FromShelf

Magazines have a very interesting way of attracting our attention to the ‘headlines’ on the cover page. With loads of photos, interesting information given in short words and research information from across the world, it does a fantastic job of keeping the readers glued to it every month.

The book ‘Emotional Intelligence’ by Daniel Goleman, is interesting for the same reasons. Most of the chapters in the book begin with a ‘true story’ sort of anecdotes. We get glued, period. And hen there are loads of researches discussed in the book.

When any psychological technique is supported by a sentence like “ The research was carried out with 10,000 college students……….”, we immediately sort of trust that technique. And that is what the book is all about. It gives you the information about lots of different researches carried out by learned people and then talks about what we can learn from those researches. Simple aspects like hope, anger and positive attitude are discussed with the aid of researches. This makes the book very interesting to read and gives it a magazine like feel.

For simple insights regarding your behavior and behavior of people around you, this book is a good tool.

This movie disturbs you to the guts. The movie has brilliantly captured the helplessness, hallucinations, depression and the frustrations of the addicts. The best part of the movie is the portrayal of Sara Goldfarb. Sara is a lonely housewife who is an addict of the TV show and is obsessed with her dream of getting on the show. Later on, in an attempt to reduce weight she becomes addict to the pills. Eventually, she loses her sanity and ends up getting hospitalized.  

This is what makes the movie so disturbing. It is not just about the addiction of the pills but also about the addiction to the artificial lifestyle we are getting used to. Most of us watch TV, play video games, are glued to our comps and try to find pleasure in the virtual world. It seems we are losing our life here. The scene where Harry comes to meet his mother and finds out that she has become an addict to pills is quite devastating. That scene haunts you for days to come. Harry desperately feels a need to talk to his mom and help her out and Sara is desperately in need of a human being who will listen to her agonies. But because of lack of communication, they are not able to express their love and pain to each other. This is a scene where you desperately feel that they talk to each other, because deep down in your heart, you know (and you know it from your own life) that saying ‘I love you’, is the only solution for most of the pain and problems in life.  

I understand that this movie is about drugs and addiction. But more than that, this movie is also about relationships. Our world is becoming defined by machines. The obsession of chatting, checking e-mails every 5 minutes, creating a different world on the net and finding confidence in the faceless identity in the web world is as serious a problem as drug addiction. The unreal virtual world is killing our living world.  

This movie makes you to think about your life. More than your addictions it is about relationships. You get identified with the characters so much that you feel their helplessness. 

 If your idea of watching a movie is fun then do not watch this movie. However, if you want to see how a sane person can go insane and gets in the vicious cycle of habits, then this movie is for you.  

Good Will Hunting is one of those movies that make your life beautiful…where you feel blessed to know that simple characters can touch you deep and stay  with  you for a long time. You feel like watching them again and again and again.

I saw Matt Damon’s interview in ITAS. In that interview, when talking about “Good Will Hunting”, he said that he wrote some three hundred pages to come up with this script. Being in writing myself, I know how tough it is to come up with those numbers of pages, and especially when you are creating a story.

Damon and Ben Affleck wrote the screenplay and the movie is directed by Gustav Van Sant.  Movie won two Oscars, and both were extremely well deserved; Matt and Ben for screenplay writing and Robin Williams for supporting role. The nomination for the best movie was lost to Titanic.

It is awesome when you have movies that have just 4-5 characters, no guns, no revenge, no special effects, no action, just simple life; simple life with simple characters and simple problems.

Matt Damon plays Will who is lonely, orphan and lost. But he is not just that …he also is a mathematics genius. He works as a cleaner at the university and solves the math problems written on the board for the students to solve. Professor Lambeau discovers this and gets in touch with him. Meanwhile, Will gets into a fight and gets imprisoned. Professor takes the permission of the judge to get him out on probation on a condition of getting Will into counseling and improve his behavior. Will agrees with that but the attempt to get him to talk to the counselors fail. There remains only one option with Lambeau and that is to get a help from an old classmate Sean, who is a professor of psychology at the college.

Sean, played by Robin Williams, is one who believes in trust and patience rather than hurrying someone into a change. He takes the responsibility of helping Will out of his troubled life. This leads to a relationship with its ups and downs and a new life for Will.

Robin is a man with no hassles. Authentic and genuine to the core with no alternate intentions, he encourages Will to identify with the self rather than identifying himself with his genius mind. Will slowly starts opening and his emotionally muddled life gets an outlet. He gets into a relationship with a girl (played by Minnie driver) and this time rather than destroying it, he decides to save it. That’s how the movie ends. Or should I say a beautiful movie ends.

Every scene in Good Will Hunting has a special touch.  Scenes of finds hanging together, Lambeau’s restless attempts to get Will on a right track and the counseling sessions with Sean; all the scenes are shot with great care and simplicity. And that is the best thing about a movie, its simplicity. A scene where Sean and Will are sitting at the lake and Sean kind of bares the real Will, is worth watching. For the first time in his life Will listens without having any word to say. The truth hits him so hard that he simply remains silent. And watch a controlled and effortless way Robin has acted there. Simply awesome.

There are some movies that remain with you for weeks. And there are others, that do not have a time span. They just become part of you. Good Will Hunting is one of those movies.