THIS won an award?!?!

Rating: 1/10 (2 May 2005)

This movie SUCKED! It took 90 minutes of my life that I'll never get back, and for what? Some really bad acting, and zero plot. As a physicist, I expected at least a modicum of insight about mathematics to be discussed in this movie. Instead, it was all fluff and psychobabble. There was no real point to this movie. The guy didn't even portray a schizophrenic very well.
The protagonist kept talking about looking for structure in the stock market, which is a chaotic system. This is hardly an original idea. People have tried to apply structural models to the market, but the market responds to such stimuli by changing in unpredictable ways, so that the rules upon which models are built are no longer valid. Any decent mathematician (and our protagonist is supposed to be a genius) would've already known this. Oh well, no one expects movie makers to have any real brains, anyway, right?
But this movie didn't compensate its lack of mathematical intrigue with ANYTHING else - it was just a bunch of meaningless dialog between characters too shallow to be even worth caring about - that is, when the viewer wasn't being subjected to miles of footage of the protagonist picking his nose (literally!), or some equally idiotic and boring behavior.
As far as movies concerning math, a MUCH BETTER movie is "A Beautiful Mind." If you're looking for a movie about crazy mathematicians, save your time and money and go to see "A Beautiful Mind" instead.