BEFORE: My 50th movie of 2025 also marks the halfway point of the romance chain - there's still about 2 1/2 weeks to go, but numerically, we're half done. I should have the topic wrapped up by March 9 or so, because I need time to get to my St. Patrick's day film. (really, it's just a film set in Ireland with a big-name actor of Irish descent, but hey, I like to have the tie-in.). I was out last night at the theater but there was no movie screened, it was more like a creative conference, they bring in four people from different fields to talk about their careers, it's like a light version of TED talks, maybe. Anyway I had an ex-co-worker drop by, I could have sworn he knew I worked at the theater, but he said he was surprised to see me there. Whenever there's an animation event, of course I see people I recognize, but this was unexpected, for sure - great to catch up.
Sally Hawkins carries over from "Maudie". And here's the line-up for Thursday, 2/20, Day 20 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar":
Best Director Winners and Nominees:
6:30 am "The Crowd" (1928)
8:15 am "The Divine Lady" (1929)
10:15 am "Stage Door" (1937)
12:15 pm "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)
2:00 pm "The Search" (1948)
4:00 pm "The Thin Man" (1934)
5:45 pm "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)
Oscar Worthy Prisoners:
8:00 pm "Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962)
10:45 pm "The Defiant Ones" (1958)
12:30 am "I Want to Live!" (1958)
2:45 am "Cool Hand Luke" (1967)
5:00 am "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" (1932)
6:45 am "Caged" (1950)
I was at 92 seen out of 219, and I've seen 5 out of Thursday's 13: "Stage Door", "The Thin Man", "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre", "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "Cool Hand Luke", I think that's quite reasonable. SO now 97 seen out of 232 takes me down a bit to 41.8%.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Rocket Science" (Movie #4,845)
THE PLOT: A socially awkward teenage math prodigy finds new confidence and new friendships when he lands a spot on the British squad at the International Mathematics Olympiad.
AFTER: IMDB said this was a romance, so I took it to be one - I'm not completely convinced, like it's not a traditional rom-com, for sure. But it's a school film, an English film that goes by the title "X + Y" in the UK, though. I guess that name just wouldn't fly in the U.S. because most people either wouldn't get the double algebra AND gender chromosome reference, or they just hate math and wouldn't know that letters stand for unknown numbers in math functions. But since it's a British film instead of saying "math" all the characters say "maths" as if it's always plural, which I don't quite understand. I mean, I get it if you're talking about geometry, algebra and calculus all at the same time, but if you're just looking for a shorter word than "mathematics" I don't know why you'd pluralize it. You don't study geographys and grammars and Latins, any name of a school course should be singular, unless you're taking gymnastics or economics or social studies. Do they have social studies in the U.K.? And if so, what weird word do they call it?
Anyway, Nathan Ellis is a teen who's definitely autistic or on the spectrum somewhere, he's loved numbers and patterns since he was a little kid, and his mother brought him to take extra math classes after the death of his father, who had encouraged him to find enjoyment and entertainment in things like toy trains because apparently he wanted a son who was socially awkward. I'm kidding, because parents don't make their kids autistic, but then, neither do vaccines. Don't just look for the easy out in the fact that we have vaccines now and also more autism diagnoses, but that doesn't mean one causes the other. It could just be that there were always autistic kids, but doctor's didn't know how to properly diagnose them for a very long time so they just called them "slow" or "introverted" or "dyslexic." Whatever the reason, we have more kids on the spectrum than ever, and maybe some of them have special talents, like memorizing all the chemical elements or being able to remember all the dinosaurs AND Pokemons. You can learn to remember a lot when you're an only child and the other kids at school just think you're weird, but then you maybe never learn how to read social cues or develop healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
Anyway, the film skips a few years to when Nathan is finally eligible to take the exam to qualify for a chance to have a spot in a competition that could get him a place on the U.K. team for the International Mathematical Olympiad, where high schoolers from around the world come together to, well, math. Nathan passes the test and this gets him a trip to Taiwan, where the U.K. team trains - look, I don't understand it either, I don't see why can't train at home, either, and I thought it might have something to do with Taiwan being a British colony, except that it's NOT, so I don't think this makes any sense. The IMO that year was going to be held at Cambridge, which is just down the road, so WHY do all these British teens need to go to Taiwan? Really, you can do maths anywhere.
But I guess the teacher who runs the UK team is friends with the Taiwan math teacher, so off they go. Suddenly Nathan isn't the smartest maths whiz in the room, all of them are brilliant and they're also all awkward in their own ways, whether it's the sullen girl who plays the piano well because music is also math, or the white boys who try to rap very badly or the one who just launches into quoting Monty Python routines without asking if the other people in the room even know what Monty Python is. But Nathan is paired up with a female student who is also the niece of the teacher in charge of the team (what could POSSIBLY go wrong here?) and begins to interact with a girl for the first time in a way that might be considered romantic if you gave it another few years to develop. Hey, it's an important lesson when a boy learns that girls are just other people you can talk to - sure, most figure this out in the second or third grade, so whatever, he's a late bloomer.
Meanwhile, Nathan's mother is enjoying some time to herself for probably the first time in ten years, as she's not taking care of Nathan and cutting his breakfast toast into four identical right triangles or making sure that he gets a prime number of prawn balls with his lunch order from the Chinese take-away. So naturally she puts the moves on Nathan's math tutor, as she's never seen him date anyone, which is probably due to his medical condition. See, when you first re-enter the dating scene after a long time away from it, it's important to date someone attainable, so you can acclimate to the routine of a relationship again. Someone with a debilitating physical ailment is an easy get, like they're probably not seeing anyone because they spend so much time in hospital, and better still, they can't run away - well, not easily.
When the Olympiad test day arrives, Nathan is just not in a good place - his first girlfriend (of sorts) has been kicked off the team, and the first question reminds him of the accident that killed his father, so in the parlance of today's kids, that's very triggering. Suddenly his anxiety takes over and he leaves the exam, essentially surrendering his spot on the team. This is a perfectly rational response to excessive stress, however it's one that he'll no doubt regret later when his permanent record is reviewed as he's applying to get into college. Look, I know a few things about this topic, when I was in 6th grade I scored really high on a math aptitude test, and so in 7th grade they put me in an 8th grade math class, and then in 8th grade I was allowed to sit in on a 10th grade algebra class at the high school, but I really didn't know what was expected of me, was I supposed to consider math as a career just because I was slightly better at it? The bad news was that my edge disappeared at some point, so in 10th grade I took the same course over again, however by 11th grade trigonometry and 12th grade calculus, I had no idea what I was doing. Perhaps I was gravitating more toward music classes and art history, but I didn't end up with a career in either of those subjects. Meanwhile I was hanging out with a bad crowd, namely community theater groups. Who wants to take math courses if they can have some kind of job waiting for them in the arts?
But I was on the math team for most of high school - this allowed me to get out of school early on some days and travel to other nearby towns, where there were math quizzes to be taken in geometry, algebra, trig and calc. A round was three questions, they were worth 1, 2 and 3 points, and of increasing difficulty. Strategy was involved, like should I skip ahead to the third question because it's worth more points, or focus on solving the first question because it's the easiest? Sometimes I played on the "B" squad, and we figured out that we didn't need five people to compete, if we were short a player we just made up a fake name and had three diffferent people sign in under that name to take the required three rounds. Nobody ever checked to see if anyone by that name was enrolled in our high school. So yeah, I cheated on mathletics - but primarily I was a really good guesser, like if you didn't know the answer to a very hard trig question, just guess either "zero" or "90 degrees". One time I didn't have time left to figure out the third question, so I just wrote down "9" and it turned out to be the right answer? I couldn't show my work because there wasn't any!
But I can confirm that the mathletes are 99% percent awkward and unsure of how to deal with their emotions and romantic relations with the opposite sex (or same-sex, whatever). If you had given me the choice in 10th grade between being on the math team and having the opportunity or courage to go on a date with a girl, there's no question, screw the math team. But that's just not how life works, we walk the roads we can walk until they lead us where we want to go, or we can reach a crossroads and make a choice. Finally at college in NYC, I took my first few stabs at going on dates, but if I'm being honest, nerds at film school are maybe even nerdier than math team nerds in high school. So I didn't see any action until a month before the end of my junior year, which ended up being my senior year as I had enough credits to graduate early. Finally, all that time studying in high school paid off, as I had passed enough AP exams to get enough college credits to take a YEAR of my sentence at NYU. I couldn't wait to get out and work in the real world, plus I was getting laid for the first time in my life, which was a powerful thing, but that's another story.
My point is, I support Nathan's decision to quit the math team, if the girl he loved was headed out of the country and he just wanted to be with her. Who needs all that anxiety anyway, about trains traveling at certain speeds or proving that there can't be four trains of the same color arranged in a parallelogram or whatever. I think, given a minute to think about it, the wise course of action would have been to just guess on every question, and therefore LOOK like a damn genius, write down just any old answer and get through the exam in five minutes, THEN get up and go find Zhang at the train station. Sure, almost every answer would have been wrong, but for the next hour, at least every other mathlete in the room would think he was some kind of genius, and isn't that worth something?
I've told the story here before about how I once took a summer computer science class at M.I.T. - yes, THAT M.I.T - but I realized in the second lesson I was in WAY over my head (I'd learned BASIC but this was PASCAL) and so I had to tell my parents that this wasn't really my thing, I hope they got a refund, and the fact that I just wanted to spend the summer NOT studying computer science and maybe watching summer reruns and having a good time had nothing to do with it, I assure you. Look, it's not like back in 1982 there was a big future in computer science, right? RIGHT?
Also starring Asa Butterfield (last seen in "Time Freak"), Rafe Spall (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "The Exception"), Jo Yang, Martin McCann (last seen in "The Informer"), Jake Davies (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Alex Lawther (last seen in "The Last Duel"), Alexa Davies (last seen in "The Sense of an Ending"), Orion Lee (last heard in "Turning Red"), Edward Baker-Close, Percelle Ascott, Suraj Rattu, Jamie Ballard, Clare Burt, Adam Foster, Lee Zhuo Zhao, Shannon Beer, Tasha Connor, Bo-Han Huang, Paul J. Dove (last seen in "The Woman in Black"), Karl Ng with archive footage of John Cleese (last seen in "Clifford the Big Red Dog"), Michael Palin (last seen in "An Accidental Studio")
RATING: 6 out of 10 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence
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