Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

blanche-2 Greg Kinnear stars in Flash of Genius, featuring Lauren Graham and Dermot Mulroney.Flash of Genius is the true story of Robert Kearns, an inventor, an engineering teacher and Ph.D who invented the intermittent windshield. While in negotiations with Ford Motor Company, Ford pulled out and decided they didn't want it, even though they had been working on one for years and hadn't come up with a solution.When Kearns sees his windshield on a car, he realizes that Ford has stolen his invention. Though everyone, including his friend and business partner (Mulroney) don't want him to pursue it, and he does, hiring an attorney, Gregory Lawson (Alan Alda). Lawson gets a settlement offer for a quarter of a million dollars. Kearns turns it down for one reason. Ford will not admit they stole his invention, and though they approach him again, he continues to turn them down. Finally, working as his own attorney and with his son's help, he finally gets his day in court.As another poster pointed out, the story is sad in a way because for every Bob Kearns who won't give up, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of people who have invented things, only to see their invention stolen.Kearns suffered through a nervous breakdown, the deterioration of his family, and isolation as he fought his case.Greg Kinnear did a wonderful job as Kearns, a serious, somewhat eccentric, and brilliant man who believed in ethics and integrity.This is a very inspiring story -- it's not easy to make a movie about the invention of a windshield wiper, and maybe it's not the most exciting film I've ever seen, but I liked it.

Robert J. Maxwell There's no reason an interesting -- even a fascinating -- movie couldn't be made about an electrical engineer who invents the now-indispensable intermittent windshield wiper, has the device stolen by the Ford Motor Company, strives for recognition for years, and finally succeeds in court while representing himself.This isn't it, though. We learn practically nothing about the device itself. (I've always been curious about how the thing knows when to make its next swipe. What's it got, an alarm clock?) The story focuses on the man himself, a professor of engineering, played by Greg Kinnear, and on his strenuous and increasingly lonely quest.There are too many flaws to make the movie more than of passing interest. Greg Kinnear is neither a thoughtful nor a forceful actor, for one thing. He's good at being mild mannered, and he's THAT, but not much more. In his refusal to compromise with Ford's settlement offers, he projects not the pride of a man cheated but the dumb-calf stolidity of someone who lives in another dimension and is convinced it's real.The script is so formulaic that it suggests that strictly commercial considerations lay behind it.That "other dimension," for instance. Kinnear's character spends some months in a psychiatric hospital. All we see him do on screen is make late-night calls, speak sharply to his family, ask if his assistant has been talking to the enemy, and finally tear angrily into the engine of a stranger's Ford that has his stolen invention in it. For rudeness, you are avoided. For the destruction of a stranger's engine, you get sued or go to jail. What's missing from this picture is what led to his hospitalization.But then the whole thing seems glossed over with familiar cuts and pastes. We've seen it before, the underdog trying to sue the Great External Auditory Meatus Corporation, having to demonstrate the injustice with only minimal resources at his command."Marie" had Sissy Spacek exposing corruption in politics. "Erin Brokovitch" had Julia Roberts fighting Pacific Gas and Electric. In "A Civil Action," John Travolta sacrificed everything to bring Beatrice Foods and Grace and Co. to justice. "Class Action" pitted Gene Hackman against The Cosmological Automobile Company. Paul Newman almost went nuts trying to get money out of St. Catherine Laboret Hospital in "Verdict." Big Tobacco tried to kill the whistle blower in "Insider." And so on and on and on.Of course not all the heroes in these movies went berserk as Kinnear's character apparently does. But then Ron Howard scored big with a lunatic genius in "A Brilliant Mind," which I would guess accounts for the title of this movie.The guy's wife and kids leave him. That's par for the formula course. His children are estranged. His friends shun him. The Ford representatives offer him $11 million but he refuses it and they think he's stupid. He wants his NAME on that WINDSHIELD WIPER! In court, pro se, he makes a fool of himself at first but then is shown making one or two clever cross examinations and wins the case. He may win, but the audience doesn't.

kosmasp I'm not gonna spoil the end or anything, I'm just going to talk about the story, that's why I put the spoiler tag up. I'm always afraid when I read the tag "Based on a true story". Most of the times, it isn't that truthful and if it is, it might get boring or some other things go wrong.In this case everything fit together. The performances, the theme, just everything. Greg Kinnear should be nominated at least for his performance/portrayal. That he is fighting for his rights and that you can see the big company treating him wrong and cheating on their contract from a mile off, doesn't matter that much. After that it's the underdog story. And it doesn't even matter how the movie ends, because as the saying goes: The journey is it's own reward!

dunmore_ego The David versus Goliath story - with David wielding an Intermittent Windshield Wiper.Antonio Meucci, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Alfred Russell Wallace - all these men had their ideas stolen, only credited years, decades after their ideas had entered the fabric of society under other mens' names: the telephone, Superman, evolution...Who knows how many such men there have been over millennia? The nature of ideas is so amorphous, so inscrutable; "Steal from one man - that's plagiarism. Steal from many men - that's research." FLASH OF GENIUS shows us one of those millions who had his idea stolen, and his principled battle to regain credit for that idea: the intermittent windshield wiper.Hard to believe this function once did not exist - but back in the late 1960s, when all windshield wipers only went OFF and ON, college professor and tinkerer, Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear, whom we meet - not coincidentally - lecturing on Ethics), hit upon the idea for the "Blinking Eye Windshield Wiper" (with "variable dwell" - that expression kills me!), a wiper that would function like the human eye - whenever it was necessary.He patents the invention (his "Mona Lisa") through his good friend, Gil Privick (Dermot Mulrooney), who owns an auto dealership. He and Gil shop the Blinking Eye to Ford in Detroit, who promptly steal the idea. Because they're a corporation and thus Bad Guys.So begins Kearns's obsessive, decades-long battle, not for money, but for the right to call the invention his; for Ford to admit their outright theft of his patent.In a cute little irony, long before he went head-to-head with Detroit corps, Kearns called his brood of six kids, "The Board of Directors." In a sadder irony, his wife (Lauren Graham) leaves him because with all his time spent on the court case, he was neglecting his kids - the same kids who would years later all end up clustered in his little apartment, helping him win his case! Alan Alda enters the equation briefly as Gregory Lawson, a power lawyer for Kearns, but when he forces a settlement from Ford and Kearns won't accept it unless Ford also acknowledge they stole his idea, Lawson is outa there, but not before warning Kearns of the difference between principled and pragmatic, "Time means nothing to them, money means nothing to them - they will bury you in countersuits, motions, delays; five years from now, you won't be closer to a resolution. Your hair will turn gray..."And he is right.In court, Ford Corp (represented by CEO Mitch Pileggi, among others) claims the idea for an intermittent wiper was in the works anyway and Kearns simply put a few common components together to finalize the design.And he is right.Kearns, who represented himself in court, countered that argument by reading Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." pointing out that Dickens never invented the words themselves, but put them together in such a fashion that he created something new and spanky.And he is right.The beauty of a good story, that happens to be true: every side is right and every side is wrong.Ford would offer Kearns higher and higher sums of money, through their lawyer who looked like a gangster, Charlie Defao (Tim Kelleher), eventually offering 30 million dollars to drop the case, which Kearns and his grown kids (now truly acting like a Board of Directors) refuse - on the grounds that the settlement still did not come with an admission of theft.Well-paced, well-acted, frustrating, inspiring, poignant, FLASH OF GENIUS is a testament to the power of principles, yet a warning as to the cost of holding onto them with white knuckles. Kearns's family life was destroyed, he suffered a mental breakdown and was in a sanitarium for a brief period.Of course Kearns wins - in the usual manipulative inspirational music swell during the court decision - or this movie would not exist. But it is unfortunate that Kearns's fight did not help the plight of all Inventors. We are all aware of those modern clauses in corporate contracts that claim everything from every individual as attributed to that corporation. There are no real inventors left, no single men allowed to claim that flash of genius. Humanity has been swallowed up by The Man.Robert Kearns was one of the last Real Men to fight The Man, squandering his life to retain his Humanity. On variable dwell.--Review by Poffy The Cucumber (for Poffy's Movie Mania).