As Good As It Gets

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

You can read what some nay sayers post or you can read a professional critique, without a slant that one much question if homophobia played a role instead of fair and balanced review. Ellen doesn't have a top rated TV show AGAIN by mistake, read below..............This post-coming-out performance fully acknowledges Ellen DeGeneres's status as America's most famous lesbian, but it is nevertheless imbued with a sense of fun. For instance, rather than describe the experience of closet-exiting on her self-titled situation comedy in the late 1990s, she performs an amusing "interpretive dance." She uses her trademark goofiness to ruminate on the necessity of directions on shampoo bottles, ant road rage, and the possible nightmarish consequences of buying cheese. While the performance is not orientation-specific, the comedienne spends a fair amount of time on sex-related issues, including jokes about blow-up dolls and people who videotape their relations. She does venture into the political with an appeal for same-sex marriage and a monologue on meeting God, who turns out to be a middle-aged black woman. None of this fazes her clearly supportive audience at New York's Beacon Theatre who get to ask her questions at the end à la Carol Burnett. The best moment of the 65-minute performance for HBO comes at the end, when DeGeneres accidentally exhibits some gender confusion with a young audience member, who then pays her moving tribute as a role model. --Kimberly Heinrichs

Ellen live in the Beacon Theatre, and welcome back Ellen! Good to see you again!Best moments include the shampoo bottle jokes, and Ellen's interpretative dance routine at the beginning.Otherwise, standard Ellen fare (and that's no bad thing) with Ellen going off on every possible tangent.More please!

Ellen Degeneres is one of my fave actresses and I admire her honesty and her ability to babble to an audience for over an hour without stopping! I live in England and you can only get this on video here, I watched it with 4 of my friends (all aged 16) and only me and one of my male friends enjoyed it. No-one else quite understood Ellen's quirks and rambling habits. Still, I give this one an 8 or 9. Nice work Ellen, keep it up. :)

Ellen DeGeneres seems like a very nice person. She may remind you of the most helpful woman at the food co-op or an extremely affable first-grade teacher. She is not, however, what we call real funny. Nor is she a very good joke-teller (her funny parenthetical asides are given GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS). Nor is she what we call especially interesting--her routine here resembles the attempts of a pleasant but not particularly bright person to make chitchatty conversation. Crunchy (but not gnarly) lesbians will have a warm smile. For everyone else, it's kind of like watching someone else's massage.