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YMMV / The Majestic

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  • Genius Bonus: Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is a notoriously demanding piece to play - not difficult per se, but requiring a lot of practice to do it right. Even if real Luke Trimble showed back in the town, there is just no way he would be able to play it from sheer lack of practice. It's also quite a solemn piece, making it unfit for such gathering. All together, this paints Miss Terwilliger as someone who clearly overestimates her own lessons from years prior and also doesn't really "get" the gravity of the situation of the man's amnesia.
  • He Really Can Act: Jim Carrey at his most serious at best. Who knew?
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • As Peter drives his car along dark, winding roads and through a narrow bridge, a possum crosses in front of the car. Peter swerves to avoid the possum, but smashes through part of the siding, leaving his car dangling precariously over the edge of the bridge. It then begins to rain. Peter tries to reverse, but the slippery road causes the car to slide even closer to the edge and slowly tips over and plummets into the river below. As his car sinks, Peter struggles to get to the surface, but his coat is snagged in the car door. He eventually surfaces, but is swept into a bridge abutment, knocking him out just as the screen cuts to black.
    • Harry slowly clutching his chest, then suddenly suffers a heart attack and he collapses to the floor.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Adele probably started to miss the smalltown life once she started killing zombies!
  • Sweetness Aversion: A key reason the film bombed so badly was that it evoked this reaction from many critics. Its principal 1940s small town setting is a pure example of Eagleland Type 1, it and its people so idealized that Kenneth Turannote  of the Los Angeles Times compared it to the phony setting of previous Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. The film runs on Black-and-White Morality (upsetting more conservative critics who bristled at its depiction of the Second Red Scare), is often bathed in golden light, is very slowly paced (resulting in a 153-minute runtime), and constantly rhapsodizing about fallen soldiers, freedom, and The Magic of the Movies. To make matters worse, by the time the film was released in December 2001, the September 11th attacks happened. Warner Bros.' ad campaign openly positioned the movie as something inspiring that Americans needed at the moment (going as far as to shoot a special talking-head ad with Carrey), which only made critics more skeptical. One critic admitted he would have declared Pearl Harbor as the worst movie he saw in 2001 instead of this, had it not been for the ad campaign just pushing the whole thing over a cliff of sappiness. About the only thing keeping this out of Glurge territory is that the storyline doesn't have any blatant unfortunate implications or questionable messages. To make clear how overbearing it can get, even the favourable reviews included disclaimers that this movie can make people uncomfortable with its overall tone.

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