Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Oscar Movie Review: "Jerry Maguire" (1996)

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Movie"Jerry Maguire"
Year Nominated: 1997
Director: Cameron Crowe
Rating: R
Running Time: 2 hours, 19 minutes
Did It Win?: No.

Sports agent Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) has a revelation that causes him to write a mission statement about the importance of people and personal relationships with clients with less focus on money. This gets him terminated from his cushy job at a big-time firm. He starts his own firm and convinces one client, Arizona wide receiver Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), and one other employee, Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), an accountant, to come with him. 

"Jerry Maguire" is a reminder that long before casting the whitest actress possible as someone who is Asian in "Aloha" and much before the box office failure that was "Elizabethtown," there was a time Cameron Crowe was a talented writer and director. We like to think he has simply veered off the path and will make his way back soon, but hey, if it doesn't happen, at least he was great at some point. Tom Cruise stars at the titular character Jerry Maguire, a sports agent who has a midlife crisis of sorts. Maguire sees a shift in preferences in his work life, coming to prefer close-knit relationships with less clients as opposed to virtually no relationships with tons of clients and lots of money. Tom Cruise was the perfect casting choice for the role of a character like Maguire, with his toothy smile, boyish charms, and a semi-insane/all-intense stare. He earned a best actor Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win for his work on this film, and rightfully so. Regardless how crazy he might be in his personal life, Cruise is a hell of an actor and it really shows here. In an excellent supporting role, offering perhaps the performances of his career is Cuba Gooding Jr. as Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Rod Tidwell. He gives an excited, fun, electrifying and passionate performance, which earned him an Academy Award for best supporting actor. Of course, it was Rod Tidwell that uttered the famous line "Show me the Money!," which, for anyone who can remember the 90's, knows became quite the cultural phenomenon as it was constantly being quoted everywhere by everyone and was even printed on t-shirts and other memorabilia at one point in time.

Even though "show me the money" is one of the most memorable lines in cinematic history, along with "you complete me" and "you had me at hello," the film itself is filled has a lot of tremendous dialogue thanks to Crowe's outstanding script. Behind all of the sports and money talk, at its core, "Jerry Maguire" is a romantic dramedy, and one that has still held up insanely well with time. The love interest of Maguire is a single mother named Dorothy Boyd, played by Renée Zellweger. She and Cruise actually have very good chemistry throughout the film and we wholly believe and believe in their relationship, especially in the manner in which it's portrayed. Dorothy has a young son named Ray, played by Jonathan Lipnicki, who is an adorably cute kid in a dorky sort of way with his oversize glasses and humongous, cheesy smile. Together, Cruise and Lipnicki just melt your heart, Cruise and Zellweger make you believe love is possible, and Cruise and Gooding Jr. make you want to have a friendship like theirs. A tremendous cast really sets "Jerry Maguire" apart from other films of the same genre, which are mostly doomed to fail and are devoid of half the chemistry this movie has. When this film first came out, we were basically still kids, and now as adults, we really get it and enjoy all the more because of the great directing, the phenomenal writing, and the excellent acting.

My Rating: 8.5/10
BigJ's Rating: 8.5/10
IMDB's Rating: 7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 85%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?
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One year ago, we were watching: "Five Easy Pieces"

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