has the whole world gone insane?

Rating: 2/10 (21 February 2003)

seeing this movie (just recently) for the first time has shaken my faith in the academy, the critics and filmgoers everywhere.
is this the film that won THE OSCAR for BEST FILM of 2001? come on, people! were you on something?
i found "a beautiful mind" to be so inept and irredeemably stupid, that had i attended a test screening, i'd have recommended the studio shelf the movie, let alone submit it for consideration.
"akiva goldsman writes a serious script". the very thought seemed like a joke. but after the oscars and the critical and popular success, i assumed i was just wrong about him; maybe he really was a real writer. maybe the man who brought us the god-awful "lost in space" and "batman returns" (which featured the legendarily witty salvo, "hi freeze, i'm batman") was just making a living, waiting for his masterpiece to be produced? but all hopes were dashed in the first two minutes. this material is aimed at 6 year olds!
how can people have serious debates over a movie where characters talk in nothing but expositions, literary quotes, lame jokes and regurgitated cliches? where mathematics, presumably a central theme, is shown as something incomprehensible that eggheads doodle? with a saturday morning cartoon villain/antagonist who taunts our hero about his failures, only to be mocked when he finally succeeds? where a govt. agent's briefing on soviet espionage consists of showing nash (and the audience) stock footage of a-bomb explosions, and nash's explanation of the meaning of a secret russian code meets the reply, "thanks for all your help mr. nash, so-and-so will show you out"?
in many ways, this movie is just as bad, if not worse, than any fictionalized biopic ever made in hollywood. would you believe you could still see, in the 21st century, a new movie where an actor in exaggerated old-age makeup accepts the nobel prize for economics with a speech about how the real meaning of life can be found "in the equations of love"?! give me a break!
one moment contained as good an unintentional laugh as any in goldsman's old turkeys. in the early stages, a man in the m.i.t. library gets a tribute from colleagues; each places his pen on the man's table. nash "asks" what this means and receives the explanation, along with us. when the obvious payoff to this scene arrives at a later stage, and nash receives the same tribute himself, the mushy string-music moment stretches on for a minute or two, and then nash actually says, almost directly into the camera: "how totally unexpected". how totally ridiculous!
dreamworks continues to be a studio that makes only 3 kinds of films: calculated, soulless, test-marketed attempts to make a big box office; calculated, soulless, test-marketed attempts to win oscars, and, thereafter, a big box office; and spielberg films. it's the only time i can think of that a movie studio only contributed to cultural decline, without a single contribution (and yes, i do include "american beauty" and "saving private ryan" in that statement. haven't seen "perdition" yet, but i'm sure it's still accurate.)
i hope nash's story will actually, one day, be made into a good movie, not a laughable ham-fest with rehashed sixth sense silliness.