Grand Canyon (1991)

Admirable film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Sad, but this movie bored me to tears. Sad because I love Danny Glover and Steve Martin, and the chemistry between Glover and Kline was excellent! The plot is just, well, life is hard, at all socio-economic levels. Thanks. Got it.

On a personal level take heart your troubles, even your triumphs are transitory and eventually of no import for you (however how you live your life does and will affect others)! That's the whole point of this movie and yet I failed to learn it's lesson and am continually stuck in the moment beset with regrets from the past and fears for the future and I know I'm playing a game that is fixed but more importantly temporary, yet I'm incapable of rising above the fray and see it for what it is, an accident! Because of my inability to separate my life and my reactions to life from this absurd game I make one mistake after another! Salman Rushdie said something very profound that sums up this movie beautifully (at least for me): "I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come." Salman you nailed it! By the way the movie is well worth a watch! I was very emotional whereas others I've talked with couldn't have cared less! Perspective based on life experience I suppose! There's a comment from another movie (Gladiator) that in this context seems rather cogent and it is the following: "What we do in life echos in eternity" (The law of conservation of energy?)! What an amazing quote! By the way the cast gave great performances save perhaps Steve Martin whose performance seemed, at times, stilted or perhaps more correctly not genuine! Therefore I couldn't rate this wonderful film 10 stars.

Grand Canyon is a marshmallow of a movie: soft, squishy, blandly sweet and utterly lacking nutritious value. Many reviewers here have called this "underrated" in fact, it is underwhelming. If Grand Canyon were really all the things its admirers claimed it was it would be far better than the film it actually is. Its somber tones and earnest observations provide a coating of weighty significance over a rusting hunk of zero. There are no revelations here, no great insights into the human condition, just the illusion of something stirring.Fans of Grand Canyon argue that those who see through its pretense are insufficiently "sensitive" to appreciate the movie's philosophical merits. But any truly perceptive observer will spot the film's obvious contradictions and glory in its unintentionally humorous aspects. One character states, "When you sit on the edge of (the Grand Canyon) you realize what a joke we people really are... what big heads we have thinking that what we do is gonna matter all that much... thinking that our time here means (nothing) to those rocks … Those rocks are laughing at me right now, me and my worries." If this is so, then why should any of the principles even bother going to the trouble of contemplating all that they pretend to contemplate? And why should anyone watching this sop give a damn about anyone in this film that strives so hard to make you care? Essentially, the Grand Canyon is meant to be a metaphor for the chasm that exists between people; between perceptions and reality, but if you listen carefully to how the characters express this, the Grand Canyon becomes more an allegory about the abyss within people who talk about the existence of miracles without daring to contemplate their source.The characters are familiar: Kevin Kline is the feckless white (liberal) dope so feeble that he is rescued from the potentially fatal consequences of his own lame-brained actions twice. Danny Glover is the Magic Negro. Mary McDonald is the wise wife who obeys the voices she hears emitting from a mute homeless man. Naturally, Grand Canyon is set in Los Angeles and features attorneys and film producers who veer into the paths of wrecker drivers.Grand Canyon appeals to a particular kind of sucker, the kind that prefers to believe in a poetic truth conjured in his own mind than the literal one staring him in the face; the kind of people who confuse style and substance. That so many of them have posted positive reviews of the film does not surprise me, what does are the many who claim it moved them to tears. Really? Cussing was inserted into the dialog so that viewers knew that they weren't watching some warmed over Hallmark Channel offering.

Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon is a movie trying to go places, and isn't quite sure how it gets there. Set in 1990s Los Angeles, it follows the fortunes of half a dozen citizens whose lives are intertwined by fate and fortune. There are some memorable scenes that will live long in the memory. Take Kevin Kline being rescued by pick up truck driver Danny Glover when he breaks down in one of the most undesirable neighbourhoods around. I found that the first half of the movie rolled along at a cracking pace and was watchable, even though many of those scenes were laden with doom and gloom and the chaos theory that we all live through in every day life. Indeed, Kasdan seemed to relish every single opportunity to tell us that modern day life - especially in LA - is fraught with danger, despair, injustice and anguish. After a while, the message gets laborious, but Kasdan then shows us that despite all that, we cannot cheat fate and that there are immeasurable pleasures to be had in life despite the surface appearing to be rotten and hard. The ending is a little too neat and doesn't sit kindly after what has been shown before, and the second half of the picture does start to sag, but all in all this is a decent movie well worth a revisit. Not sure what Steve Martin is doing here - he seems hopelessly miscast in a straight role, but Kline and Glover, in particular, are excellent.