JamesCinemaFan

When I first saw Kramer vs. Kramer, it was extremely painful for me. And that's a good thing. The movie covers its difficult topic about as well as it can be covered. It doesn't offer any easy answers, like so many similar movies. Thus it respects the subject matter and presents hard emotional truths for us to swallow. And that is how a person can develop a wise heart. Ideally, all movies would be working toward promoting the right emotional and intellectual responses in all of us, instead of desensitizing us toward serious human issues and rendering us apathetic and stupid. Kramer vs. Kramer demonstrates how a movie, simply by provoking the right questions and framing issues discerningly, does not have to offer many explicit answers to be extremely meaningful and constructive. And, in a way, doing that is an answer to life's problems. Perhaps one of the most important kinds of answers of all. Marvelous leading performances by Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry. Great character acting from the rest of the cast. A superb movie in every respect.

An adequate acting performance manages to avoid detracting from the quality of the character it portrays. A good acting performance enhances it. In "The Accountant", there is only one good acting performance of note, by Anna Kendrick. She is extremely sympathetic and relatable in a very limited role. J.K. Simmons, among others, makes a valiant attempt to elevate characters from irretrievably poor material that doom them to be mediocre at best. Cynthia Addai-Robinson gives a poor performance, adding vagueness and inaccuracy to a character that would have been far more vivid if we just exclusively read the screenplay. There is one adequate acting performance of note, Ben Affleck. Unlike the movie "Argo", where he detracts from his character, his performance in "The Accountant" is perfectly serviceable. The film unfolds in a number of different story arcs, each of which could easily be an entire film unto themselves. This plentiful material would be a boon, but only one of the story arcs, the one that directly follows the main character with his personal history and relationships and choices, is well executed. For the rest, we are left to soak up massive amounts of plot and character exposition in short scenes near the end of the movie. Again, we would do almost as well reading this material in screenplay form as by watching it in the movie. Worse than that, the movie includes far insufficient material to begin to make sense of or sympathize with these massive and complex plot developments, leaving the viewer with a lot of incoherence. A common misconception of art analysis will surface here. Some audience members will argue that they can fill in the blanks with their imagination and come up with excellent results. But if you the viewer are forced to essentially write material yourself that is vital to the quality of the movie (unlike, for example, the audience imagining gratuitous exposition to add to an already great movie), then that is a credit to your imagination but an indictment of the actual movie's quality. For the quality of the main story arc and of Kendrick's and Affleck's characters, I give this movie a 6.5.

A masterpiece leaves you with a sense of being filled up and flowing over. A deep well for your spirit to drink and be sated. A masterpiece is ineffable, much more than the sum of its parts. It's not that every part of it is perfect, far from it inevitably, but the whole is transcendent, and as such it transcends even its own limitations and problems. The characters in Princess Mononoke are living and breathing, full of life and profundity. It is partly in the characters themselves, and partly in the way the movie gives us to understand them. Through voice acting (the English version is marvelous, I can't speak for the original), music, dialogue, facial expressions and body language, and more. The imaginary world's symbolism doesn't let us down either, as do most. It is wonderfully coherent and rich.