Good Will Hunting is one of those movies that within the first few minutes you knew was something special. The idea behind this movie is a great one; a super genius without any formal education has mathematical skills far beyond anyone else in the world. This story came from real life, from an Indian math genius of the 1920’s named Ramanujan who was poor, never formerly educated and changed the world with new mathematical formula’s that nobody had previously been able to solve. This movie is also reviewed in this blog: The Man Who Knew Infinity

Good Will Hunting was nominated for best Picture in 1997 and won best original Screenplay. Robin Williams played the therapist who befriends Will Hunting in without any doubt the best acting role he ever had; for this role he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The lead character of Will Hunting was played by Matt Damon , who also co-wrote the screenplay with his co-star Ben Affleck . There were several reasons why Good Will Hunting was such a great movie: the unique story about a one of a kind math genius, the scenes discussing math with the MIT math professor and his colleagues, the acting and mostly the relationship between Robin Williams and Will Hunting which grows over the 2 hour movie to a great friendship ending in a scene where Willams character has a breakthrough with Will while discussing Hunting’s years of a very abusive childhood as a foster child. The resultant break through following Williams repeating the line “it’s not your fault” is one of the best and most emotional scenes I have ever seen in any movie (see video below). Like many actors who make movies, Robin Williams never achieved the heights he achieved in Good Will Hunting ever again and considering how good he was in this one role, that is a shame.

There is a love story in Good Will Hunting involving actress Minnie Driver and It thought that this was a good side story with the ups and downs of this relationship greatly affected by Will Huntings very bad childhood. Its been 19 years since this movie was released and if you have not see it already, you owe it to yourself to see this great movie.

Srinivasa Ramanujan is one of the geniuses in this world that through the bad luck of being poor and living in a poor country like India and dying at a young age, never got the recognition he deserved for being one of the greatest and most brilliant mathematicians of all time. Ramanujan was mentioned in the movie Good Will Hunting and perhaps was the inspiration for that movie, because the main character was also not formerly educated and obtained great mathematical ability through talents that were born through sheer brain power and genius given by his own DNA or perhaps some fluke of nature. This is also true of brilliant giants of the past like Einstein and Issac Newton who were far ahead of other scientists and greatly advanced human knowledge during their time.

The movie The Main Who knew Infinity is about the short life os Srinivasa Ramanujan and his plight to find work in a poor Indian village through the use of his mathematical notebooks which contained hundreds of pages of original ideas that had never before been solved. From these notebooks Ramanujan was invited to Trinity College in Cambridge and collaborated for years with professor G.H Hardy , portrayed very well by Jeremy Irons . Another professor who also helped mentor Ramanujan was John Littlewood who was almost as brilliant as Ramanujam. This story also includes a love story with Ramanujan and his girlfriend at home whom he had to leave to travel to England and hopefully being published and once published their plan was to reunite. Numerous letters were exchanged by the couple until Ramanujan got sick with Tuberculosis but his girlfriend was never notified of this until right before he returned to her in India.

There is much talk of God in this movie and Ramanujan believed that God gave him all of these formulas to create but his mentor Professor Hardy did not believe in God and as he put it, “could never believe anything that he could not prove”. Proving the existence of God and “proofing” all of his formulas which were a prerequisite before getting published were a source of great conflict throughout this movie between Ramanujan and professor Hardy. Eventually, Ramanujan got the knack of writing proofs to prove every formula he created but despite this, the barriers he had to overcome because of the egos and prejudice of many of the professors at Cambridge were at times overwhelming.

One of the most interesting part of this movie was the attempt to prove the mathematical partition theory which counted the number of ways that a combination of numbers could be used to add up to another number. This theory was considered impossible for many years until Ramanujan devised a formula that solved this puzzle to .04% accuracy. What is not explained very well, is why solving complex problems like this one was considered so important.

If there is one flaw in this movie it was the constant chain smoking of Professor Hardy and you would think after so many years and so many lung cancer deaths we can find some kind of a middle ground towards not showing smoking at this level in any movie ever again. It seems that we are still a very long way from eliminating smoking in all movies.

This film is a very good one and I do recommend it for its cinematic​ quality and for its ability to teach unknown and important history.

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The Man Who Knew Infinity – IMDB

Ramanujan’s Notebooks

Money Monster is a great idea for a movie. Obviously, the entire idea for the screenplay came out of watching CNBC and more specifically Jim Cramer who is the star of “Mad Money”. While watching this movie I remember asking myself, could something like this happened in real life, considering the horrible year 2008 which created a “generational low” in the stock market in March 2009. The year 2000 bear market that started in March 2000 and lasted 30 months and the many so called experts that go on CNBC to give their opinions which many times are proven very wrong.

In my opinion, the advice and commentators on CNBC had a great deal to do with accelerating the insane ups and downs of the stock market since 1998 and which in the last two years have included flash crashes, where the stock market drops a thousand points or more in one day. Recently, and several times before this, billionaire Carl Icahn has gone on CNBC to make comments about stocks either positive or negative that everybody knows will have a great affect on the stock market overall as well as the stocks themselves. Recently Icahn announced that he sold all of this APPLE stock and soon after the stock went down many more points and brought the stock market down with it. Clearly, this should be considered an illegal practice because the odds are high that Icahn was either buying shares or shorting them to make money at the expense of other stockholders .

As far as Money Monster, George Clooney plays the Jim Cramer character and I think much of the over the top dancing around before this fictional financial show was a bit much, especially since Cramer himself does not dance around on his show at all. Very soon into the movie Cramer is held at gunpoint by a very angry young man who lost 60K in a stock that Clooney’s character told his audience was “as safe as a savings account”. From this point on, about 15 minutes into the movie, the rest of the film had to do with things we have seen many times before on TV police drama’s, ie. trying to get this hostage situation resolved, which in this case also included a bomb attached to Clooney’s chest. Julia Roberts is also in this movie as the producer of the financial TV show and we learn that she is going to leave the show in a few weeks, due to the problems with Clooney’s character. Jodie Foster directed this movie, which overall was just good but could have been great. The young man who holds Clooney hostage was played well by Jack O’Connell although the foul language and the overuse of the “F” word I thought were overdone. While I do recommend this movie, its a shame that many of the plot points were not believable but the acting was good and the story was compelling enough.

Money Monster – IMDB

Jim Cramer Does not beat the market