I hae ma doots...

Hmm... sadly I managed to get along too late to see yet another movie at the Glasgow Film Festival the other day (a German comedy, no less) and so made do with Doubt instead.

Ho, and, indeed, hum.

I mean it's not desperately bad or anything. Amy Adams is very good as the naive (is she ever anything else?) nun; Philip Seymour Hoffman is, well, as good as he ever is, which is to say very good indeed, as the young-ish priest. And bonus points to the film-makers for resisting any temptations that they might have had to show us Mr Hoffman's wobbly white bum - blimey, we can do without seeing that again, I'm sure.

And then of course there's Meryl. She's very good too, though her part (as the scary nun who sets out to ruin PSH's "modern" priest, on the basis of what may or may not be flimsy evidence) is a real ham's delight, and poor Meryl can't resist sinking her teeth into a fair amount of the scenery. At one point I wondered if maybe she's angling for a part as a baddie in the next Batman movie - who says The Penguin can't be female?

But och, overall it's a bit dreary and unconvincing.

How's the Maths, father?
Well, a fair amount of this is set in the young nun's classroom, where she drones on for the most part about history and suchlike. But things did perk up considerably for me when a scene began with her writing some fractions on the board instead - Lordy, thinks I, we're about to get some maths, I mean math! Now I can't recall exactly what all the fractions were, but they were something along the lines of 1/4, 2/8, 4/16 and 16/64. So, I'm thinking, equivalent fractions - fair enough, it could happen. But then Amy says "What is the common denominator?" - at which point something or other reasonably dramatic happens, and the question remains unanswered.

Well all I can say is, do tell, please, sister: what is the common denominator? 'Cos as far as I can see, there isn't one! Oh sure, you could convert them all to have the same (ie common) denominator... but the examples are all the same bloody fraction! A better question would be, what do these fractions have in common? Or, leave some blank, and ask for them to be filled in: how many 64ths, etc. But presumably no-one on the film set could be arsed bothering coming up with anything half-decent, by way of a maths question. Quelle surprise.

Yes folks, what we have here is a clear transgression of Maths Teacher's (hitherto secret) First Rule of Movie Mathematics: Thou Shalt Do The Math. Clearly Sister Amy has been at the communion wine when she should have been revising her knowledge of basic fractions, and a better movie would surely have seen the eagle-eyed Ms Streep getting all righteous on Ms Adam's ass for her shortcomings in matters arithmetic. PSH could still have been around, going on about Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, if he was keen to be seen as "trendy" - and you just know a dedicated actor like him would go off and study the subject for a good few months, just to get the part right.

Talk about a missed opportunity!