Well, Crowe does remain half the pattern for Reverend Rook
I can see that.
but even that wouldn't be enough to make me watch A Beautiful Mind, I'm afraid, which has the Oh-Gemma-no one-two punch of higher math and glamorized insanity.
Well, I can't do anything about the higher math, but for the first two-thirds of its runtime, the film is not glamorous; hence my frustration with its final act. (I am going to leave aside the issue of fidelity to the actual life of John Nash, because I can't speak to it at all—I suspect that the story smoothed itself out as it went along, so that the earlier scenes are more or less fact and the later myth, but I have done no research whatsoever to support this claim.) I have a lot of respect for the initial conditions of the script. It immerses the audience in Nash's delusions without romanticizing them past the point where they are revealed as such—significantly, the first time our viewpoint widens from the first person, so that we can see the empty spaces Nash is shouting at, the unlocked gates and condemned windows that reveal that no one lives at the drop-box address at all—and presents its protagonist's eccentricities with a similar candor, so that even in retrospect we cannot tell what was an early warning sign and what was merely a red herring; it makes the case not that his genius presaged his madness, but if anything the ironic reverse, that his profession and its environment quite effectively camouflaged the onset of his schizophrenia, because if you're a high-stakes mathematician who not infrequently consults for the Pentagon, hell, yes, people expect you to be paranoid and peculiar, and this was already someone for whom social skills were a pointless exercise at best. And it doesn't feel the need to contrive sympathy somehow for Nash when he's in full-bore conspiracy mode—he's terrified, bristling, his office tacked full of string and photographs and newspaper clippings and his head whirling with threatening agents and Soviet spies, and he is not at that moment a particularly nice person; there is an acute pain in these scenes that has nothing to do with the tormented artist and everything to do with someone who has snapped from reality and can do nothing to stop himself even as he senses, vaguely, that something is wrong. And so we can watch a person on the screen, not an archetype thrown up from the collective unconscious of Romantic literature; there is a care for the small sticky details over the great upsweep of story, and I finally realized that's what goes down the drain completely at the end of the film.
no subject
I can see that.
but even that wouldn't be enough to make me watch A Beautiful Mind, I'm afraid, which has the Oh-Gemma-no one-two punch of higher math and glamorized insanity.
Well, I can't do anything about the higher math, but for the first two-thirds of its runtime, the film is not glamorous; hence my frustration with its final act. (I am going to leave aside the issue of fidelity to the actual life of John Nash, because I can't speak to it at all—I suspect that the story smoothed itself out as it went along, so that the earlier scenes are more or less fact and the later myth, but I have done no research whatsoever to support this claim.) I have a lot of respect for the initial conditions of the script. It immerses the audience in Nash's delusions without romanticizing them past the point where they are revealed as such—significantly, the first time our viewpoint widens from the first person, so that we can see the empty spaces Nash is shouting at, the unlocked gates and condemned windows that reveal that no one lives at the drop-box address at all—and presents its protagonist's eccentricities with a similar candor, so that even in retrospect we cannot tell what was an early warning sign and what was merely a red herring; it makes the case not that his genius presaged his madness, but if anything the ironic reverse, that his profession and its environment quite effectively camouflaged the onset of his schizophrenia, because if you're a high-stakes mathematician who not infrequently consults for the Pentagon, hell, yes, people expect you to be paranoid and peculiar, and this was already someone for whom social skills were a pointless exercise at best. And it doesn't feel the need to contrive sympathy somehow for Nash when he's in full-bore conspiracy mode—he's terrified, bristling, his office tacked full of string and photographs and newspaper clippings and his head whirling with threatening agents and Soviet spies, and he is not at that moment a particularly nice person; there is an acute pain in these scenes that has nothing to do with the tormented artist and everything to do with someone who has snapped from reality and can do nothing to stop himself even as he senses, vaguely, that something is wrong. And so we can watch a person on the screen, not an archetype thrown up from the collective unconscious of Romantic literature; there is a care for the small sticky details over the great upsweep of story, and I finally realized that's what goes down the drain completely at the end of the film.