dmnkeen

I don't really dislike this movie, but giving it Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay!!! Come on, Academy, snap out of it: let's try giving the award to something that really deserves it and not something that is merely worthy.

Although A Beautiful Mind is well made (Roger Deakins' cinematography in particular being a standout), it is not in the same class as fellow nominees In The Bedroom, Lord of the Rings, Gosford Park and Moulin Rouge. All of these other movies take enormous risks, inflame passions and debate, and look like labours of love. Ron Howard's movie, regardless of the makers' intentions, comes over as a well intentioned but flatly earnest big budget made for TV issues movie. At it's worst, the movie is more about emotional manipulation than it is about producer Brian Grazer's aim of opening a window on understanding mental illness.

Russell Crowe has done much better work than on show here (and, deservedly, lost out to Denzel Washington for Best Actor); and Ron Howard himself has produced better movies like Ransom and Apollo 13; even his underrated The Paper is much better than this. That Howard at his least effective has beaten directors like Altman, Jackson, and Scott at their peak does not reflect well on the Academy's judgement.

When all is said and done, however, what does it actually mean? The history of the Oscars is littered with movies which lost out but are more memorable than the winners: Raging Bull, Jaws, It's A Wonderful Life, Psycho (hell, Hitchcock never ever won an Oscar - what does that tell us?), The Searchers, etc, etc, so it will not surprise me when, in a few years, this movie has been largely forgotten or reevaluated for it's true worth (a la English Patient) while Rings, Rouge, Bedroom and Park will stand unblemished as the true master classes in making stimulating cinema that they really are.

6/10

Have I missed something? Has my IQ suddenly plummeted to an all-time low? No, I refuse to believe that I've lost my senses here and that, in true Lynchian paranoia mode, it's everybody else that's gone crazy. But, my oh my, did this movie suck big time!

It's the same old David Lynch formula (which, believe it or not, I actually like) as seen in Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Wild at Heart et al. But here, it feels not like Lynch himself, but some hack Lynch wannabe who has taken control. The acting, apart from the two female leads, is appalling - whoever cast Justin Theroux should be shot - the camerawork stodgy for the most part, and even Badalamenti's score sounds like he was composing in his sleep.

I'm all for innovation and challenging cinema, but this movie disappears up it's own rear end (and I don't mean in the intended way). Some scenes were also cringemakingly embarrassing to watch.

This is definitely, in my humble opinion, a sad case of the Emperor's New Clothes where a director has started pandering to the critics and vice versa. Who cares what it all means? When it's this badly, lazily, and pretentiously done, there's no point in even thinking about it. Along with Lost Highway, this definitely Lynch's worst.

As someone who has continually put off reading Tolkien's novel, I finally gave in and read this weighty tome this year. I completed it just before the release of Fellowship of the Ring, and have to admit that, while the book was very good, I found it to be extremely heavy handed in places, downright dull in others and not a little dated in a lot of ways. It's still a classic book, and well worth reading, but contrary to the whinings of Tolkien fanatics, I'm not convinced by it's place as the Novel of the 20th Century.

So to the movie. It, too, may have it's flaws (and God knows, it certainly has it's detractors, many of whom, I suspect, regard themselves as the guardians of Tolkien's book), but I have to say I liked it. In fact, I loved it. More than that, I believe it is easily the best thing I've seen projected on to the screen this year. You can go through it scene by scene, referring back to the novel, moaning that Peter Jackson's vision of Middle Earth and it's inhabitants doesn't match yours, but hey, TOUGH! Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema have taken a huge gamble in bringing LotR to the screen in the first place and you have to ask yourself, rather than carping, would you prefer that they hadn't bothered at all? If you seriously think that the little movie you played in your head when you read the book should be the sacrosanct blueprint for something that has cost $300 million, then I suggest you stay at home and read your tattered copy of The Silmarillion or The Hobbit (which, incidentally, I think is a less pretentious and more rewarding book). If you accept that the book is just the starting point for a movie (as it should be: Harry Potter is an example of what happens when you are slavishly faithful to a source novel), go and see it. I think you'll like it.

I was literally blown away by the spectacle I saw here. Jackson's imagining of Tolkien's world is magnificent, creating something that is both intimate in it's examination of friendship and camaraderie, and epic in it's presentation of evil threatening good on a large scale. Visually, the movie is continually interesting and, if there are a few ropey moments a la dialogue or whatever, the cracks are plastered over expertly by a great cast (McKellen, Wood, Astin, and Lee being particular standouts). My favourite characters in the book (Sam and Gollum) are tantalisingly shown here, promising great things for their expanded roles in the next two chapters.

Hoeward Shore's pounding score deserves a mention, matching the fierceness of Jackson's passion for his material on screen, and providing a strong emotional accompaniment to the director's unfailing eye.

There will be people who don't like this just as there many highly regarded movie that I don't like. But if you are being dismissive because of an occasional lapse in a special effect, or whatever, please get a life. Great movies all have their flaws and Fellowship of the Ring is a great movie. It is also a big movie, important and even classic and in a year where you sometimes you get the impression that filmmakers have lost all nerve and ambition (Pearl Harbor and Planet of the Apes, anyone), thank God for it.

Along with equally flawed, risk taking projects in 2001 like Moulin Rouge and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Fellowship of the Rings should be what movies are all about. Excellent stuff.

10/10