Ron Howard
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Ron Howard

Far and Away (1992), adapted from a theatrical play, is set at the end of the 19th century and tells the story of an Irish farmer and his landlord's daughter who migrate to America and move west.

Splash (1984)

A child, Alan, spots a mermaid in the sea and dives to meet her, but is immediately rescued and the mermaid disappears. His brother takes advantage of the confusion ot bend and look under women's skirts.
Years later, the child is a busy young man at the market, and his brother is a funny guy who still browses under women's skirts. One day, after a confrontation with a paranoid scientist, Alan falls in the ocean and is about to drown when a gorgeous girl saves him. She doesn't say a word, just kisses him and then dives back into the ocean. Once she's in the water, she assumes the tail of a mermaid and scares a sub who sees her. She lives in an underwater house. But she decides to come to land and meet with humans. Unfortunately, she is naked and creates a commotion. She gets arrested and Alan is called by the police to identify her. She doesn't talk but she keeps kissing him.
Madison (her acquired name) has only six days.
During the day he leaves her alone and she starts exploring the world. She goes shopping and she is fascinated by tv. Alan finds her in a department store. She has learned English from watching the tv sets of the department store. He makes the mistake of asking her her name: the reply breaks the glasses of all the tv sets. Alone at home again, she indulges in a bath, but, when Alan returns, she must hide the tail.
Alan tells her that as a child he fell in the water and never learned to swim because of the shock.
Alan still thinks that his friend is a foreigner. The paranoid scientist who saw her in the water knows that she is a mermaid but can't prove it. He is walking around the city like a madman, carrying buckets full of water that he throws at women hoping that this would reveal their tail.
Alan is totally in love with her and asks her to marry him. First, she flatly refuses, then she accepts. They have dinner at a business reception where the president gives a speech. The crazy man has spotted Madison and is ready to hit when the president's bodyguard carry him away, fearing a terrorist attempt. But he is still outside when she walks outside and sprays her with water from a hydrant. The tail immediately grows. A crowd of reporter surrounds her and Alan does not protect her. She is carried away by the police.
They take Alan to a lab and drop him into a tank of water to find out whether he also is a mermaid. Alan is desperate. It is his brother to show him that true love knows no obstacles. The two brothers force the crazy man to help them free the mermaid. Chased by the American army, they manage to reach the ocean.
When they are about to part, Madison reveals that Alan the child saw her underwater. He can join her into the ocean again, but he will never be able to come back. The soldiers are closing in and there is no time for discussion. Madison jumps in the ocean and waves goodbye. Alan dives after her and just one kiss is enough to turn him into a mermaid. The evil subs of the army have surrounded them but Alan and Madison easily get rid of them and then swim away.

Beautiful Mind is the melodramatic biography of a Nobel prize winner. The film is too long for what it has to say, full of stereotypes and rarely engaging. The emotional level is kept at a minimum and the personal dilemmas are hardly analyzed.

John Nash is a shy and isolated student at Princeton that is shunned and derided by the other students, befriended only by his room-mate Charles. He is one of the last students to complete his paper but, when he does, he discovers a revolutionary theory. His fame as a mathematical genius reaches the Pentagon, where generals ask him to help crack a secret Soviet code. He is therefore enrolled by the army to figure out a Soviet plan to smuggle atomic weapons into the USA. While teaching, he meets a cute student who invites him to dinner and eventually becomes his wife. His task for the military (still kept unknown to his wife) gets dangerous when agents attempt to his life and is barely rescued by the man who recruited him. Back home, he refuses to tell his wife what happened, but, worried about her pregnancy and what could happen to her, he dispatches her to her sister. One day he is kidnapped by people who claim to be from a psychiatrist hospital, but whom he believes to be Soviet agents.
The doctor calls his wife and tells her that John has developed schizophrenia. The disease has probably been going on since his college years. He is paranoid about the secret services and dreams up fantasizes about a room-mate called Charles. None of that is true. When his wife visits him, he tells her what he believes: that the Russians kidnapped him and are planning a major attack against the USA. She tries to explain that the conspiracy is only in his mind. In vain.
One year later John is back with his wife and his son, and seems to have left his schizophrenia behind. His wife helps him return to a normal life, but he is not a husband anymore: his sexual life has been affected by the medicines. John realizes the pain this causes to his wife and stops taking the medicines. His mind is still a living calculator and one day begins to see patterns again in a newspaper. The man who recruited him appears again. He is taken to a secret laboratory and asked to work again on the same secret assignment... and his wife finds a room plastered with newspaper and magazine pages like he used to do when he was schizophreniac. His wife gets on the phone to call for help. All the ghosts of his hidden life appear and ask him to stop his wife, to kill her if necessary. They appear like real beings to him. John is about to listen to them, when he realizes that one of them is Charles' daughter, still a child: she never grew up, she can't be real.
John is healed inasmuch as he now believes that something is wrong with his mind, that those characters are fictitious, but he is not truly healed because he keeps seeing them. The psychiatrist begs tells him that it will get worse. John is even welcome back to Princeton, but he has to fight his ghosts, often in public. Now that he knows they are not real, it is even worse, because he argues with them aloud, while people stare at him. Eventually, his mind finds the strength to say goodbye to them. He regains his reputation as a mathematical genius and, eventually, the respect of his students. He has learned to live with his ghosts: he still sees them and hears them... the old room-mate, his daughter, the secret agent... and just ignores them.
He goes on to win the Nobel prize. At the ceremony he thanks his wife for her love.
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