Just no fizz to it.

Rating: 4/10 (18 August 2003)

Alright, it was a well done movie for what it was, and interestingly executed, but it had the feel of a dry non-fiction work. It almost seemed like the hype and the Academy Award voting were tactical; you couldn't give Jennifer Connelly an Oscar for her brilliant performance in Requiem For A Dream, for instance, because after all Academy Awards can't go to naked women performing explicit kinky sex on camera in druggie films, but Beautiful Mind was just that sort of painfully earnest movie for which Academy members can impress one another at parties by claiming to have given it their votes. Now Crowe did a workmanlike job, Connelly was the spectacular eyecandy she's been capable of being her entire career, and the alternative to voting for this flick would have been to give Moulin Rouge a Best Picture nod, which would have been a crime against nature.
But that aside, while I saw this at Dollar Night at the Wollaston Theater, it's still two hours of my life I won't get back.
Rating: 4/10 and that's generous.