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Comment by hi41 | Hacker News Reader

I was really moved by this movie. Based on his previous movies, I didn’t think of Jim Carrey as a good actor. But this movie changed that.

Everyone watching this movie will relate to the movie’s plot as it speaks to the existential questions that arise in every human. We can imagine the reality tv boss as God. Our own experience of thrownness feels like God is playing with us just as the reality tv boss is playing with Truman.

In the ending sequence, I wept when the tiny boat reaches the end of horizon and hits the blue sky wall. The utter devastation Truman experiences when he realizes he has been played all his life.

I was deeply impacted by this movie.

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The ending of Truman Show is often considered one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema. It's a really great sequence that also stayed with me since then. I was never too much into Carrey acting on comedic roles, but I really like his dramatic ones.

Definitely up there as one of the greatest endings, the melancholy it represents is just so on point. Another similar film like that would be 'Being John Malkovich', - a film that was utter perfect all the way til the end.

The thing I absolutely love about the end is that what happens after is completely left open. Did he find peace or was it disappointment at the horrors of what was outside the dome? We will never know, it is just something you have to wonder and accept. It is not for us to know, it is but the feeling a dream you can never grasp like the clouds behind a distant mountain.

I rewatched it the other day and it is a great ending. My first thought was that they could have cut to black when Truman walks through the door, but actually having the last line as "what else is on?" is perfect IMHO.

Considering the pace at which the attention moves on, it was an honest but savage mirror onto the viewers. And by comparison, the 90's was slow by today's standards.

It is funny looking back at media from that era and seeing how there was this idea that things were already too hectic. Like in the early 90's Bart Simpson referring to the non-stop fast times they lived in.

Vaguely related but another great one was the small doco "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age" filmed in 1985, they are talking about how they cannot keep up with the pace of BBS boards. If only they knew what was coming. Also of note is this is one of the earliest recorded sightings of Richard Stallman, his message was very on point even then.

This may blow your mind: Alvin Toffler wrote the book Future Shock [1] about the psychological effect of "too much change in too short a period of time" in 1970. That predates cell phones (1973), personal computers (1977), the web (1989), smart phones (2007) and modern AI (2022?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

> I was never too much into Carrey acting on comedic roles, but I really like his dramatic ones.

I enjoy dumb movies toe but, like you, I prefer him in the "not totally dumb" movies.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie I like a lot too.

This resembles my feelings towards Tom Cruise. I always thought of him as an action star and nothing more (well, a Scientology-kook as well, but that detracted further). But his performance in Magnolia was so convincing to me that I started seeing his acting skills in a different light.

He is a good actor, no doubt there. He can be darn funny too, check ie his stint in Tropic Thunder.

That doesn't change the fact he has some very deep internal issues/fears that Scientology has managed to hook on very tight and kept their grip so effectively. It fucked up his marriages and is a stain on his brand/legacy that literally everybody knows about but respectfully act like they don't see it. Almost a bit like Truman show :)

From reports of people who know Tom Cruise, Magnolia was Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise, which is why he was so convincing in that role.

That Magnolia performance is a standout among fantastic performances. What a great movie.

Just like the Truman Show movie, I have always felt it's a bit underappreciated. So many great performances in that beautifully shot movie and such an emotional roller coaster. Although in many aspects a totally different type of movie, I think Uncut Gems was the first one since I watched Magnolia that touched me in similar ways. And just like with these other movies, it really changed my view of Adam Sandler.

Just in case you haven’t seen it:

The director of Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) actually cast Sandler in a dramatic role a couple of years later (Punch-Drunk Love) that was also received very well. Might be worth checking out if you liked Magnolia (I loved that movie).

Punch drunk love is an amazing film.

Amazing Score/Soundtrack by Jon Brion too. If you like that then try Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and I Heart Huckabees for their Score/Soundtrack.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is in that film and is great.

Thanks for the suggestion, never seen the movie!

I felt the same way about Tom Cruise until I saw Collateral, which quickly become my favorite movies of his and possibly one of my favorite movies of all time.

Before watching the Truman Show I actively avoided Jim Carrey movies because I really disliked his over the top acting. Just like in your case, this movie completely changed my view of Jim Carrey, even the performances in previous movies that I had disliked so much. I may even call this my favorite movie of all time.

Btw, Jim Carrey has never won an Academy Award, and neither has The Truman Show, which is quite a shame.

For me the equivalent was seeing Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. I was channel surfing and this came up randomly. It was absolutely captivating, and was easily the best portrayal of mental illness I had ever seen in cinema.

Adam Sandler! That goofy idiot that plays in low-budget comedies that won't even make you laugh once!

Someone on Reddit explained that Sandler is a true genius because he doesn't work too hard, does "fun" low-stress movies, and takes his friends along to "assist" in beautiful tropical locations. All probably as a tax write off.

Brilliant.

Score of 7.5 on IMDB is not too shabby! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/

Adam Sandler also delivers a stunning performance in Uncut Gems - any preconceptions of him disappear as he plays the role of a greedy, jaded gambling addict so well. He clearly knows how to act, just chooses the low-stress comedy route most of the time.

I love Sandler's movies exactly because you know exactly what you get. He's found a formula that works well enough, and has largely stuck to it. He's one of a handful of actors I can go "I'm in the mood for a X movie" about and not care much which movie it is. They're a genre in themselves.

Sure, I know I will groan at how dumb various things are, but that's part of the expectation.

Carey is similar but less so. His span is wider. That hits both ways, Carey at his best have more brilliant performances than Sandler, but it also means that you can be in the mood for Carey, but not Mask and Ace Ventura stupidly over-expressive Carey, for example, so it's harder to just semi-randomly pick one of his movies based on a mood.

It undersells what he’s doing a little bit to say it’s just a formula. He’s still trying to be experimental, it’s just that, in his risk taking the riskier he makes things the worse they tend to be. His Hubie Halloween accent is a good example. “What if I spent an entire movie talking like this in this silly voice” is one of his gags, and more often than not it doesn’t work, but he still tries new voices.

There's a few actors that just fit in a niche like that. I'm thinking Steven Segal, who's been playing the same role in the same film for decades now. But his movies are sold and played on TV all the time, there's definitely an audience for his brand of... whatever he's selling.

He is great in Uncut Gems too.

(That movie is absolutely great, but it is a hard watch. I don't regret watching it, but I would never watch it again).

He's a fine actor. He just happens to look and act like the middle aged guy next door so he gets overlooked.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind comes to mind, as well.

Man on the Moon too.

Also not a fan of his variety of slap-stick & such, he's good at it but it just isn't something that works for me from other performers either, but give him a slightly more dramatic role where he isn't just being Jim Carrey Jim-Carrey-ing like Jim Carrey, and you can see he has a talent.

(not that I object to his other stuff existing – different strokes for different folks!)

Carrey was absolutely amazing as Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Sure it was just a kids movie, but there was something really sinister in his performance. Really amplified the sense of true powerlessness that the kids had in their lives, what a terrifying world to live in as a child.

I think Carrey is seriously underrated as an actor.

thrownness?

Heidegger's term i think, based on the english translation of "being and time" (Sein und Zeit), our state of having found ourselves like this.

It’s as if you wake one day and suddenly find yourself in the midst of things without anyone asking you whether you actually wanted it. You don’t choose your epoch, parents or the nation or the religion you are into. You find yourself “thrown”. I meant it like that.

>>> In the ending sequence, I wept when the tiny boat reaches the end of horizon and hits the blue sky wall. The utter devastation Truman experiences when he realizes he has been played all his life.

I guess no need to see that movie now.

Thanks for that.

A single spoiler can't really ruin the experience of that movie imho. Also the age of the movie aside, if you expect comments about a movie's story don't contain any information about that story that's on you.

It's not even a spoiler. There is no great plot reveal at the end, it's already established in the first 10 minutes that Truman is living a fake life inside a giant dome. Sure, the post above gives away some of the specifics of how the character experiences the denouement. But hardly a spoiler. And, as others have said, you can't expect perfect secrecy to be maintained in discussions of a 25 year old film.

I think it's acceptable to discuss endings on a 25 year old movie.

Why does the age of the movie have any bearing on this? We aren't born with all knowledge of previous movies. There will only be more and more of them released as the years go on. For most of us it isn't possible to watch and know all of them. I don't think it's too much to ask for a heads up when a spoiler is coming.

If this was a community based on the movie I'd say all is fair, but since it isn't I don't think it is fair to dismiss the concern just because the movie is old.

> Why does the age of the movie have any bearing on this?

Opinions vary: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05/as-regards-spo...

The film is not a mystery, it is a satire using the framing of Plato's allegory of the cave. There's no twist, its purely comedy and commentary about his antagonists and their motivations.

You’ve avoided the spoiler for 25 years? That’s impressive!

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