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MSRP 29.98
RATED PG-13
STUDIO MPI Home Video
RUNNING TIME 96 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES
• None
The Pitch
Jessica Alba delivers a most unexpected performance as Mona Gray, a quirky young woman who hides in a private world of numbers when her beloved mathematician father falls ill. But when Mona is offered a job as an elementary school math teacher, she’ll introduce the students to her own eccentric gift for numerical obsession. Can the joys of arithmetic multiplied by a shy romance with the school science teacher help Mona discover a new life she can count on?
The Humans
Marilyn Agrelo (Director), Jessica Alba, Chris Messina, John Shea, J.K.Simmons
The Nutshell
A boring look at a minimally eccentric girl and her quest to make numbers more important than humans or emotions.
The common face witnessed on any audience member after the film ends.
The Lowdown
CHUD has a policy that they will review any DVD sent to them. Doesn’t matter that it isn’t the target audience, and this film is definitely as far from the target audience you can get. Somehow this film attempts to explore mental health, terminal illness and the reasons most sane people would avoid having children. It completes by making fun of the death process, making mental illness become a made up event in someone’s life and turning one of the children in a female second grade Dexter.
Jessica Alba looks horrible in this film. Period. If the costume designer wanted to make sure there was absolutely no way possible she could maintain the pretty face that helped establish her into the entertainment industry, they succeeded. They exceeded all expectations also. Chris Messina looks like a 90s grunge band singer and J.K. Simmons looks very old. The costume and makeup departments made a cast that might have excelled at looking ordinary and turned them into repulsive. This doesn’t take into account the aunt’s dresses and the cancer ridden mother and her ridiculously large glasses. I normally don’t give a crap if someone looks bad for a scene or two, but this was the entire film.
Upset that they didn’t master the art of making her the ugliest woman ever.
The direction and cinematography was a some of the worst in my recent viewing pleasure, and I have seen plenty of bad lately. There is an emotional scene where a young girl is telling Alba her mother has terminal cancer, and the only thing worse than that topic is making it so one hundred percent boring in every possible way that nobody gives a shit that this girls mother is going to die. They move from completely centered stationary long shot to the opposite completely centered stationary long shot.
If the direction and costumes and makeup weren’t bad enough, the story does not help. Interest quickly wanes as plot grasps for straws to tie things together and make them work. The opening 10 minutes were entertaining but sad, bringing some visual life to numbers jumping out of everything, but after that it is all downhill, and it races to the predictable ending that bathes in sap.
I thought he said he was in Nirvana, not into Nirvana
The Package
Nothing on this Blu. A trailer, but since there isn’t anything else, I say nothing.
Rating: 
Out of a Possible 5 Stars
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