A few smart cats cant do anything many can change the world

Rating: 4/10 (4 April 2008)

Knowing people that attend MIT, and trying to confirm many of the facts presented in this movie I cannot agree with much of this "this movie is based on facts".
This movie has a lot of resounding issues with me not to be impartial but a few of these are:
All Students are A students, All A Students are Geniuses, All Students that Attend MIT are Great Card Counters for Blackjack, MIT has a History of Card Counting back to when the actor Kevin Spacey playing Micky Rosa, hit the card counting at MIT long before "21" unfolded as a flashback.
For me genius has anything but to deal with education or institutionalism and more to do with the nature/nurture issues perhaps environment and different approaches to solving problems. Of course there will always be cases in which higher learning enhance the gifts of some but most geniuses swing by the wayside of conventional metrics.
This segmenting society into the leaders and the followers or the gift of a degree often to find a job which this movie appears to suggest is the way of life is unfortunately in many cases reality and we furnish our fortune 500s with tic tacs. Tic tacs in the sense that they are hard coated almost perfect replicas of what industry requires, we throw away tic tacs that are not shaped uniformly. A few of these throw aways are so disgusted with the system they start companies like "Microsoft" and "Apple" to name a few.
Telling someone they're not good enough for something and that another person is a more suitable candidate is great as it was approached in this movie. The issue that resounded with me was this means to an end to make the cut by describing trials and tribulations with a casino scheme as a means to attain acceptance which seems rather like a casino advertisement. "Hey get busted by the security at a casino and we consider you really smart and worthy of a scholarship"
I will admit we live in a complex almost impractical world everyone knows the saying "life is not fair" but for many of us we try to make the best of it. For me as someone in the 25-29 demographic I have some serious reservations with what this movie is telling people that are struggling with money and other pressures associated with life. This casino option is the wrong message to send, Hollywood is a powerful message sender and these are the wrong messages; Gambling doesn't solve anything. Even if Kevin Spaceys character states "you need to follow the system and not get emotional we arnt gambling here this is a business we are in" the quote is a summary of what was said and not word for word from the movie.
Treat this movie with a grain of salt. I am still researching to see if the facts are even true for the baseline plot (or lack there of with no character development and no glue putting anything other then the money making scheme).
All in all this movie may appeal to some who just want to be dazzled by the mighty brilliance of the rich, straight A geniuses of MIT with 4.0s and perfect SAT scores or the romance of the "geek beauty and the bigger geek".
For me this is not the case. I thought this was a cheap shot at the working middle class and struggling citizens who struggle on a day to day basis to make ends meet and get educated ( college, university). Being successful or great has little to do with MIT, if we look at research itself we find the top schools do not account for a disproportionate amount of good research or scholarly articles amongst all the other universities out there worldwide. Anyone is capable of great things from a bum on the street to research being done at any school with or without resources. These schools like MIT are for the most part well funded and have the power through cash to scoop up talent from lesser known institutions, still most of the break through work is never done in their own institution.
All it takes is some hard work and a bit of drive and "sometimes" not always assets for higher learning where a university or some vessel capable of providing tools can help, I believe in the next 20 years Google and infrastructure like Google will become the next education or institution dynamic of tomorrow and give these MIT class institutions a run for their money. I have a saying " a few smart cats cant do anything many can change the world" and these education institutions are only producing a few smart cats every year.
My rating is as such.