Highbrow! Lowbrow? brings another fresh episode of Jesse and Shaun chopping it up about movies. As we do every week, we review the Top Box Office Earner and Best Picture Academy Award Winner of the same year to see who was right: the critics or the masses. This time we aren't going too far back as we look at the year 2001 and its films, A Beautiful Mind (Highbrow) and Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone (Lowbrow).
A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, is an autobiographical story of Nobel Peace Prize winning mathematician John Nash (played by Russell Crowe) who seeks to do something truly great while battling his inner demons. Nash eventually falls in love with Alicia, a former student played by Jennifer Connelly, who stands by her man against all odds. Both Crowe and Connelly have a somewhat difficult time pulling off these roles, Crowe, a manly man, being a nerdy scientist, and Connelly, being a beautiful woman interested in an awkward and somewhat mean mathematician. There are some fascinating twists and turns to the story that really alter how you see John and his interactions with the world, culminating in a poignant ending both tragic and triumphant. The director Ron Howard has been critiqued as manipulative and his stories saccharine, and for the most part, this film had enough quirks to avoid those pratfalls, however occasionally you do feel the film push you in a certain direction. Overall, this was entertaining throughout, a compelling story about an interesting individual aided by Ron Howard's crowd pleasing direction.
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone, directed by Christopher Colombus, is the 1st installment of the Harry Potter franchise, based off the adventures of Harry Potter, played by Daniel Radcliffe, and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) as they learn to become wizards while fighting off the evil forces of Voldemort. This film sets up the tenets of the series, establishing the wizard world and introducing us to the main players of the story. Though some of the cgi effects can feel dated, overall this film has a very fantastic, majestic and epic feel due to the sweeping castle shots, nuanced special effects, and imaginative art direction. We both thought that the acting of Grint and Watson were strong, Watson giving a intelligent female hero and Grint hamming it up just enough. But we disagreed on Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, where Shaun thought Radcliffe was wooden and awkward, Jesse embraced such traits as a part of his nerdy charm and his growing acceptance of this new world. One of the bigger critiques of the film was that it was overlong, taking too much time to get to the arc of the story, a good 10-20 minutes could have been shaven for a leaner and more focused film. Ultimately, t's a worthy 1st installment for the Harry Potter series, combining elements of fantasy, mystery and honor to tell a magical and epic story.
So what film did we end up siding with? The magical adventures of Harry Potter in Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone (Lowbrow) or the tragic trials of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Highbrow)? Tune in to the next Highbrow! Lowbrow? to find out!
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