Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001)

Nominated for eight Academy Awards, and winner of four Oscars including Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind is one of the foremost dramas of this millennium. The creation of director Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind debuted to widespread serious approval due to the depth of its screenplay (by Akiva Goldsman from a book by Sylvia Nasar), the brilliant performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, and the in-depth portrayal of a victim of mental illness.

Russell Crowe's follow-up performance to blockbuster hits such as, LA Confidential and Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind is an astonishing trip into one man's delusional reality. As a mathematical genius, John Nash (Russell Crowe) enjoys the early achievement of a promising profession in academia. Able to solve mathematical theories that stump many of the greatest minds of his time, Nash’s true problem arises because of his mental illness. The reality in which he lives does not exist, and it threatens to tear apart his marriage, his career, and the very life which he holds dear. Crowe's one-of-a-kind depiction of the schizophrenic Nash and the beautiful Jennifer Connelly's performance as the woman who loves him are both complex, bolstered by an onscreen chemistry between Crowe and Connelly. Crowe especially is adept at revealing the many onion-like layers that Nash creates for all aspects of his life.

The cast and crew of A Beautiful Mind allow us to see a whole new world through the eyes of suffering genius. And Ron Howard has crafted an absorbing film which effectively blends the lines between the world in John Nash's mind and the real world, A Beautiful Mind eloquently depicts one man's struggle against enormous odds. As Nash's paranoia and figments of imagination join together to conceal the genius of Nash’s beautiful mind, the power of the human spirit rallies to great heights in this inspiring film, arguably one of the best films of the decade.

Billy Lutz
SPA Film Club

A Beautiful Mind falls into the honorable category of “biopic,” a film that tells the life story of a real person, emphasizing the facts. That’s not to say that biopic film-makers don’t bend a few realities in the name of dramatic narrative, but this is as close as Hollywood gets to non-fiction without being a documentary. Biopics earn respect in the industry, too. They challenge actors and give film-goers access to historical figures without turning the experience into lecture. Think of the recent or great biopics you might have seen: Gandhi (starring Ben Kingsley), X (Denzel Washington as Malcolm X), Ali (Will Smith), Frida (Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo), Ray (Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles), Beyond the Sea (Kevin Spacey as Bobby Darin), Walk the Line (Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash), The Queen (Helen Mirren), Milk (Sean Penn) or Invictus (Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela). Many of these have been nominated for Academy Awards and often the actor won or was nominated as well. But how respectful are these sorts of films of the history they represent?

Tonight’s film takes us through the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a mathematical genius who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. When the film came out, an argument ensued over screenwriter Goldsman’s somewhat cavalier use of his source material. Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the book, claimed Goldsman left out important parts of Nash’s life and fictionalized others. This is always the tension with major film biopics – the desire to both entertain and inform, to make a good story out of real life. Typically, we find that Hollywood will bend truth in order to provide entertainment, and so as we watch A Beautiful Mind, it’s important to keep in mind that the reality may not be exactly as it appears on the screen. Perhaps A Beautiful Mind, about a mathematician who has delusions, is our own delusion – we think we see John Forbes Nash, but we really just see Russell Crowe as a character that reflects a few of the moments of his life.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Chang Cheh’s One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Editor's note: Once the Shaw Brothers and Chang Cheh introduced us to the one-armed swordsman hero in the late 1960s, a trend was born. One-armed heroes cropped up all over the martial arts film world, teaming up with each other, fighting each other, going it alone. Some of the more popular one-armed titles were even remade or rebooted within the mere space of a decade. The following essay refers to one of the one-armed swordsman works, but not the one we ended up watching. We apologize for any confusion.

“So the other day I was walking through the country side minding my own business when some dude (I later found out he was an emperor) comes out of nowhere and lops my arm off. WHAT THE HELL, MAN?!?!?

“At this point I’m pissed. Who goes around chopping people’s arms off at their leisure? I really couldn’t do anything at the time so I just ran away. I wasn’t going to beat some dude in a fight with just one arm. So, you know, I bided my time making money as a mystical one-armed waiter until I could gain enough money to teach this guy some manners about cutting people’s limbs off. Little did I know he has like a million followers who would throw down their lives for him.

“And throw down their lives they did. Jeez, I must have murdered at least 100 people on my way to this emperor dude. When I finally got to him I had to use three swords—YES THREE SWORDS—to end his sorry life; it was super raw. An arm for a … life. That’s how the saying goes right? Actually including all of his followers it was more like an arm for 101 lives. Either way, I taught him a lesson about walking around cutting limbs off. He will be able to use it plenty of times in the after life at the bottom of some hell pit."

One-Armed Swordsman has to be one of the best kung fu movies of all time. It’s a story, like most kung-fu movies, of revenge. If you like Quentin Tarentino this is where he stole a lot of his stuff from. Cheap dialogue, ridiculous plot, awesome action: that’s what kung-fu is all about. If you don’t like this awesome form of entertainment, that’s fine (but you are insane) – even so I would give this movie a try because it is one of the pinnacles of the genre.

Just the scene where the one-armed swordsman is trying to get to the emperor and cutting down a bunch of people to get there is supermegaawesome. And then after that it shows all of the dead that he left in his wake from an overhead camera shot which just blows me away. If you are looking for lots of passion and emotion, One-Armed Swordsman won’t have any of it. In fact it may even remove some emotion from your body and make you a harder, tougher person. If the goal of the movie industry is to entertain, this movie does the job quite well.

So what kind of actor could be a big enough badass to star in such an awesome kung fu movie? Move over Bruce Lee and enter Jimmy Wang Yu. This guy was not only insanely awesome on screen (often playing one armed characters for some reason) but he was even cooler off screen. He got in plenty of bar brawls and had a love affair with a famous actress whose husband ended up hanging himself rather than go through a divorce. Most people think of Bruce Lee as the first well known kung-fu hero but Jimmy Wang Yu was well known before Bruce Lee (One-Armed Swordsman made one million dollars at the box office). He paved the way for Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. For the longest time I thought he only had one arm in real life because all of the movies (3) I had seen with him he only had one arm. But he has the normal amount of limbs which raises the question why does he play so many one-armed characters? Maybe you can find out!

When you get home after watching this move you should tie your arm behind your back and try some kung-fu tricks. I bet it’s far harder than it looked on screen. That’s probably why Jimmy was one-armed in so many movies. He just wanted to prove to the world that disabled people could do just as much killing as any normal person. What a valiant statement, Mr. Yu. In fact, more directors should make disabled people action movies. Ray would have been so much better if Ray Charles went on a murder rampage.

Alec Nordin
Film Club co-President