A Beautiful Mind

So yesterday was so slow and the work day seemed as if it would never end.  But I ended up watching 2 movies, neither of which blew my proverbial skirt up.  My first selection was “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell “The Muscle” Crowe.  Generally it was ok, long as hell, but ok (135 minutes/WTF).  For those who have not taken this jaunt, it is about a genius grad student John Nash (Russell Crowe) who goes to Princeton and loses his flippin’ mind (or beautiful mind).  What   I thought was funny watching the movie all the actors playing these young grad students looked old as hell.  (Russell Crowe/Paul Bettany/Josh Lucas/Adam Goldberg/Jason Gray-Stanford/Anthony Rapp) These guys don’t have one foot in the grave by any means, but as college-aged, grad students it was a stretch.  The story was cool; Crowe discovers or figure-out some theory (theorem) and wins the coveted job they all were competing for at Wheeler Labs at MIT.  He helps out at the Pentagon and then is recruited by the DoD, via Agent William Parcher (Ed Harris).  He is doing secret-squirrel stuff, gets into a car chase/shoot out, finds a girl (Jennifer Connelly), marries a girl (Jen-Again), has a baby boy, and goes completely crackers.  Of course all of this is based on the real life person John Forbes Nash Jr, who won a Nobel Laureate in Economics or the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science 1994 (Sorry folk, conflicting data).  With all of that the guy suffered from paranoid-Schizophrenia.

This is where everything went “bat-scat” on me, turns out there was no DoD Agent Parcher or even his longtime friend and college roommate.  Both characters were hallucinations brought on by the schizophrenia.  In the movie he is conducting a lecture at some college and he sees a suspicious looking guy lurking around in the back of the lecture hall and decides to bolt from the stage mid-sentence, this is of course following the shoot-out/car chase.  He was caught ad taken to a hospital (sorry folks no spy games) and diagnosed with the paranoid-schizophrenia.  In the end he is able to fight through and win his Nobel Prize.

I discovered there are significant contradictions in the movie and the actual life of John Nash.  In the movie his hallucinations were visual and auditory; in real life they were only auditory.  Also the movie showed him taking medications following what looked like medieval torture.  Nash stated he did not take any medications.   There is a laundry list of events that conflict with Nash’s real life but, the filmmakers consistently told critics that the film was not meant to be a literal representation, which I think would have been far less interesting.

A Beautiful Mind was released 21 December, 2001, was well received by most critics, raked in $170 Million worldwide and won 4 Academy Awards [2002] (Best Picture/Best Director/Best Adapted Screenplay/ Best Supporting Actress), (was nominated for Best Lead Actor/Bes Editing/Best Makeup/Best Score).  Directed by Ron Howard (Awesome), Produced by Brian Grazer (Awesome), Wirtten by Akiva Goldsman (I, Robot/The Da Vinci Code/Cinderella Man), and Sylvia Nasar (Wrote the book A Beautiful Mind), Music by James Horner (48 Hrs/Star Trek II&III/Aliens/An American Tail/Field of Dreams and nearly 100 more) and Edited by Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill.

The budget for the project was $60 Million and received positive reviews from 78% of the critics, though some beat up Russell Crowe’s performance and also stated it was formulated to seek Oscar nominations (it worked).  I waited nearly 10 years before I watched it and was not blown away, but at the same time it was a decent little jaunt on a boring Thursday morning.  I learned a little and got paid to do it…how can you beat that.  BTW; Ron Howard is a Beast (Opie Cunningham)!!!