Pay It Forward [Region 2] |  | Director: Mimi Leder
Actors: Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt, Jay Mohr, James Caviezel
Category: DVD
Buy New: $19.81
as of 3/21/2010 00:37 EDT details
New (3) Used (2) from $9.27
Seller: moviemars
Rating:  330 reviews
Sales Rank: 215623
Format: PAL
Languages: English (Subtitled), Arabic (Subtitled), Romanian (Subtitled), Bulgarian (Subtitled), English (Original Language)
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Region: 2
Discs: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Running Time: 123 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 7321900188777
ASIN: B00005LDEM
Theatrical Release Date: October 20, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
Pay It Forward is a multi-level marketing scheme of the heart. Beginning as a seventh-grade class assignment to put into action an idea that could change the world, young Trevor McKinney (Haley Joel Osment) comes up with a plan to do good deeds for three people who then by way of payment each must do good turns for three other people. These nine people also must pay it forward and so on, ad infinitum. If successful, the resulting network of do-gooders ought to comprise the entire world. Trevor's attempts to get the ball rolling include befriending a junkie (James Caviezel) and trying to set up his recovering-alcoholic mother (Helen Hunt) with his burn-victim teacher (Kevin Spacey), who posed the assignment. While this could have turned into unmitigated schmaltz, the acting elevates this film to mitigated schmaltz. By turns powerful and measured, the performances of Spacey, Hunt, and Osment can't make up for the many missteps in a screenplay that sanitizes the look of the lower-middle class and expects us to believe that homeless alcoholics and junkies speak in the elevated manner of grad students. (Can that really be Angie Dickinson as Hunt's dispossessed mother? Yes, it is!) The germ of the story is a good one, though, and one may wonder how it would have been handled by the likes of Frank Capra, who could balance sentiment with humor. But clearly Capra would never have let the ending of his version to take the nosedive into cliché and pathos that director Mimi Leder has allowed in this film. More than a few viewers will also recognize that Leder has blatantly borrowed her final image from Field of Dreams, where its intended effect was more keenly and honestly felt. --Jim Gay
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 330
Get ready to cry... March 2, 2010
Andrew Ellington (Mulholland Drive)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This movie is pure sentimental saccharine schmaltz, in the line of Ron Howard yet not as effective or as expertly handled, but I still gobble it up like it were peach cobbler and sob like a baby who lost his binky. I mean, this movie is simultaneously forced and honest, and that is thanks to the splendid acting and the contrived script.
The base prose for `Pay it Forward' is quite simple. A young kid with bid ideas finds that his new teacher has motivated him to put into play a plan that could alter the face of the world. Asked to come up with an idea that could change the world, young Trevor decides that if he were to do something to help three people and those three people helped three other people (and so on and so forth) then the world could be a better place for everyone. Trevor immediately sets his sights on his mother, an alcoholic struggling to take care of her son, and a junkie in need of a fresh start.
Where the film goes wrong, for me, is in trying to make too much of this `idea'. The idea should have been a metaphor for what young Trevor was experiencing at home, in his life, struggling to find something better and pay himself forward so-to-speak. The film tries to go that way in parts (the natural development of his mother, played brilliantly by Helen Hunt, is one thing this film nails) but the way it handles the phenomenon that this idea became kind of relinquishes the effect it should have had to a mere punch line. It loses a lot of its weight and emotional power by spreading it too thin.
Yes, the ending is crafted for the sole purpose of bleeding your tear ducts, but I wouldn't have changed it.
The best thing about this film is, by far, the performances. Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment have all been better, but that doesn't mean that they don't work this material over very well here. Osment has to kind of carry the film, for he needs to sell us on his childlike innocence as well as his matured sense of understanding, and he does so beautifully. Kevin Spacey is an actor who I really like, a lot. He manages to take a gimmicky character (burn victim/inspirational teacher) and make him human (that whole "my father" scene just broke my heart). But, just like in `As Good As It Gets', best in show awards can be showered upon only one person, and that is Helen Hunt. She is outstanding as Trevor's emotionally unstable mother. Her frailties are beautifully tempered by her overly assertive sense of strength. She tries so hard and yet falls so far, and it is seen all over the creases in her face.
The film is as schmaltzy as they come, and it doesn't try to hide that fact. It is designed to do one thing, make you cry, and it does that with ease. I would have loved this subject to have been dissected and tackled with a little more earnest grit (and honest realism), since the performances truly deserved it, but in the end I am more than satisfied with the way this film pans out.
 Wonderful movie, great message January 30, 2010
Rebecca L. Morse (Palm Springs, FL)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this movie to give as a gift. I own it and love it. I knew my friends and family who hadn't seen it would want to own it to watch again & again.
EVERYONE Needs to see January 30, 2010
S. Krammes (Tremont PA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This Movie is one of the Best Movies of All Time. I can watch it over and over again. Love It!!!
Pay It Forward January 27, 2010
M. Bredthauer (LOGAN, UT, US)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is such a spectacular movie! It arrived promptly and in the condition it was said to be in. I can trust this seller!
 If you like this movie, try this... January 14, 2010
Hanley (Maryland)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This story reminds me of Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C Douglas.
In that story, a young playboy, Merrick, while drinking too much, has an accident at a lake. The paramedics use the emergency equipment at the lakeside to save his life. Meanwhile, a famous neurosurgeon is at the same lake, but his life is not saved, since the equipment is already in use. When Merrick wakes up, he overhears the nurses saying what a shame that he survived and not the neurosurgeon Dr. Hudson, who has done so much for humanity. This makes him rethink his lifestyle, and do his best to replace the doctor that he deprived of life, and serve his fellow men in his place, partly because Dr. Hudson believed in anonymously helping others enriches and empowers the person who does so.
It is an excellent and engrossing read. The book is better than the movie, which stars Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, mostly because the couple is supposed to be college-age, and Hudson & Wyman are too old.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 330
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