To this day, Good Will Hunting remains one of my all time favorite movies. I enjoyed the tenth viewing as much as the first. Even my parents, who don't care for most movies, considered this to be a top-notch movie.

The story is pretty unbelievable, that a person with extreme mathematical abilities, would be a janitor and would not be trying to use abilities to earn himself a good living, and be a troublemaker, seems quite far-fetched to me. Still, Will's personality and character are so interesting that it is hard to lose interest in the story during the movie. I think I tend to identify with Will simply because I was always an A-student and loved math, although I couldn't identify with his other quirks (troublemaker, orphan, etc.).

The problems on the chalkboard were obviously conjered up by someone with the goal of going over the heads of the average person. The movie was quite special to me because during February 1998, when the movie came out (and when I first saw it), I was taking MA540, which is a graduate-level Conbinatorics class. That's exactly the kind of math that Will was into. By the time I got the first copy of the movie available that I could play at home (the Laserdisc!), I froze the picture and took a good look at the problems on the chalkboard. By this time, I was taking MA740 (Combinatorial Algorithms) and had taken MA640 (Graph Theory) and found it hilarious that the problems on the chalkboard that Will solved (the first set) were problems that our class was taught to solve on the first day of class in MA740! One problem involved finding the adjacency matrix for a graph and basically involved squaring and/or cubing it, something that some high school students should be able to do. One problem involved finding a generating function, which I'd learned in MA540. The second set of problems put on the board involved finding all the trees with a certain property, which we'd done in MA640. For some reason, this made the movie that much more special to me.

I felt that the acting was terrific. Matt Damon, Minnie Driver, Robin Williams, and Stellan Skarsgard did exceptional jobs playing their parts.

I know it's been a long time since this movie has been out, but I felt it deserves a thread, since there is a very warm place in my heart for this movie. I'd like to hear comments from others about this movie (opinions of it, etc.). I enjoyed this movie more than I did "Titanic", which is the movie that kept it from getting more awards than it deserved.

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Evans A Criswell
Huntsville-Decatur Movie Theatre Information Site

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Another film that was filled with inadvertent in-jokes was Jurassic Park. Classics lines included the ones about chaos theory and the famous Lex line, "Hey, I know this -- it's UNIX!" (paraphrase).