It rarely gets better than “The Sixth Sense” which came out in 1999. In my movie going experience, there has never been a better surprise ending than this movie, with the possible exception of the ending of Seven, 1995 which was more shocking than it was unexpected.
One of the most fascinating things about the difficult process of making a great movie, is that in so many cases a writer or director has only one great one in them during their entire creative working life. This is definitely true of writer/director M. Night Shyamalan who never got close to hitting a home run as good as this movie again in his career. I thought that the movie Unbreakable was very good when it came out in 2000 but this is a distant second to the Sixth Sense which had a level of quality that Shyamalan has never reached since.
If you have never seen The Sixth Sense, you owe it to yourself to see it. The ending is one of the best in movie history.
I remember while sitting in the theater 20 years ago “Jerry Maguire” watching Jerry Maguire and thinking that this is one of the first movies I had ever seen where you I realized it had great quality within the first few minutes. Jerry Maguire was written and directed by Cameron Crowe and in 20 years it seems he has not been up to this level of quality considering both the great story idea and screenplay since then. Most recently Crowe released the movie Aloha, which came out last May and this was quite a bad movie. You can never guarantee that one huge hit from a great writer will ever lead to another one, considering the difficulty of writing a great screenplay. It definitely is very hard to believe that its been almost 20 years since Jerry Maguire was released.
Cuba Gooding Jr won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for Jerry Maguire and sadly he has never been lucky enough to ever get a part this good since. His performance in this movie was both outstanding and very funny and the catch phrase “Show me the Money” is as big as any catch phrase for any movie largely because of how well he yelled this famous line after Jerry found out he was losing his job and was desperate to keep his clients.
Tom Cruise was very good as the lead in this movie as was Rene Zellweger . Zellweger was not even nominated for an Oscar and neither was Tom Cruise, but he did win the Golden Globe for best actor. You have to figure that the Academy of Motion pictures has a problem with Tom Cruise, considering the number of times he has been snubbed. Jerry Maguire is definitely another one of those times and a nomination for best actor was definitely warranted here.
If there was a moment in time where this movie lost its high level of quality it has to be at the end when Zellweger’s character said to Cruise, “You had me at hello”. This line might very well be one of the stupidest and corniest likes since Love Story in 1970 and “Love means never having to say your sorry”. Your kidding right? That cannot be a line in a movie?”. Its hard to believe that it is.
This movie has great acting, humor throughout and the friendship between Cruise and Gooding’s characters is very believable. The child who played Zellweger’s son in the movie is another great added dimension of likability which also includes the music and great emotional ending.
This movie is televised quite a bit on cable and should be seen if you have not seen it already, many times.
Is it even feasible to make a 2 hour movie about an incident in time that took perhaps at most 2 hours? Despite the highly unusual side stories surrounding the meeting between Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon on December 21, 1970 who would actually think that this relatively short meeting in 1970 could be made into a movie? Some of the unusual circumstances surrounding this meeting mostly include Elvis Presley’s desire to receive some kind of an FBI badge so he could be an “Federal Agent At Large” and somehow despite his world wide fame, could go under cover for the FBI? Of course this never happened and Elvis even thinking that he could go under cover is both ridiculous and stupid but amazingly this is the main reason why Elvis wanted to meet Nixon in the first place as well as to get this special badge which seems in like something a 9 year old boy would desire. He also said he wanted to help the FBI with the Nation’s drug problem, even though he himself was a very heavy drug user; another ridiculous irony.
When first approached with the proposal of this meeting with Elvis Presley, Nixon immediately rejected the idea but after some bribery with Nixon’s youngest daughter Julie for pictures and an autograph Nixon finally agreed to meet him. Nixon originally only wanted to meet Elvis for only 5 minutes but after Elvis commented on how attractive his 2 daughters were and saying that because of his attractive daughters Nixon himself must also be attractive, the meeting between the 2 of them lasted several hours. This is another strange side effect of this famous moment in history between these two men almost 50 years ago.
Another weird side story is the letter Elvis wrote to the president while on board a commercial airline. The handwriting in this letter is barely readable, and poorly written: Elvis Letter to Nixon. The fact that Elvis even thought he had a shot at a special meeting with Nixon was rather insane in the first place but as this movie clearly shows, Elvis was rather insane and was using drugs frequently.
This movie is supposed to be mostly a comedy but it was not that funny. The acting was good especially by Kevin Spacey who played Nixon and Michael Shannon who was an unusual choice to play Presley. None of these 2 actors overacted their impressions of these two men and I thought that they were both at just the right level. At the end of the movie it was announced that the most requested picture in the history of the White House archives is the picture (below) of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon.
This movie was good, not great, not that funny, but good enough to recommend.
This is another link to the National archive page that documents this Nixon and Presley meeting:
A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies. 