Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mask!

Theme: Swing Set - Jurassic 5

The first and last time CGI had sovl.

Zoomies and alphies will know Jim Carrey (if at all) for his John Wayne Gacy tier schizo ""art"" of, like, Blumpf bumming himself in prison or whatever, but before he was a dribbling mental case, our Jim Jam had a trilogy of kinographs of surpassing quality in the 1990s: Ace Ventura Pet Detective had him fighting crime and saving animals in a succession of Hawaiian shirts, headbanging with Cannibal Corpse and making transsexuals seethe, while Liar Liar cast him as the slick attorney one day cursed with the affliction that he cannot utter falsehoods, which would also make transsexuals seethe.

IT'S...NOT...MA'AM

Yet between these pillars of dopey hilarity there was another one which I watched more recently, hence the article. The Mask has Carrey start off as a hapless everyman hopelessly orbiting a 4, before his life is TURNED UPSIDE DOWN when he finds a The Mask (1994), which, when donned, makes him The Mask (1994), a guy with a bright green face and no ears (no, IDK why). This alter ego is imbued with the power of being a Tex Avery cartoon, which makes him invincible, amoral and capable of producing physical objects from some wormhole situated just behind his back. Like a less hooker-murdering Edward Hyde, he does all the whacky, crazy things that normal!Carrey was afraid to, like rob banks and romance 7s like Amy Yasbeck and Cameron Diaz.

Every man just wants a beautiful mid to call his own.

The characterisation of The Mask is wonderfully multilayered, in that he's a wish fulfilment fantasy, but for a sensitive young naïf, who therefore wears a bright yellow suit with a pimp hat and says cool guy things like "Party: P-A-R-T-WHY? Cause I GOTTA!". It's like Jon Arbuckle's idea of cool, but because he shares the fantasy with you, the viewer, the world around him must play ball. It's one of those cinématic nowhere-cities that's not quite contemporary to the movie's release, but also has art deco imagery from the great depression and film noir times.

People don't dance like this anymore and I didn't know I want them to.

While The Mask was loosely based on some comic noone's ever read, it was originally scooped up by New Line because they wanted a new horror property to pick up where the Nightmare on Elm Street series left off, and offered it to Dream Warriors director Chuck Russell, whose input largely was to make it this love letter to old-timey cartoons instead, which is a fun trajectory for a project to take. You can't go wrong by making movies fun male wish fulfilment fantasies, because they just consist of a man getting to enjoy a bit of romance and adventure, while female ones are all oddly mean-spirited and empty. Today reviews would screech that normal!Carrey's perfectly modest complaint that "nice guys finish last" proved he was really a thoughtcriminal, and "entitled" (which in newspeak means not entitled to something, much like "privileged" means shut up and know your place). Needless to say, retvrn.

"Somebody stop me!" If only they never had.