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JANUARY: A BEAUTIFUL MIND. Story of a genius, half mad mathematician at Princeton and MIT. Was interested in this movie because I ran into John Nash a number of times on the Princeton campus. He was quiet and reserved. None of the bizarre behavior shown on the film. One of the nuttier scenes is the finale at the Nobel presentation in Stockholm. Nash attributes his great success to the love of his wife, who in real life didn't come into his life until after his seminal work.*GOSFORD PARK, with Maggie Smith, Ellen Mirren and just about every other British actor yet to be embalmed. A sheer delight, a marriage of Agatha Christie and Upstairs Downstairs. Maggie plays a countess whose cruel barbs sear everyone she encounters. The lord of the estate (Michael Gambon) referred to as a hard-hearted, randy old sod, refuses to give money to a business partner and is killed later in the evening. The murderer (or murderers) come from a different element of society, however. * THE SHIPPING NEWS. Clueless inker for a New York newspaper is cuckolded by his playgirl wife, who dies in a car accident. He drives to Nova Scotia with his aunt to live in a creepy house abandoned ages ago by his clan, the Quoyles. He redeems himself as a reporter for the Shipping News after a series of near fatal adventures and epiphanies. Wonderful characters and beautiful shots of the rocky, bleak, almost uninhabitable islands. * THE LADY AND THE DUKE. Period drama set during the French revolution. The lady is Grace Elliott, an Englishwoman, who elects to remain in Paris as the revolution destroys all her friends. The duke is the Duke of Orleans, a former lover of the lady and a cousin of the king, who votes (as a member of the assembly) to execute the king. He does not save himself. Robespierre has him executed within a year. Interesting technical note; the backdrops are constructed from paintings and drawings of the period. POSSESSION, the film adaptation of A S Byatt's novel. Plenty of crackling dialog in this story of two literary researchers digging out the text of an unlikely love story of two poets in the nineteenth century. The poetess, Christabel Lamotte, had been considered an intractable lesbian. In Byatt's novel, both academics are English, but the director, Neil LaBute, changes the dynamics of the principal (20th century characters, Gwenyth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart) by making Aaron a brash American. Quite an interesting two hours.
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