Mary & Max 50th Review Special! CR #22

Today is a glorious day, a day I could only dream of, a day that will be remembered in history as a glorious day that I could only dream of, it's Canada Day! Let us celebrate all those famous Canadians like... Celine Dion...and...Tara Strong depending on whether or not you watch cartoons... Ok this joke has gone on long enough. Yes, today is Canada day, but, more importantly, it's my 50th review! So to celebrate I'm going to review one of my two favorite movies of all time, yes I have two movies at #1. One of the two is a movie I've seen more times than I can even count, a movie I found by accident at the time when I was just starting to learn of my love for film, this is...

 Let's Begin

PLOT

Mary Daisy Dinkle is an 8 year old girl living in 1970's Australia, and she was bored. She has no friends, neglectful parents, and relies on her mood ring to make decisions. In New York City, there is Max Jerry Horovitz, a 40 year old obese man who also has no friends or family. One day, Mary decides to write a question to an American, and she randomly chooses a Mr. M. Horovitz. Mary and Max soon form a friendship that lasts through hilarious and exciting ups, sad and hard downs, three decades, and two continents.

PROS

This movie is stop-motion animation, think Nightmare Before Christmas, and it's beautiful. Every scene has so much detail that your eyes will be zooming all over the place just to find everything. The stop-motion animation is also impressive. It's so smooth and high quality that I'm still not sure how they did some things.

The actors portraying Mary (Toni Collette as adult Mary and Bethany Whitmore as young Mary) and Max (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) do an amazing job, the stand-out being Hoffman. He has a knock-out performance that blows me away every time.

Barry Humphries is the narrator who's one of the best parts of the film. As my friend pointed out to me, his narration is very innocent and comedic, like a dad reading to his child, even though the film deals with some dark and heavy subjects.

The script is very clever and has a ton of memorable lines and scenes.

The cinematography and style is very unique, one of the best examples I can give is whenever we're in Australia, the color scheme is very bright and colorful, but whenever we're in New York, the film goes black and white.

The movie has a bold yet satisfying bitter-sweet ending that really sticks with you and makes the movie for me.

While this might not work for some, I really love the quirky characters and how they show it through Mary and Max's letters.

CONS

Don't make me laugh, how could this movie have problems?

CONCLUSION

Mary & Max is one of the best, heartfelt, thought-provoking, and most rewatchable movie I've ever seen. It deals with mature subjects and growing up in subtle ways that I fell in love with. I've probably seen this movie more than 20 times, and I'll see 20 more. While not for everyone, everyone at least needs to give it a try. Run To is not strong enough of a rating to give. In fact, I'll make a new rating, how about...

RATING

CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!