She never gets old! Marcee can't be real; she never gets old!

A Beautiful Mind

(2001)

As Best Picture Oscar winners go, is there a more obvious example of a mediocre, heartwarming film serving up a fast-food illusion of depth and profundity? In a case of the bland leading the bland, Ron Howard directed Akiva Goldsman script, resulting in one of the most fatuous representations of mental illness to make it to the big screen. No wonder the Academy went wild for it.

I’ve said that I don’t think the mark of a film based on a historical incident or figure should be its faithfulness but, rather, its dramatic integrity. A Beautiful Mind is as good an example as any of failure at this. The film diverges significantly from John Nash’s experiences, both in terms of his life (be it his divorce and remarriage, alleged homosexual relationships, child from an earlier relationship, the mawkishly sentimental “captain, my captain” pen giving scene) and illness (he did not experience visual hallucinations, only aural, thought he was in contact with extra-terrestrials, experienced anti-Semitic episodes and took no medication from 1970 onwards), but the motivation for this is of the least laudable kind. Nash’s life is to be rendered palatable and anonymously heroic, with all the hard edges and dramatic meat scraped off.

As such, I’m sure there was a good film to be made from Nash’s troubled life. But reducing it to the most trite “triumph over adversity” formula serves no one but the moneymen. It’s not as if Howard and Goldsman persevere in ensuring the audience understands why the Nash equilibrium became so important; indeed, following the most bland of visual explanations for how Nash came up with the theory, Howard throws any interest in it away. In every case, Howard renders the workings of Nash’s mind in with an astonishingly patronising “madness for dummies” approach, which may just betray how Ronnie actually thinks. He also liberally sprinkles fairy dust on top; this man’s mind is so magical it requires the wondrousness of James Horner’s emotive piano to hammer home the point.

Goldsman, infamously, penned Batman & Robin before apparently redeeming himself with an Oscar win for this script. Yet nothing he has written since (save for his small screen work on Fringe) has suggested a man of hidden talents. His solution for telling Nash’s story (keeping the reality of his illness from both him and the viewer until a crucial moment) is fine if you’re disinterested in really understanding the man; if you’re cynical enough to use a twist structure as “shock treatment” for the viewer, to alert them to his mental state, you really shouldn’t be surprised at how your story comes up short in numerous other respects. As it is the sub-Fight Club element is plain cheap; like everything here it testifies to how low the bar has been set.

Tom Cruise was apparently lobbying for the part of Nash, but his previous form with Howard didn’t seem to curry sufficient favour and Russell Crowe scored the role. I’m not sure Cruise could have pulled it off, even given his experience with old pro Hoffman on Rain Man to draw on (by that comparison, I’m not foolishly comparing autism with mental illness but drawing attention to roles where the physical difference is the first thing you see, and tends to attract awards recognition – another example would be Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot). Certainly, Crowe gives a horribly mannered performance. There’s never any doubt that this is an actor trying to approximate the behaviour of someone who is schizophrenic, rather than “being” the role. Crowe was superb in his physical transformation for The Insider a few years previously, but Howard encourages only the broadest and most cartoonish version of Nash. The director is so unsubtle that, with the trio of “friends” he sees around every corner and the constant tinkling music, you’d think he was taking the piss if you didn’t know better.

The one bright spot is Jennifer Connelly as Nash’s wife. Somehow she finds a truthfulness and substance that lends the film a weight it scarcely deserves. She anchors Crowe’s flailing gurning and more than deserved her Oscar (both Crowe and Connelly appear in Goldsman’s upcoming directorial debut, Winter’s Tale).

For a while there, Howard was Hollywood’s brightest star of journeyman directors. His stylistic fingerprints are minimal, aside from an overpowering sense of well-meaning and an absence of intellectual curiosity. He has good, wholesome tastes and runs in the fastest opposite direction to anything provocative. But in the decade since Mind, he’s done little of merit (during the decade prior to it, there were a couple of above average movies like Apollo 13 and Ransom). Arguably the man who massacred the Grinch, and inflicted two crappy Robert Langdon “thrillers” on audiences has lost even the touch that ensured undemanding but serviceable fare. And Crowe’s steer cleared of anything stretching himself since (perhaps wisely), his vocal chords excepted (see A Good Year and Les Mis). As for Oscar, it is as poor an arbiter of quality as ever but even more so when it comes to sentimentalised disability.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

If a rat were to walk in here right now as I'm talking, would you treat it to a saucer of your delicious milk?

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
(SPOILERS) His staunchest fans would doubtless claim Tarantino has never taken a wrong step, but for me, his post-Pulp Fiction output had been either not quite as satisfying (Jackie Brown), empty spectacle (the Kill Bills) or wretched (Death Proof). It wasn’t until Inglourious Basterds that he recovered his mojo, revelling in an alternate World War II where Adolf didn’t just lose but also got machine gunned to death in a movie theatre showing a warmly received Goebbels-produced propaganda film. It may not be his masterpiece – as Aldo Raines refers to the swastika engraved on “Jew hunter” Hans Landa’s forehead, and as Tarantino actually saw the potential of his script – but it’s brimming with ideas and energy.

Check it out. I wonder if BJ brought the Bear with him.

Death Proof (2007)
(SPOILERS) In a way, I’m slightly surprised Tarantino didn’t take the opportunity to disown Death Proof, to claim that, as part of Grindhouse, it was no more one of his ten-official-films-and-out than his Four Rooms segment. But that would be to spurn the exploitation genre affectation that has informed everything he’s put his name to since Kill Bill, to a greater or less extent, and also require him to admit that he was wrong, and you won’t find him doing that for anything bar My Best Friend’s Birthday.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

Hey, everybody. The bellboy's here.

Four Rooms (1995)
(SPOILERS) I had an idea that I’d only seen part of Four Rooms previously, and having now definitively watched the entire thing, I can see where that notion sprang from. It’s a picture that actively encourages you to think it never existed. Much of it isn’t even actively terrible – although, at the same time, it couldn’t be labelled remotely good– but it’s so utterly lethargic, so lacking in the energy, enthusiasm and inventiveness that characterises these filmmakers at their best – and yes, I’m including Rodriguez, although it’s a very limited corner for him – that it’s very easy to banish the entire misbegotten enterprise from your mind.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

Just because you are a character doesn't mean that you have character.

Pulp Fiction (1994)
(SPOILERS) From a UK perspective, Pulp Fiction’s success seemed like a fait accompli; Reservoir Dogs had gone beyond the mere cult item it was Stateside and impacted mainstream culture itself (hard to believe now that it was once banned on home video); it was a case of Tarantino filling a gap in the market no one knew was there until he drew attention to it (and which quickly became over-saturated with pale imitators subsequently). Where his debut was a grower, Pulp Fiction hit the ground running, an instant critical and commercial success (it won the Palme d’Or four months before its release), only made cooler by being robbed of the Best Picture Oscar by Forrest Gump. And unlike some famously-cited should-have-beens, Tarantino’s masterpiece really did deserve it.

That woman, deserves her revenge and… we deserve to die. But then again, so does she.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
(SPOILERS) I’m not sure I can really conclude whether one Kill Bill is better than the other, since I’m essentially with Quentin in his assertion that they’re one film, just cut into two for the purposes of a selling point. I do think Kill Bill: Vol. 2 has the movie’s one actually interesting character, though, and I’m not talking David Carradine’s title role.

The adversary oft comes in the shape of a he-goat.

The Witch (2015)
(SPOILERS) I’m not the biggest of horror buffs, so Stephen King commenting that The Witch “scared the hell out of me” might have given me pause for what was in store. Fortunately, he’s the same author extraordinaire who referred to Crimson Peak as “just fucking terrifying” (it isn’t). That, and that general reactions to Robert Eggers’ film have fluctuated across the scale, from the King-type response on one end of the spectrum to accounts of unrelieved boredom on the other. The latter response may also contextualise the former, depending on just what King is referring to, because what’s scary about The Witch isn’t, for the most part, scary in the classically understood horror sense. It’s scary in the way The Wicker Man is scary, existentially gnawing away at one through judicious martialling of atmosphere, setting and theme.

Indeed, this is far more impressive a work than Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which had hitherto been compared to The Wicker Man, succeeding admirably …

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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