MYST- A Beautiful Mind

So I watched this movie in Psychology because it deals with Schizophrenia. I have been told that it was a really good movie, one of the best in a long time. Russell Crowe plays John Nash a brilliant mathematician at Princeton who lives with Schizophrenia for 10 years without realizing it. It tells the "true" story of his life and what he accomplished and the struggles he had to go through to become sane once again. It won best picture and best director at the 2001 Academy Awards.

I have to say that I didn't enjoy this movie as much as I thought I would. It was a very compelling story and very well acted but I thought it would be less cheesy and Hollywood at the end. Ron Howard who directed the film did win best director, however he doesn't do anything interesting with the shots until the back half of the movie, when he starts to go through treatment and when he relapses. That being said I hope the reason that he didn't do anything out of the ordinary for the first half of the film is because he is trying to make us feel like everything is normally, so that when the shift happens the audience is caught off guard.

I must say that Russell Crowe plays this character very well because not only does he have to be brilliant, absolutely crazy and carry an accent, but he also has to portray the development of this character from college to near the end of his life and all of the stages of his mental illness in between. The best scene of his performance and of Howard's directing is when Nash relapses and begins to believe that people are still there. There is a very cool pulsing light with a constantly spinning camera as Nash tries to protect his wife and child from a non existent government agent. Crowe's conviction that this person is there really is aided by those two affects because it makes the audience feel uncomfortable and confused. The whole scene is very well done, as is the rest of the movie despite feeling a little cheesy in portions. Overall I give it a 7.5 out of 10

1975 - Poison Trail

A group of left thinking anti-government hippies living on a commune find out that the government is
putting chemicals into the water supply. These hippie’s try to alert the public on their radio station but
before they can get the word out, a government agent kills the majority of the compound. Three escape
alive. This is the story of three hippies trying to escape the government agent and alert the public of the
fiendish ways of the government as they run from the man through the woods of Virginia.

My group did Poison Trail as our movie. We chose Dennis Hopper as our director because he had a connection with a major studio Columbia after "Easy Rider" which made lots of money while still going against the grain by making heroes out of the outcasts of traditional American society, but he also was an artsy anti-government type of person who could work wonders with this type of of the beaten path 70's Anti-hero and mixed elements of good and evil.

All of our actors were kind of unknown except for Jack Nicholson, but that made sense because Dennis Hopper had worked with him before. We chose new actors because we wanted to keep the movie low budget, so the actors didn't need to be big name guys.

We wanted to focus on costuming because Hopper did this in "Easy Rider" and because it seemed like the right idea for a movie about hippies and Anti-government. Having the hippies dress colorful and the government be dressed in all black seemed to make a lot of sense, it would be low budget, it would be easily spotted by almost all audiences, and it would still carry a subtle message. The reason we picked a new college graduate who happens to also be female is that she would be low budget but also she would be talented based on her later works.