(MENAFN- Arab Times) 'Tis clearly the season for Oscar-worthy performances by British actors playing mathematical geniuses facing daunting personal odds.
Sound overly specific? Consider: A few weeks ago we had "The Theory of Everything," starring Eddie Redmayne as the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. And now we have Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Imitation Game" as Alan Turing, the man chiefly responsible for cracking the vaunted Enigma code used by the Germans in World War II.
But even though Turing literally changed the course of history - Winston Churchill said he'd made the greatest single contribution to the Allied victory - and, by the way, also created one of the first modern computers, you may well have never heard of him.
That would be reason enough to applaud the arrival of "The Imitation Game," directed by Morten Tyldum and written by Graham Moore based on a 1983 book by Andrew Hodges. But though it often feels like your basic high-brow British biopic, the film also happens to boast impeccable acting, especially by Cumberbatch, who masterfully captures the jittery, nervy brilliance of a man whose mind could bring down an enemy yet couldn't process simple human interactions.
Was Turing autistic, or did he have Asperger's syndrome? Who knows - today we'd probably say he was "on the spectrum." He's a man who can't coherently answer whether he wants a sandwich for lunch. At the same time, he's conceiving a machine that will somehow defeat the Germans' own cipher machine, the Enigma, which uses code that changes every 24 hours, rendering traditional decrypting methods useless.
As we learn about this painful duality in Turing's life, we also learn he was gay, in an era when homosexual activity was criminalized in Britain. After the war, he was prosecuted for indecency. Given a choice of "chemical castration" or prison, he chose the former. He committed suicide at 41, a cyanide-laced apple by his bedside.
Oddly, though, the film addresses Turing's death only with a quick line in the postscript, and no word on the method. It's a strange omission - particularly given that Turing was said to have been fascinated by the "Snow White" story.
Mysterious
We begin after the war, with the police investigating a mysterious break-in at Turing's home and wondering what this fellow's about (they don't yet know about his role in the war). Soon we flash back to 1939, and younger Turing's job interview with the commander running the secret codebreaking program (a nicely crusty Charles Dance). Given Turing's dreadful personal skills, it doesn't go well.
But he's hired, and immediately starts alienating his colleagues, especially the charismatic Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode, excellent and also perhaps the best-looking mathematician ever portrayed onscreen). (Well, at least until Keira Knightley makes her entrance in this film.)
Turing is ridiculed for insisting on building his machine, taking up time and money while soldiers are dying. Denied funding, he makes a direct plea to Churchill, who puts him in charge. That's when he hires Joan Clarke (an appealing Knightley), the only woman on the team and his eventual fiancee.
Still, things go badly, until an offhand remark by a woman in a bar makes Turing realize a way to speed up the machine's activity. Eureka!
The story gets more interesting as the team realizes it must keep its huge breakthrough a secret, lest the Nazis figure it out and change their code. They enter into a painful calculus: Which information can be used, and hence which lives saved?
There are surely numerous narrative shortcuts taken here. There's also one of those slogan-type lines that seems far too tongue-trippingly clunky to be uttered by one character, let alone two: "Sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."
But there's truth to it. Turing's story is indeed hard to imagine. Thanks to Cumberbatch's committed performance, a lot more people will know it.
"The Imitation Game," a Weinstein Company release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking." Running time: 114 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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The characters of the modern workplace comedy, like the rest of us, don't know how to make a living anymore.
The characters of the modern workplace comedy, like the rest of us, don't know how to make a living anymore.
Having haplessly tried to murder their bosses in the first "Horrible Bosses," Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis return in "Horrible Bosses 2" as hopeful inventors. "Let's bet on ourselves," they tell each other, making a clearly questionable wager. They go into business with a bath product dubbed "Shower Buddy," and with their abysmal guest spot on a morning show promoting it, it's clear they may have backed the wrong horse.
It's become a familiar genre trope of recent years: The idealistic self-starter business that almost certainly wouldn't stand a chance in real life. Dwarfed by corporations or left behind by the digital economy, comedies are routinely littered with plucky upstarts, from Kristen Wiig's would-be baker in "Bridesmaids" to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson's middle-aged Google aspirants of "The Internship."
While the first "Horrible Bosses" tried to tap into the widely held fantasy of killing the overloads of the office, its sequel mines the farce in being your own boss. The entrepreneurial efforts of the film's ever-yammering trio, of course, fail, and the film descends into a thinly sketched kidnapping plot that serves mainly to space its celebrity cameos.
Hoodwinked by a rich distributor (Christoph Waltz), the guys - Nick, Kurt and Dale - plan to kidnap the executive's playboy son (Chris Pine). The ill-conceived scheme returns them to their criminal adviser (Jamie Foxx, who the film could have used more of), Nick's now imprisoned former boss (Kevin Spacey) and Dale's old torturer dentist (Jennifer Aniston).
"Horrible Bosses 2," directed and co-written by Sean Anders, is built on its hydra-headed leads who appear almost tethered together, crowding the frame like the Three Stooges. Bateman, Day and Sudeikis are each talented comic actors who have their riffing rhythm down, skillfully weaving and overlapping their idiotic antics.
But this gratuitous sequel fails most because their triangle offense, while smooth, isn't dynamic enough. With Bateman playing the straight man and Sudeikis' smiley, glib shtick wearing thin, the only source of laughs is the slapstick of Day - a reliably funny, high-pitched ball of anxiety. The "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" star is like an electrocuted chipmunk, his fearful eyes always darting. (AP)
So "Horrible Bosses 2" goes for whatever cheap, vulgar gags it can collide into. Most unfortunate is the debasement of Aniston, who lights up the movie but suffers some of its lowest jokes. Really, it's an altogether likable cast, all of whom appear quite game despite the lacking material.
That the film skitters aimlessly away from the office is a wasted opportunity, too, since today's workplaces could use the levity. Someone should have given "Horrible Bosses" a real job.
"Horrible Bosses 2," a Warner Bros release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "some sexual references, mature thematic material and historical smoking." Running time: 108 minutes. One and a half stars out of four. (AP)
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