take place in though. I thought they replicated this movie so much that they even set it in the 60s, especially when William H. Macy showed up. Macy acted like a pretty typical 60s cop, and then Julianne Moore walks in wearing a Walkman, for no apparent reason other than to say “PSYCH … O!” There were a bunch of things that didn’t work in this movie, the biggest of which was the music. I know it was a nod to Hitchcock, but I found it kind of tedious and adding to tension that wasn’t there. They would have really tense driving music when Heche was driving in her car. COME ON! She WAS getting herself all worried by having a really annoying interior monologue of people talking about her and figuring out what she’d done, but SHE was worried, not me. I was bored. You don’t need to lay everything flat on the table for the audience, we can figure some things out. But they do that again at the very end of the movie, where the psychologist that talks to Norman lays out exactly what he did and why he did it for about 5 minutes and I was thinking “Yeah, I know. I figured it out when I saw him in the wig.”

The performances were fine in this movie. Not spectacular, but mostly not horrible. Vince Vaughn was kind of like other Vince Vaughn characters, but more creepy, shy, and nervous. Anne Heche looked, and acted, pretty good in this. Her performance in the shower scene seemed a little off, but I think she was trying to do a remake of the performance from the original. Otherwise her reaction to being stabbed was perhaps a bit strange. I had no idea that Viggo Mortensen, Julianne Moore, or William H. Macy were even in this, but I was happy to see they got a pretty descent cast for a movie that didn’t need to happen. I thought Macy’s performance was strange when I started to figure out that this was supposed to be happening in the 80s, but it wasn’t off-putting. The thing that WAS off-putting was how bad his death was. It wasn’t his fault, but I forgot to put it in the last paragraph and I ain’t goin all the way up there to add it. He “falls” down the stairs, but it’s fairly obvious that the “down the stairs” part is green screen and he’s just standing in front of it flailing.

Based on what I know, this seems like a shot for shot remake of a movie regarded as a classic, but I found it to be very boring. Judging by the other reviews for the two movies, my guess is they did a poor job trying to remake the original, which probably didn’t need to be remade. The performances were mostly okay, but the movie didn’t really need to be made. We’ll see if neither movie needed to be made if I ever get around to the original. In the meantime, you don’t really need to watch this one. The remake of Psycho gets “We all go a little mad sometimes” out of “A son is a poor substitute for a lover”.

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