A Beautiful Mind (2001) - Ron Howard

I feel like this movie belongs in a box set with The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything.

Russell Crowe stars in this Best Picture winning movie about the American Nobel laureate and mathematician John Nash. He’s no Gladiator, but he’s nice enough.

The best part about the movie is that they think they can casually age Russell Crowe from 20 years old to 66 in a two hour movie.

Not to mention his Noah costar and on-screen wife, Jennifer Connelly! And if you’re wondering why this is included in a Wikipedia article called “List of films featuring whitewashed roles,” Alicia Nash is El Salvadorian. Noah is in this list too, obviously.

Anyway, I’m getting distracted. A Beautiful Mind tells the story of John Nash, who in 1948 began his doctorate program at Princeton, where he received the John S. Kennedy fellowship. Determined to discover something wholly original, Nash skips all his classes.

But he ends up writing a paper on equilibrium that wins him the respect of his colleagues and the commendation of his superiors.

Also his fun and crazy roommate, Charles.

Soon, Nash begins a career as a mathematician, where he sometimes helps the government with covert operations to crack codes from the Soviet Union.

And he meets his wife! He wins her over despite being incredibly socially awkward.

But as the movie reminds us, Nash is one of the best pattern recognition experts in the world.

He woos her with this party trick where he can find any shape he wants amongst the stars. I looked up at the stars that night and counted three… so… triangle.

But just when you think this rich, straight, white man has it all, the movie reveals a twist! And even though they were on the verge of losing me because almost everything in the first hour goes exactly as Nash plans, I found it to be really heartbreaking.

I won’t give it away, but the rest of the movie finds Nash desperately trying to hold on to that passion for numbers and discovery that made him endearing in the early part of the film. Disgraced, he tries to return to Princeton, and eventually finds a loving community amongst the 80s and 90s students (the 70s ones were so mean to him). And then he wins a Nobel Prize!

The movie is ultimately a story about love, how important it is and what it can do to transform people who are lost. A Beautiful Mind tackles mental illness in a way that is sort of refreshing for its time.

Plus the movie is incredibly prominent in our pop culture consciousness. Whenever you see a room filled with papers covering every surface with an attempt to reach a singular conclusion, that’s A Beautiful Mind reference.

A Beautiful Mind went on to win 4 Oscars, including a whopping two for Ron Howard… who directed How the Grinch Stole Christmas the year before.

Spring 2015 #7: Gladiator (2000) - Ridley Scott

A $100 million Roman epic that is also a Best Picture winner? Hard to believe in this century, with the past decade being dominated by low-budget indies such as Slumdog Millionare in 2009, The Hurt Locker in 2010, and The Artist in 2012. But it wasn’t so long ago that massive blockbusters like Titanic, Lord of the Rings, and Braveheart were taking home the golden statue.

I think the digital age can be thanked for the improved quality of small independent films, since passion projects like Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) can be made for as little as $1.8 million, or Whiplash (2014) for $3.3 million, and then can be successful enough to get the Academy’s attention.

But anyway, since I have 100 more gifs of this film, I might as well talk about it. Gladiator tells the almost true story of the Roman Emperor Commodus, who became the sole emperor of Rome at the age of 19 when his father, Marcus Aurelius, died in 180 AD.

Here we have a young Joaquin Phoenix, as Commodus, pouring his heart out to his father, after being told that the general Maximus (Russell Crowe) will succeed his father instead of him.

Poor Joaquin. All he wanted was for his father to love him! Well Commodus takes the throne by his own doing, forces Maximus to be executed, and then ascends to the throne in a wonderful celebration of 150 days of Colosseum games.

But you can’t kill Maximus! He escapes, then gets captured as a slave and sold into the games as a gladiator. Okay so maybe the film is about Maximus and not Commodus, but I’m here for the brother from Signs and not Javert from Les Misérables. 

And I know Commodus is a corrupt leader and probably sexually attracted to his sister, Lucilla… but I think Joaquin is beautiful and I can’t stay mad at him.

I call it the Jamie Lannister effect.

Anyway the script went through a million rewrites, which I think can be chalked up to arguments between the historians hired to work on the film and the studio people who were worried about narrative. Apparently, after several drafts, Russell Crowe said to one of the writers, “Your lines are garbage but I’m the greatest actor in the world, and I can make even garbage sound good.” I would like to see the movie fail after a declaration like that, but Russell Crowe did win an Oscar for this… so I don’t know.

But he’s right, so many of the lines are garbage. It’s like they focused on the massive sets and costumes (over 27,500 pieces of armor were made for the film), that they didn’t care what anyone was actually saying, as long as it looked awesome.

And it does look awesome. The first scene is a battle between the Roman army and the Germanic tribe in the last holdout against the Roman Empire’s expansion. Beyond that, the Gladiator scenes themselves are cool as hell.

Oops wrong gladiators. Despite the insane effects, including CGI shots of the entirety of Rome and a packed Colosseum, the film is lacking in character stuff. Apparently, Maximus himself wasn’t even a likable protagonist until they added all of this weird stuff about the afterlife.

So the film added a ton of random dream sequences where Maximus ponders his life after death, wondering about the meaning of it all. He was just an innocent farmer who became a general who became a slave who became a gladiator!

You do you Commodus. Anyway the film went on to gross $457 million, it won five Oscars including Best Picture, and it is #46 on the IMDb Top 250. The first Best Picture winner of the 21st century!