The Worst Film Ever

Really Surprised!

Beautiful, moving film.

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

A nostalgic and sentimental fantasy (journey), based on the historical, and the political climate of the time.An absolutely lovely, and well-cast movie. Almost Capra-esque, in the way this ordinary Joe, fights, for truth, justice, and the American way... and gets the girl, too.Reminiscent of an actual post war movie THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), where a returning soldier loses his arm in the war.A touching swan song, for the gentle and endearing Martin Landau, who we lost in 2017.Inspirational, and heartwarming, this is truly, Jim Carey's finest hour.

Jim Carrey did a fantastic and believable job in his dramatic role as screenwriter Peter Appleton in this touching patriotic movie. I love this movie and have watched it many times, often inviting friends to watch it. Invariably, they are also delighted and overwhelmed by Carrey's acting and that of the artfully performing supporting cast. I am disappointed that the reviews at the time of the movie came out were quite good but the box office earnings was poor. Perhaps the public did not believe that Jim Carrey could perform a movie role without being silly, comedic or vulgar. But he can, and he should have gotten much more recognition from Hollywood for his superb acting in this deserving cinematic effort without his usual tactics. I believe he did an Oscar performance. Jim, if you ever read this, please do more dramatic roles like this. Don't cheat the public from your talent and ability, which is to make us believe, make us enter into your world as we did in the world of Peter Appleton and Lawson, California.

"The Majestic" is a throw-back to fantasy films of a by-gone era, such as those directed by Frank Capra and Henry Koster. Not only is the storyline itself similar to Hollywood fantasies of the late 1940's and 1950's, several scenes ring of old movies. Townspeople often gather in front of the main character and his girl. In some sense, the film is like a film within a film, in which the people of the small town are like the audience and the characters like those on stage. "The Majestic" is an inadvertent realization of "the world is a stage", but unfortunately, as things play out, the central theme is applied like a bull-dozer. Only in a few scenes do we see the character exhibiting blood, sweat and tears, at the beginning and near the end. For much of the middle, he's almost too happy, things working out too well. There's an old adage of storytelling which says only trouble is interesting. Unfortunately, the trouble takes a back seat to the elation.The premise could have been concocted straight out of a Frank Capra screen concept. A b-movie screenwriter in 1950's Hollywood, Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey), is accused of secretly harboring communist sensibilities and therefore could be spying for the USSR. His career in film is essentially at an end, and he's being summoned to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. He then takes a trip with his only friend, a little stuffed monkey, up the California coast where he gets into a horrible accident on a bridge. He's washed up on the beach like a crew member of a ship lost at sea. An old man discovers him and helps him to the nearest town, an unassuming small town on the California coast called Lawson which rings similarly to Bedford Falls of "It's a Wonderful Life". Appleton suffers from amnesia and doesn't who he is. He sees pictures in the town windows of local young men who fell overseas fighting in the Second World War.He happens into a local coffee shop where another elderly gentleman, Harry Trimble (Martin Landau), recognizes him. He's convinced it's his son, Luke Trimble, who went missing-in-action during the war. The local towns folk then reacquaint themselves with who they believe is their long lost soldier, one of the few who has returned. They decide to hold a large celebration in his honor. He even meets Adele Stanton (Laurie Holden) who had been Luke's fiancé. She is absolutely drop-dead gorgeous and yet for nearly a decade she's not hooked up with any other men, which is one of the many problems with the storyline.Since the town believes he's a hero, he goes along, even though some aspects don't seem right. Although he can't remember, there is a sense that Appleton knows that things aren't they way they should be, which is the best aspect of Carrey's performance. Trimble takes him home and shortly thereafter proposes they re-open the local movie theater which has laid dormant since the war. Of course the name of the theater is "The Majestic", and it gives Appleton, now Luke Trimble, a new sense of purpose and direction. At the same time, the FBI has decided that Appleton must be a communist spy since his disappearance from Los Angeles.The central problem with this film is that it lacks balance. The joy and elation of the townspeople enjoying the return of their long-lost hero goes on for about as long as an endless dance sequence from a musical. Almost no one in the town questions that Luke Trimble is a war casualty and has returned in the flesh. I was expecting to see more doubt among some of the townspeople. I also wanted to see the darker sides of both characters, Appleton and Trimble, but both seem too perfect. Maybe a curse word from Appleton which would never have been on the lips of Trimble, or visa-versa. Only one towns-person is not happy to see Luke Trimble but not because he doubts it's really him but because he was a rival before the start of the war. It was also difficult to buy the idea that Adele Stanton was not with another man, and that when she started spending time with him, she thought something was wrong. It would have made more sense if she was with someone else and then flabbergasted concerning Luke's return.The script really needed several more rewrites with added confrontations between Carrey and doubters. Only one character reveals late in the film that he knew Trimble wasn't Trimble. Aside from him, the joy of most of the town upon celebrating the return of Luke was just a bit too saccharine and forced. When they begin to renovate the movie theater, the entire town pitches in to help. I half-expected them to start singing Kumabya. It reminded me of those old Bing Crosby movies where the cast is trying to "solve a problem" and everyone decides the solution is "Hey fellas! Let's put on a show!" Again I expecting a bit more blood regarding his return similar to the story of Martin Guerre, a returned war hero who turns out to be an impostor. Only when the FBI catch up with him is there some meat to the story again, but this occurrence is about 80% through the film. The film was 75% in the bliss department and only 25% in the trouble department with too many additives and preservatives. If trouble is what makes a story interesting, "The Majestic" needed to reverse the numbers. By film's end, Appleton/Trimble had not gone through hell and back to make me feel like he's really been through something which significantly causes him to change. In "It's a Wonderful Life", George Bailey goes through hell to get back to heaven. With Appleton/Trimble, it was more like a short-cut.

There's a little bit of something for everybody in this sentimental and heart-warming, thoroughly commercial, tale of the rise, fall, rise, fall, and rise again of Jim Carrey.It 1950 or so. Carrey is a screenwriter in Hollywood, now accused of being a communist by the House Unamerican Activities Committee because years ago he attended meetings of the Bread Instead of Bullets Club at UCLA, with the intention of being near a girl he was interested in.Blacklisted by the studio, he gets drunk, drives a long distance, has an accident, and loses his memory. He is thence taken by a sympathetic old chap to the nearest town -- I forget whether the name was Meadowville, Smallville, Homewood, Arcadia, Camelot, Brigadoon, or Cloud Cuckoo Land, but it's one of those idyllic towns that only exist in The Twilight Zone -- in which impossibly amiable people all mistake Carrey for a World War Two hero whose body was never discovered.The unwitting Carrey is fêted, re-introduced to his old girl friend, has love lavished on him by his ailing father, Martin Landau, and brings the bereaved community back to life, symbolized by the reopening of the defunct MAJESTIC THEATER, towards whose refurbishing the entire community has contributed. It's opening night is a blaze of color and neon glory. The awed mayor -- my co-star, Jeffrey DeMunn -- buys the first tickets.However, the obsessed hunters of HUAC are in hot pursuit and manage to track Carrey down, at which point his memory returns and he realizes he's not Luke, the winner of the CMH, but just another blacklisted screenwriter. The confrontation, the presentation of the subpoena, takes place just after Landau's funeral, in the town square, surrounded by residents. Man, the predators went out of their way for this commie on the lam. There are half a dozen big black Buicks with those vertical grills that look like fangs in an angry mouth. The hunters have some of the most misshapen faces ever committed to celluloid. The worst part is that Carrey, now believed to be a communist agent, is shunned by the community that loved him so much. Even his girl turns away in disgust.I said there was a bit of something for everyone. We can start with the popular tale of Martin Guerre, done and redone cinematically several times. Then there is Frank Capra and his adoring but fickle crowds. Then there is the letter from the REAL hero, who evidently did die in combat, that is a shameless rip off of a very moving letter that was written by a soldier to his wife. It's read aloud in, I think, Episode Two of Ken Burns' magnificent documentary on the Civil War.The climactic scene has Carrey called to testify before the HUAC. He's expected to read a statement, after a no-more-than due humiliation by the legislative Inquisition, confessing that, yes, he was a communist, but he apologizes -- and furthermore, here are the names of some other Reds I've known. This long, drawn-out courtroom scene ends appropriately with a rip off from Woody Allen's "The Front." But, despite Carrey's pre-testimony anguish, there's never a doubt about what he will do.The beautiful photography of the little coastal town is impressive. My God, do I want to live there. Everyone friendly. Nice beach. No garbage in the streets. No graffiti. No minorities at all except one perceptive and sympathetic black usher at THE MAJESTIC THEATER.But the film is repulsive because it thinks that you and I are so stupid that we don't see the skull beneath the skin. The movie (and the wistful music) tugs at our heart strings. It brings tears to the eyes. But it does so as mechanically as peeling an onion does. It plays the audience like a funereal organ moaning out "Oh, Mein Papa." The story is so desperate that it will do almost anything to get an emotional response. It will drop an entire story of an amnesic young man bringing a renewed spirit to a dispirited little town, and it will thrust us into a political story in which "good" is innocent Jim Carrey and "evil" are the guys with the heads straight out of an Ivan Albright painting.The performances are fine but they can't overcome this shoddy material. The writer, Michael Sloane, and the director, Frank Durabant, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The Twilight Zone did both kinds of stories better.