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.

Halloween 2015 #7: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) - Don Siegel

If you need an 80 minute science fiction film on Amazon Prime, this one is choice.

In the small town of Santa Mira, California, Dr. Miles Bennell begins to notice something strange happening to the town’s inhabitants. Aside from a string of cancelled doctor’s appointments, several people begin to believe that their loved ones are not longer who they believe them to be.

Scary, right? Soon, Dr. Bennell’s friend finds a dead body who looks almost identical to him. Our reasonable doctor is suspicious, but remains calm in front of his recently divorced love interest, Becky. 

Before long, the gang discovers pods in a greenhouse that are spitting out bodies that could very well be their clones. It all comes together! Aliens!

Becky clone! Apparently, members of the town are harvesting these pods, and when you fall asleep, the clone absorbs your mind, including your memories and thoughts, and disposes of your original body. But the pod people can’t feel emotions, so obviously we don’t want to become them.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is released in the 1950s, meaning that every bit of it has been examined in relation to McCarthyism. Most critics agree that the alien invasion is a metaphor for the “loss of individuality” under the threat of communism. Both the director as well as the author of the original novel have stated that this interpretation is not intended, but the paranoia of outside invasion as well as the desire to remain autonomous in the face of dehumanization are ripe for analysis.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t critically acclaimed until decades later, and now holds a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Gold Rush (1925) - Charlie Chaplin

Tonight my friend came over and we decided to go for #136 on the IMDB Top 250, Charlie Chaplin’s famous 1925 hit, The Gold Rush. Of course we were a little skeptical at first. 

I’ll be the first to admit that I had never seen a Charlie Chaplin film before, and the only silent film I had ever seen was The Artist… but I kept myself openminded and started the movie.

Now I watched the Netflix version, the 1925 original, but Chaplin would later go on to rewrite his own original score and add narration. He rereleased the remake in 1942 (and it was nominated for two Oscars). I think that watching a film as old as this one is a great way to remind everyone how far we have come in the field of cinema. Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, scored, starred in, and edited this masterpiece, which is basically unheard of today (I think Woody Allen comes about as close to that as possible in modern cinema). So The Gold Rush is pretty impressive just from that standpoint, but I haven’t even gotten into the plot yet.

The film stars Chaplin as a “The Tramp,” a wandering vagabond who goes to Alaska during the gold rush of the late 1890s. Due to a storm, he ends up getting trapped in a cabin with a wanted criminal and a prospector who has just discovered millions of dollars in gold, but can’t get back to his land because of the storm. The three later part ways, the convict and the prospector getting in a fight that would later leave the convict dead and the prospector with amnesia. Chaplin’s character moves to one of the gold rush towns, where he takes up a job as a house-sitter for a new prospector. At the town dance hall he meets the beautiful Georgie, whom he later mistakenly believes loves him back after they dance. A whole mess of confusion later, the Tramp and the original prospector rediscover his gold mine and end up multi-millionaires, which finally allows Georgie to fall for him and have it be socially acceptable… or something like that.

Yeah we get it Kanye, she’s a gold digger because the movie is about The Gold Rush.

All kidding aside, the film is beautiful. As soon as I saw the Roll dance, I instantly recognized it, as many consider it the most famous scene in film history.

Also, you can immediately recognize a serious mastery of storytelling that Chaplin brings both as a director and as an actor. The scene where the house is tipping over the edge of a cliff is by far my favorite, both because of how long it takes Chaplin and the prospector to figure it out, and also because of the cutting between the house tipping side to side and the characters running around the house to fix it.

Finally, as my friend pointed out, some of the shots are just beautiful. It’s always great to see an old film and be like “this story really speaks to me, I feel as if I’m there.” The dance hall where most of the town socializes is our modern… okay so we don’t socialize in person anymore, but maybe a playground if we were still kids in the 90s. And every shot conveys that idea of Chaplin’s character being an outsider, and yet somehow I’m still laughing because everything he does it so comedic and awkward.

Even when looking sad, Chaplin still manages to look ridiculous. Here he is wearing a sack for a shoe because he ate his right shoe during the blizzard. I can honestly say that during most of the film my friend and I looked like this.

Overall, the film definitely earns its spot in the Top 250, and I wish the Oscars had been around in 1925 to give this film the credit it deserves!