Title: A Beautiful Mind |
Release Date: 2001 |
Nationality and Language: |
Running time: about 140 Minutes |
|
Distributor and Production Company: Universal; Dreamworks; Imagine |
Director; Writer: Ron Howard, based on book by Sylvia Nascar |
Producer: Brian Glazer |
Cast: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Judd Hirsch, Hosh Lucas, Anthony Rasp, Christopher Plummer |
Technical: 1.8-1 |
Relevance to doaskdotell site: polarity |
Review: Here is a biography of 1994 Nobel Prize
(Economics) winner John Nash , going all the way back to 1947 and his college
days at Princeton, where he was immersed in his own mental world, that grand
“idea,” and where his people skills could not have been tolerated in many
workplaces. In fact, he seemed to need this own world to make himself
important. This sounds like the
self-indulgence of the psychological defenses of the subjective feminine
personality. Well, his schizophrenia would have a chemical basis afer all. In the
1950s, the World Book Encyclopedia would write “half of all hospital beds are
filled with people with mental illness,” and the treatments—insulin shock
therapy--could be brutal indeed. His
delusions of involvement with fibbies and black ops (Ed Harris) as a master codebreaker, complete with tattooed implant as a
“Secure-ID card” in his forearm, seem compelling enough, as rogue Soviets
apparently plan terrorist atomic attacks within the Some gay bulletin boards have complained that Dreamworks intentionally left out gay material. Well, Nash is married in the movie, but one of his playmates, an imaginary roommate, seems to play on his need for affectionate approval from other men. But if you make a movie about Alam Turing, the real codebreaker without whom we might not have beaten the Nazis, you have to present his homosexuality, in full measure. John Nash was
interviewed on CBS “60 Minutes” on A related film is Iris, from Miramax (2001), with Judi Dench (as the aging British writer Iris
Murdoch, Jim Broadbent, Kate Winslet (as the young
Iris) and Hugh Bonneville directed by Richard Eyre. We watch the slow descent
of Iris into Alzheimer’s disease, starting innocently enough when she can’t
remember how to spell the word, “puzzle,” and progresses when she forgets her
subject matter during public speaking engagements. Her husband, John Bayley (Jim Broadbent) is homely enough, but their
committed marriage seems to generate the creative energy behind her mysterious,
often sensual, writings for most of her career. However creative, she was no singleton, and
at the end can only survive, as she moves finally into a nursing home,
because of the complete dedication of her husband. {Proof} (2004, Miramax/Endgame, dir. John Madden, based on the play by David
Auburn, PG-13, 99 min) seems related to “A Beautiful Mind” and furthermore
tries to make mathematics filmable. It’s often considered a no-no to confer
too much didactic information in a screenplay, but here it works reasonably
well. First, there is a theorem in the movie, not mentioned explicitly. It
might be Fermat’s last theorem. (http://www.coolissues.com/mathematics/Fermat/fermat.htm
). It may have to do with Fibonacci numbers (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FibonacciNumber.html
) mentioned once in the script. (The number theory example of the number 1729
is given, as 1**3 + 12**3 or as 9*83 + 10**3. We could also speculate about
the notorious “four color problem: in algebraic topology; http://www.math.gatech.edu/~thomas/FC/fourcolor.html;
this was proved on a computer at the The question toward
the end is whether she could have written the proof, since it is somewhat
derivative of her father but still different. The handwriting is the same,
but the mathematical techniques are new (infinite matrices). Hal sees this,
and then he will believe her, but only through his own intellectual
processes. Knowing what a proof is (the notorious “Given” and “To Prove” in
plane geometry), then, is crucial to appreciating the play and the movie. The film is shot on
location in This film is also
one of the last from the Weinstein brothers as executive producers under the
current Miramax distributor label. We don’t know yet what they will call
their new company after their spin-off from Disney takes effect. There is
information about my own numerical analysis Master’s Thesis at the Do not confuse this
film with Proof of
Life. Torn Curtain (1966, Universal, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, wr.
Brian Moore, 128 min, PG-13). While this looks like a stereotyped Hitchcock
film with its close-ups, it is more an exotic adventure into danger and
escape than it is mystery. I recall that the title was a bit of a joke in
1966 among friends in grad school – more like “torn clothes.” But the title
of course refers to the torn Iron Curtain. A major episode in the film takes
place in Now the story here
roughly parallels one of my own novel drafts (I may call it “Brothers”).
Instead of the professor and his fiancé, I have two gay proto-lovers, one mid
thirties and one college age. The older man is married with a successful
family but yearns for more. He works for the It is interesting
that the The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956, North By Northwest (1959, The 39 Steps (1935, Criterion/Gaumont, dir. Alfred
Hitchcock, 86 min, novel by John Buchan) has received some attention because
the plot is basically a precursor of Dan Brown’s “Da
Vinci Code.” Here, the murder victim is Annabelle Smith (Lucie Mannheim), and
the everyman hero is Canadian tourist Richard Hanny
(Robert Donat). She collars Richard in a beer music
hall, running away from something, then rings at his flat, and is soon found
knifed in his flat. (That’s like having a trick ring your apartment intercom
and showing up dead.) To clear his mind, he goes on a scavenger hunt in Short
from Warner Home Video: “The
Hitchcock’s On Hitch” (10 min) Family members, especially a daughter who
died in 2003, provide memories, as a dinner where he
says, “respectable families commit murder in private.” Hitchcock liked the
idea of a man who is not guilty of a crime but, being framed for it because
of his personal vulnerabilities, might as well be guilty. Saboteur (1942, Universal, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 119 min, bw)
is another Hitchcock “escape” (leading up to films like “The Fugitive”) with
corny situations but with a political context that turns out to be quite
moving. At the start of WWII, at an aircraft factory in Sabotage (1936, Film Classics/Laserlight, dir.
Alfred Hitchcock). Terrorists, including a cinema owner, plot in 1930s
London. Very prescient. Blogger. The Lodger (1927, Vintage, dir. Alfred Hitchcok, 90
min, UK). The landlord suspects the tenant of being a serial killer. Again,
prescient. A major silent film.
Blogger. Stage Fright (1950, Warner Bros., dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 110 min, UK). A real
theater piece, with a character who foreshadows
Norman Bates. Blogger. Notorious (1946, RKO Radio/MGM/20th Century Fox, dir. Alfred Hitchcock).
A woman (Ingrid Bergman) is hired to infiltrate neo-Nazi spies, marries one
(Claude Rains), and discovers a uranium cache which is used to poison her.
Also a great romance with Cary Grant as the master fibbie
who tries to save her. Claude faces his own demons at the end. Blogger.
The House on 92nd Street (1945, 20th Century Fox, dir.
Henry Hathaway). Docudrama of a Nazi house in NYC that tried to penetrate US
atomic bomb secrets. Blogger. Marnie (1964, Universal, dir. Alfred Hitchcock,
novel by Winston Graham, 130 min) is another Hitchcock film with hidden
psychological trauma. Sean Connery
(007) is insurance executive Mark Rutland, who hires a mystery girl Marnie (Tippi Hedren) who soon embezzles from his safe in a classic
scene of utter silence and a split screen (Hitchcock disliked the widescreen
format, but it is needed here). He falls in love with her anyway, and has to
deal with the reason for her trauma. There is discussion of psychiatry as it
was at the time, a very real issue for me given what I went through. She has
an aversion to intimacy, and it turns out to be related to her mother, who
was a prostitute, and Marnie once had to kill one
of the johns (played by a young and virile Bruce Dern)
with a fireplace poker to save her mother. Mother raised her to be well-bred
and she turned out, in her own words, as a “cheat.” The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965, Paramount, dir. Martin Ritt, 112 min, BW, PG, novel by John le Carre, screenplay by Paul Dehn)
is a classic spy tale, again about defection, but less in the adventurous
style of Hitchcock than just in dialogue and ideas. Alec Leamas
(Richard Burton) is about to retire, and doesn’t want a desk job with paper.
He travels to Sherlock Holmes (2009, Warner Bros/Village Roadshow, dir.
Guy Ritchie, PG-13, UK) Presents a terror plot in 19th Century
London with Hitchcock-like plotting. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law play the
“odd” and “gay” couple. Blogger. |
Related reviews: The Sentinel, PI Strangers on a Train; Dial M for Murder |
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