Cheap Being John Malkovich (DVD) (John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich) (Spike Jonze) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Being John Malkovich

An stylish fastasy fantastic dark comedy.
The Plot:Craig Schwartz(John Cusack) is a strugging street puppeteer looking for the easy way to life at success. But he`s need to make some money for his future. He takes a job as a filing clerk. One day at work, he accidentally discovers a door top a portal of a celebrity brain of John Malkovich!(Played by the actor himself). for 15 mintues, he experiences, what the actor sees in his eyes and then he fall from the sky onto somewhere in a New Jeresy turnpike! But his beautiful office but hard to be friends with mate Maxine(Catherine Keener) and his pet-obsessed wife(Cameron Diaz) helps craig to make money to let another people see for $200 each person. But craig discovers he can use the actor brain for a very long time, if he`s that good.

DVD special features has a fine widescreen(1.85:1) transer and good Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround and good extras but no commentary track and no deleted scenes. But is still a great movie. Grade:A-.

---

A refreshingly original movie.
After reading a few reviews of this movie it is clear that it is a movie that you either love or hate. Personally, I love it. It is easily the best movie of 1999, and fully deserved its three Oscar nominations. John Cusack is well cast as a struggling puppeteer whose life takes a strange turn when he discovers a hidden door in his office. Catherine Keener and Cameron Diaz also put in fine performances. John Malkovich has a tough role to play but pulls it off with conviction. If you are expecting a laugh-a-minute comedy then this movie probably isn't for you. Although it has it's funny moments, these are subtly played - like Cusack applying for a filing job on the seven and a halfth floor, which has rather low ceilings (low overheads you see, so the savings can be passed onto the customer...). The overall premise is pure fantasy and requires suspension of disbelief but if you are prepared to go along with it, this movie is well worth seeing. It is very thought-provoking. Finding a category for this movie would be a tough job, but the best I can come up with is 'bizarre existentialist philosophical comedy' (but don't let that put you off...). The DVD itself is very good. Excellent picture and sound, and some extras although these are of questionable quality. The 'interview' with director Spike Jonze is quite frankly baffling. It takes place in a moving car and he ends up getting out and vomiting. Whatever. So, I wholeheartedly recommend this. It easily slots into my top 10 movies. One of the most original movies I have ever seen.

---

"Inventive" and "Original" do not begin to describe....
Charlie Kaufman has the distinction of writing the two most deranged screenplays I know of with "Adaptation" and it's predecessor, "Being John Malkovich". Here it became clear that a mind of unsurpassed creativeness had been loosed among the movie-making crowd.

Four fantastic performances are given by John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener and Malkovich himself, and they are guided by Spike Jonze' direction and Mr. Kaufman's screenplay.

Cusack is a gifted, tortured, starving artist, and not just any artist, but a puppeteer - working with marionettes. The film opens with a marionette performance so poignant it seems neary human - the performance reminds me of the opening of "White Nights" in which Baryshnikov dances "Le Jeune Homme Et La Mort". In White Nights it takes a moment before you recognize that you are watching a performance of a ballet, and in this film the marionette is so life-like it doesn't require much suspension of disbelief to think the puppet alive. In another similarity between the two films later on a human-sized marionette is made to "dance" the lead role in "Swan Lake" surrounded by human ballerinas. The rest of this film is SO startlingly original that it's easy to overlook the fact that the movie has some REALLY skilled puppeteering in it.

But I digress. Puppeteering doesn't pay Cusack well, so there are money arguments between John and wife Cameron Diaz, who looks like a cross between a street person and a washer-woman here. She works in a pet store and keeps a collection of animals including a dog, ferret, bird and chimpanzee - all apparently with some form of veterinary post-traumatic stress disorder. Diaz' Lotte is the kind of person who forms close emotional ties with animals but has more difficulty being intimate with other humans.

Desperate for a paying job, Cusack thinks his nimble puppeteering fingers make him ideal for a company that specializes in filing, so he gets a job in an old New York building on the 7 1/2th floor - the kind of quirky little thing added in just for "flavor" in this film.

At his new job Cusack discovers Maxine - an attractive but sarcastic New York woman who has had it with most men, and Cusack's Craig Schwartz certainly seems like most men to her.

Craig also discovers something he wasn't expecting behind a filing cabinet: a portal that leads to 15 minutes inside the head of John Malkovich before dumping you on the side of a New Jersey highway.

If it seems like I've given away the whole story - I haven't. These are all plot setups that lead to the development of a narrative that doesn't just have a "twist". THIS story "twists" every five minutes.

On my second viewing of the movie my greatest regard is for John Malkovich himself, who not only allows himself to be spoofed, but participates in the spoofing with great gusto. On the first trip "into Malkovich" we track him as he's getting ready to go out. He goes down to the street where a cab is hailed for him. The driver looks back and instantly recognizes him.

"Hey.... you're that actor, aren't you?"
"Yes", Malkovich replies.
"I loved you in that movie where you played the jewel thief".
"I never played a jewel thief". (Although a few years later John Malkovich actually does play a jewel thief in Johnny English.)

A few other times other characters bring up his performance in the jewel thief movie - a great running gag demonstrating how easy human nature makes it to spread urban legends and other incorrect information.

John Malkovich has been in a large number of my very favorite films: The Killing Fields, Dangerous Liaisons, Places in the Heart, Shadow of the Vampire, In the Line of Fire and Of Mice and Men. (Fans of "Sex and the City" will enjoy the moment when Willie Garson walks by Malkovich in a restaurant and compliments him on his performance in the movie where he played "that retard".) Now one of my favorite John Malkovich movies is the one that bears his name.