Anniversary of The Truman Show
On June 1, 1998 in the town of Westwood, California (USA), the premiere of the film "The Truman Show" took place. Director Peter Weir.
With a film budget of $ 60 million, the film’s box office exceeded $ 260 million, of which more than $ 125 million was earned by the film in the United States and almost $ 140 million in other countries.
A fifth of the budget - $ 12 million - was made by Jim Carrey's fee. However, the usual fee for that period of his creative career was $ 20 million. However, the fee was not the main goal of the participation of this actor in the film by Peter Weir. He agreed to a lower fee as compared to the usual one, because he wanted to expand the boundaries of his acting capabilities with the help of the role in this film: add the amplua of a dramatic actor to his well-established amplua as a comedian.
Initially, the premiere of the film was planned for the fall of 1997. But then the company Paramount postponed the premiere in June 1998, so as not to interfere with his other brainchild - the film "Titanic" - to receive all possible awards from the American Film Academy. But as a result of such a transfer, Peter Weir’s film fell under the “truck” of another blockbuster - Stephen Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”. To this film “The Truman Show” lost in the most important nominations for the Golden Globe and Oscars. But Jim Carrey and Ed Harris still got the Golden Globe for best male roles. By the way, during the filming, they never met on the set.
But it is in America. And in Europe, the film "The Truman Show" won the European Academy Award for Best Non-European Film, as well as the British BAFTA Award for Best Director.
The appearance of “The Truman Show” on the screens of movie theaters caused a literally enthusiastic chorus of film critics. In particular, Roger Ebert, who rated the film 4 stars out of 4, wrote about it in his review: « I enjoyed "The Truman Show" on its levels of comedy and drama; I liked Truman in the same way I liked Forrest Gump--because he was a good man, honest, and easy to sympathize with. But the underlying ideas made the movie more than just entertainment. Like "Gattaca," the previous film written by Niccol, it brings into focus the new values that technology is forcing on humanity. Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives--of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.»
The New York Times movie reviewer Janet Maslin this movie caused philosophical thought: "What if our taste for trivia and voyeurism led to the purgatory of a whole life lived as show-biz illusion? What if that life became not only the ultimate paranoid fantasy but also achieved pulse-quickening heights of narcissism?"
Russian film critics highly praised the film by Peter Weir as well. In particular, Sergey Kudryavtsev wrote in a review: “He (Peter Weir - FG) made a truly intelligent, subtly styled and unobtrusive work that everyone is free to understand and interpret in his own way: from the primitive philistine ridicule of the audience over the boring “soap operas“ to the total philosophical reflection that we are all engaged in some kind of universal show arranged by the Creator with a goal that is led to him alone.”
Russian moviegoers saw this film 5 months after its premiere in the USA.
The rating of Peter Weir’s film by ordinary viewers was equally enthusiastic: 75% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated it 8 to 10.
According to the FilmGourmand version, the film has a rating of 9.064 and takes 151st Rank in the Golden Thousand.
10 years after the release of the movie one of the varieties of mental disorders got the name "Delirium of the Truman Show. The main symptoms of this disorder are that the patient presents himself as an involuntary star of his own reality show, in which everything around is staged and rigged, while others play the roles assigned to him.
