This movie is mostly about one thing: loneliness​ and adjusting after a spouse dies. I can’t​ remember ever seeing any movie that is entirely about this one issue, but this one handles this subject every well.

“The Medler” approaches the inevitable life of grief and death expertly, suggesting that the main character, played very well by Susan Sarandon​, is trying to distract herself from fully realizing her grief after her husband dies by constantly calling their only daughter, played very well by Rose Byrne, meddling into her business and driving her crazy. It’s quite believable​ that a person would do something like this, I​ definitely would, because sitting alone in a house and thinking about your grief would be an unbearable alternative​. Trying to distract yourself with other people and activities is certainly a healthy thing to do but can also make the people’s lives around you quite miserable​.

Once Sarandon’s​ daughter leaves to New York to shoot a TV pilot she replaces her daughter by helping her friend’s gay friend’s wedding, which also includes paying for it and handling all the details. Sarandon’s character it seems has a great deal of money after her husband has died and her therapist suggests that perhaps she is giving so much of it away because of her guilt of inheriting the money in the first place. In my opinion, her money was just another way of distracting herself from facing her grief. On an airplane, on the way home after visiting her daughter, Sarandon’s character had a moment of realization​ and grief that it seemed she was trying to avoid for the whole story. The acting at this point in the movie was both subtle and very well done.

There is a possible future love story that develops for Sarandon’s character towards the end of the movie and her boyfriend is played very well by
J.K Simmons who is in many more movies lately after his groundbreaking performance in the movie Whiplash where he won a best supporting actor Oscar in 2014. The list of Simmon’s recent credits is amazing as he is trying to cash in on his Oscar before it all dries up. I have no idea how one actor can be in so many movies over such a short period of time.

This movie is a good one and the subject matter is very relatable. All of the acting performances are very good. I do recommend this movie.

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