Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt each won an Academy Award for 1997’s As Good as It Gets, a movie about a jerk with OCD and a waitress with a heart of gold.
This week, we discuss dogs that don’t eat bacon, why Jack Nicholson’s character would have fit in at Dunder Mifflin, and how this movie ended up with the name ‘Mr. Cat Poop’ in Hong Kong. We also weigh in on Steven Spielberg’s beef with Netflix before finding out if As Good as It Gets stands the Test of Time.
I believe you have missed one really big point about why this movie does not stand of time.
In 2010s, 2020s, what would happen if a celebrity was caught publicly insulting people, going on bigoted rants and what not? People would take out their phones, start recording it. Melvin would have been on all social media in all his nasty glory.
You didn’t mention his genre of fiction, but it actually was romance. (Oh the irony.)
In the age of social media, a nasty and creepy romance writer would have been cancelled into oblivion, or perhaps pigeonholed as a right-wing favorite, which could affect his publishing contracts.
And if he had a Twitter/X, he could have doubled down on that in his posts, only making it worse (think J.K. Rowling’s online activity today).
He was probably getting away with this in the movie, because a writer was typically not a public person in the late 90s. Maybe some TV interviews (which I would bet Melvin was not interested in doing), but, generally, it was just a name on a cover, very separate from a real-life person and their whatever antics.
You’re my favorite podcast! Thank you so much for doing it. Greetings from Estonia!
That’s a great point! And thank you for listening; it’s so cool that we have at least one fan in Estonia!