Word: melvins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Jack Nicholson, back in leading-man form, plays an obsessive-compulsive curmudgeon named Melvin Udall. The movie's first scene shows Melvin shoving an adorable little dog down a garbage chute, and he doesn't get much more polite than that, dispensing sharp-tongued and occasionally appalling wise-cracks throughout...
...despite all this Melvin, is likable from the beginning, mostly due to Nicholson's broad, compassionate performance. His soft underbelly shows through his sarcastic ranting, and the question is never whether Melvin will open up to others, but how. Thankfully, the movie doesn't try to cure Melvin's obsessive, gruff behavior but instead gently nudges him towards reciprocating emotion. Nicholson does more than manage to balance his character's conflicting traits--he makes it look easy...
...Melvin's isolated life is complicated by developing relationships with two acquaintances: a gay painter (Greg Kinnear) who lives in the apartment next door, and a lovely, down-to-earth waitress (Helen Hunt) who serves him lunch every day. Melvin doesn't technically befriend either character. His first words to Simon, the painter, are bigoted and vicious, and all he wants from Carol the waitress is his bacon and eggs done right with as little small talk as possible...
Friendship is thrust upon Melvin, and he doesn't quite know what to do with it. When Simon is beat up in his apartment and Melvin winds up caring for his dog (the very one he tried to dump earlier), Melvin develops an attachment to the animal that sets the stage for actual interaction with humans. Similarly, he becomes so dependent on the daily routine of Carol's service that, when she takes time off to care for her asthmatic son, he is virtually forced to involve himself in her life and set things right again. In the process...
...hand her a real challenge: the world's meanest man. This guy, a writer named Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), can't even think about gays, blacks, Jews, Hispanics, women or little sick kids without making an acid slur. But long before the end of As Good As It Gets, the buoyant new bauble from TV- and movie-comedy master James L. Brooks (the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment), Melvin is converted; he realizes that this woman, with her aggrieved look and a tongue as sharp as Cheddar, is his redeemer. He gulps hard and tells her, "You make...