People are voting emotionally.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Continuing my plan to watch every Will Smith movie in order, I come to Six Degrees Of Separation (1993)Plot In A Paragraph: Based on a true story. An affluent New York couple (Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channinh) find their lives touched, intruded upon, and compelled by a mysterious young man (Will Smith) who is not quite who he says he is.Will Smith totally knocks it out of the park in this movie. He is utterly compelling!! You just can't stop watching him. Changing was nominated for an Oscar for her work here, and personally I think Smith should have been nominated too. He is brilliant. Donald Sutherland is as brilliant as he always is. That comes as no surprise, the surprise was Smith had a performance like this in his locker. Likewise Channing, who I had not seen in anything since Grease. Director Fred Schepi Wanted Meryl Streep, whom he has recently worked with in A Cry In The Dark for the role of Ouisa. However the film could never have been made if Channing hadn't been cast as Ouisa. She starred in the Broadway version, and the playwright, John Guare, stipulated that if the play were adapted to a film, Stockard Channing would have to reprise her role. Without Stockard as Ouisa, the movie was not to be made at all.The supporting cast is great too Ian McKellan, Heather Graham, Anthony Michael Hall and a certain J.J Abrahams.It's probably a bit too artsy and talky for most people here to bother watching. But I found it engrossing though.Despite positive reviews, the movie only grossed $6 million at the domestic box office.

This film is close to being brilliant. It is a totally unique film. And to top it off, a first class performance by Will Smith in what I would call his breakthrough film.Smith plays a young Black man who works his way into the lives of a number of people in New York City. Mostly his "victims" are the rich and successful, although one young couple befriends him, which ends in the death of the young man from suicide. In all cases, Smith's liaisons are designed to make him money. But later in the film you begin to realize he's not just a con artist; he's a deeply needy young man who lives in sort of a fantasy world. He wants all the good things in life, but only really sees his way free to get those things through hustling.However, it's not just Smith's performance that stands out here. The primary couple that he "befriends" are brilliantly played by Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing (certainly her best role). They're a totally absorbed rich couple who have no sense of realism beyond their own art-filled world of the rich.Supporting roles are played by Ian McKellen (who coincidentally has one line where he mentions "The Lord Of The Rings" nearly a decade before that film series was filmed), Bruce Davison, and Richard Masur. There's not a bad performance in the film.My only disappointment in the film is that in the end we don't know if Will Smith's character is alive or dead.Highly recommended.

I guess we can see the genius of Will Smith right from the start. This is a film about a chameleon who is able to create for himself identities suited to an intriguing game he is playing. He really wants to be loved, but has become so deeply entrenched in his charade that he soon isn't sure what he wants. He is a master of subterfuge with a smile and a wink. He claims to be the son of someone who is relatively reclusive and unapproachable. This gives him the opportunity to invade people's lives; but for what? It's his "victims" that grow because of him. He is searching for a family but needs so many assurances. He chooses the super-rich, which makes his job much harder. The performances by Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing, and Smith, himself are quite incredible. I began by absolutely hating these people. They are so smug and pretentious that they make one gag. And that's why their redemption due to this invader is so poignant. They grow to love this young man in their own ways, despite the fact that he appears dangerous (is he; I don't know). Of course, the six degrees is the theory that we are all related in some way if we go back six generations. The thing asked is, how can we then be so different. A real surprise.

The fact that the actual title comes from, as Channing's Ouisa informs us at some point, everybody being six persons - friends, acquaintances, lovers - away from celebrity, that is someone famous, is like an intended, over-prepared, pointless irony: it rather reads like six degrees of preparation, or six degrees away from greatness.The film has no consistent pace, is merely a play transfered - and not worked through - to celluloid, and a mediocre, portentous one, for that matter.Where it should have been an ensemble effort, it gets muddled mid-way by a flash back on how Smith's Paul was "discovered": a slight variation on the Pygmalion myth/paradigm, but weighed down by Smith's sudden moodiness, too much and too suddenly of a "man", especially for a gay, polished character. This lacks subtlety, and subtlety along with gusto is what the film was most in need. If this was intended in tune with other quasi-farcical moments, it was a ghastly error.An improbable phone-call between Ouisa and Paul muddles whatever premise and goes on forever. That much for dramatic economy.Yet Channing and Sutherland shine through, and Channing gives a tour-de-force in a nutshell during her final, small monologue, which may well be the film's moment. Afterwards smacking with a stupid closure (slapping a tree's leaves the way she did the moment of creation between God and Adam at the Sistine Chapel) of a ho-hum symbolic-and-so-manhattanite-released conclusion.This sounds worse than it is, and maybe it is, going from extreme, supposed subtlety, some good, very good lines, to cardboard situations and skimmed if not skipped direction. Watch it for its good moments and since the word imagination garlands the film with some of its best lines, imagine the film it could have been.