BEFORE: Today marks the now-annual Star Wars Day, May the 4th, and I've got nothing for it. I mean, I can celebrate getting two new Star Wars autographs in the mail, and buying a ticket for "Solo" on May 25, but that's about it, I can't mark the occasion here with a film. I do have one documentary on my Netflix list called "Jedi Junior High", but I can't link to it, and I don't want to interrupt my chain. So I'll just have to celebrate the holiday in my heart, and not with a movie.
Instead I'll finish off the Jake Gyllenhaal chain - for now, anyway, because it seems like I say that every year, and then there are always more Jake Gyllenhaal films to watch during the following year. This could have made an appropriate Father's Day film, but the chain just didn't work out that way. This could have made a good lead-in to "Avengers: Infinity War" too, but the chain just didn't work out that way either. I've got many other ways to link to that film, because the cast is HUGE, so let's just get this one off the books and move on, OK?
THE PLOT: The daughter of a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician, recently deceased, hn
AFTER: Everything's coming up "Avengers", at least that's the way things are going to seem until I can finally see "Infinity War" in five days (or so) and post that review in two weeks (or so). So now when I watch this film, I'm thinking, "Hey, there's Pepper Potts, and she's mourning the death of Odin, but she's being comforted by her sister, who happens to be Maria Stark somehow." That's life in our heavily influenced by Marvel Comics world now, and yet still I couldn't drop the new "Avengers" film in here, because it would have ruined my lead-out, with another Anthony Hopkins film on the docket for tomorrow.
But I've got to GET there first, so let me deal with this one, which is so obviously based on a play - I mean, I KNOW that it's based on a play, but even if I didn't, that might have been easy to discern from the fact that 99% of the action in this film takes place in one location, the dead mathematician's house, there seem to be the minimum number of characters possible, and all of the plot points from the dialogue are each mentioned several times, because each one is SO important. I mean, it's not like playwrights get paid by the word, but you might think so sometimes, because the fact that one character is in a band, and everyone in the band is a math geek, should take 10 seconds to day, but instead that gets drawn out over five minutes. I mean, seriously?
Worse, we've got another fractured timeline tonight, because sometimes the math genius is dead, so we're proceeding in the present, and then sometimes he's alive, which means we're back in the past. Didn't I go through this with Anthony Hopkins in "Westworld"? There were two timelines there, too, only they didn't TELL us that, they just made everything very obtuse and challenged everyone at home to figure that out. Screw you guys, I mean, just thanks for nothing. And it would be one thing if we toggled between two timelines, present and past, where each one progressed in order, but "Proof" is like all random, like a series of editing mistakes - or it's just designed to confuse and confound, which isn't any better. Oh, we MEANT to put all the scenes in the wrong order. Nice try, but I ain't buying it.
Then I've got my issues with the premise - the math professor who has a house on campus. But somehow it's HIS house, like he owns it, only then it's NOT a house on campus, is it? Look, I'm not a professor, I don't know how colleges work, but when his other daughter says she's going to sell the house BACK to the college, that implies that he bought the house FROM the college in the first place, and I don't think that's how college houses work. Either the college owns the house so the professor can live there, or he bought a house NEAR the college but not on campus, you just can't have it both ways. It can't be a campus house that he owns, that his daughters will inherit. NP.
Next we've got the professor himself, who's a genius, and he's also lost his mind. Well, which is it? He was brilliant, now he's not, I understand dementia, sure, but pick a damn road already. He's spent the last few years furiously writing down equations in the hope of discovering some last proof, getting some last bit of math brilliance out of his dying mind, and the story here keeps both possibilities alive as long as it can, until we can't take it any more - in the end, was he brilliant or crazy? The suggestion here is that there MIGHT be a fine line between the two, but that's not how math works. You just don't hear a lot of people wandering the streets, talking to themselves in the form of math equations.
I've also got to call another NITPICK POINT on the daughter's choice of college - her father teaches at the University of Chicago, so naturally when she develops an interest in mathematics herself, she decides to enroll in Northwestern. Huh? Why would she go to the college an hour's drive away, when she could probably get FREE tuition at the University of Chicago? That makes no sense. I mean, I understand she wants to get out from her father's shadow, be her own person and not have her father as a teacher, but hello? FREE tuition? And she's already living in a home right on campus? With the cost of tuition and board these days, she should have more strongly considered the school with the better deal. Sure, she's only an hour away if needed, but getting free college AND still being close to her father who needed care was a no-brainer.
It's also a big cheat to have this whole back-and-forth conversation about math proofs, and never show us one, what it's about or how it might work. That's about as bad as making a boxing movie with no fight scenes in it, having all the matches take place off-screen.
Also starring Gwyneth Paltrow (last seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming"), Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Hope Davis (last seen in "Captain America: Civil War"), Roshan Seth (last seen in "Gandhi"), Danny McCarthy (also carrying over from "Stronger"), Gary Houston (last seen in "Eagle Eye"), Colin Stinton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 drunk theoretical physicists
No comments:
Post a Comment