There’s a new Affleck trailer up, and while it’s not as exciting as the one for The Town, it’s certainly compelling. First of all, the cast for The Company Men includes Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Craig T. “Coach” Nelson, Rosemarie DeWitt (from Mad Men and Rachel Getting Married), Kevin Costner, Maria Bello, and Kingston’s own Chris Cooper. Hot damn!

This trailer has many highlights. Chief among them is this fact: the movie includes a scene in which Affleck, recently fired from a big corporation job, brings coffee for his colleagues on a construction site. Allow me to repeat that: In this movie, Ben Affleck’s character works on a construction site, and furthermore, in this movie, Ben Affleck brings coffee for others. Oh. My. God.

1997

2010

Another notable similarity to our Favorite Movie Of All Time: This movie has one egregiously terrible Boston accent. One might even go so far that, judging from the way he says “cahptenter” as if Katharine Hepburn on This Old House, Kevin Costner is the new Robin Williams. Congratulations, Costner; it looks like you’ve really out-Costnered yourself this time.

A one square mile neighborhood called… Charlestown!!

I incidentally did a quick Google search of Charlestown and “bank robberies” and came up with this article about a series of robberies in Charleston, Summerville, and Dorchester. Apparently there’s a parallel universe of Boston neighborhoods in South Carolina, slightly misspelled. I wonder if they each have a Boylston Street?

Read all about the filming of The Town in Harvard Square, right here in a Blog Will Hunting post from last winter.

The therapy scene from the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly comedy Step Brothers; it sounds a lot like Good Will Hunting.

NBC’s Community riffed on Good Will Hunting this week.

GET IT??  Bananas!

If you haven’t seen The Super Secret Project‘s “Granite State of Mind” New Hampshire tribute (and Jay-Z send-up), go do that, quick, because it’s amazing. Then check out their recreation of the Perfect Strangers opening, Boston-style…. (They also did the Good Will Hunting Louder “remake” we posted a while back.)

Next up, maybe they can do Step by Step, but on the Green Line instead of a roller coaster?  Terrifying!

The following scenes make some interesting choices interpreting a moment between Will and Skylar.  These performances confirm that it may be impossible to deliver the line “on behalf of my wiener” with any actorly dignity.  I’m not sure how Damon did it.

A couple of things to note:

1) The award is presented by the original odd couple. (I’m gonna have to say Matt Damon is the Felix to Affleck’s Oscar. Ben Affleck — so rough around the edges!!)

2) They’re with their moms!

3) Ben Affleck’s voice cracks like that of a thirteen-year-old.

4) Their competition for the award included Woody Allen, P.T. Anderson, and James L. Brooks.

5) It really reminds me of the end of the Sports Night episode “The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee” in which Casey and Dan very enthusiastically thank all of the show’s crew members.

I suppose it should be no surprise that while home for the holidays last fall, in going through folders of old papers, I came across a receipt for a notable purchase from February 23, 1998.  It was from my local record store on College Avenue, and on that day I purchased the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.

I can pretty honestly say this would become one of the most significant music purchases I’d ever make.  I didn’t really listen to music until late in high school… or maybe I did, but it was just the Aladdin soundtrack over and over again.  In tenth grade, though, I discovered my dad’s Beatles collection.  I went from there, largely basing my new tastes on that of my peers: Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, Billy Joel (River of Dreams, man).  I can tell you I was definitely not someone who “listened to Dave Matthews before everyone listened to Dave Matthews.”

I can also tell you that on that February day I did not go into Manifest Records to buy the Good Will Hunting soundtrack.  More likely, I was going primarily to get my very own copy of Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20.  Also predetermined, I picked out the Counting Crows’ August and Everything After.  Somewhat less so, I snagged the soundtrack for the movie Swingers.

Near the cashier was a display of what were probably new(ish) releases.  It speaks to how hurting I was for music suggestions that I picked up the CD soundtrack to a movie I had seen, and loved, but had only vaguely recalled the music. “I think I remember liking it,” I said to myself.

While Matchbox 20 lit up my CD player, Good Will Hunting was more of a slow burn.  When I gave it a first listen I found it nice and mellow — but it kind of “all sounds the same,” I thought.  Matchbox 20, on the other hand… each song blazed like a smash-hit single.  (In fact, five of the twelve songs were released as singles.)  Good Will Hunting, at least, made good background music.

But it stayed with me.

I don’t really associate it with those early months of 1998, but in following years it became a staple.  I fondly remember Good Will Hunting keeping me company on late evenings in my dimly-lit college dorm room.  If it was raining outside, it was twice as wonderful.

If not for that impulse buy, who knows how long it would have taken for me to find Elliott Smith?  And I felt like I really discovered him, rather than co-opting his catalog along with whatever else my knowledgeable peers recommended.

Elliott Smith has never been far from my ears this past decade, while Rob Thomas and Company burned out and then they faded away.

Nevertheless, I look back twelve years later and wonder: what if Good Will Hunting‘s soundtrack was populated by the songs of Matchbox 20, rather than those of Elliott Smith?

Last night I put together a little video.  I think it would have looked and sounded a lot like this…

I once watched Good Will Hunting with a math student, and she scoffed at the so-called impossibility of the problems on the hallway blackboard.

Her skepticism is validated by Professor Robin Wilson of Gresham College:

That’s right, homeomorphically irreducible trees of degree ten have nothing to do with function analysis.  And this particular problem isn’t that hard.

However, when the film was released, some were simply impressed that they actually used real math.

On NPR’s Weekend Edition back on April 4, 1998, host Scott Simon spoke with mathematician Keith Devlin about the plausibility of the math in the film.  Devlin’s opinion is that “they got the math right,” and describes the blackboard problem:

What they did that was very smart was… they had to make sure that it was a problem that someone like Will Hunting, who was innately a genius but had no mathematical training, someone like him had to have been able to solve the problem… and graph theory is one of the few areas of mathematics where that can happen. Someone could literally come out of the streets — or come along the corridor at night with a mop and a bucket, which is what the Will Hunting character does — and if they’ve got the ability, they don’t need the training, and they can just solve it. They have just got to be smart.

The Weekend Edition clip is definitely worth a listen in its entirety; they go on to discuss the real life story of self-taught mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, part of the inspiration for the Will Hunting character, as well as what the filmmakers get not-so-right.

"It looks right," says Tom.

Tired of hearing about the iPad?  Everyone loves it!  Everyone has a complaint about it!

Among the over-hyped complaints about the revolutionary new Apple device is that certain accents and regional pronunciations make the terms “iPod” and “iPad” indistinguishable.

Cult of Mac blogger John Brownlee writes:

I wanted to point out quickly why I think this is such a terrible product name. I’m from Boston originally. We have an interesting way of pronouncing our a’s.

Call up a friend with a Boston accent and ask them to say “iPad.” They might just pronounce it pretty similarly to “iPod.” We’re weird that way. Or as Jake von Slatt just said to me: “Here in Boston, we’d say ‘Do you haave the big iPohd or the little iPohd?’”

Even if the pronunciation is different for everyone, though, iPad still seems a bad choice. A one letter difference makes for a lot of possible confusion.

The following send-up of the product uses good ole Good Will Hunting to elucidate this point. (And at last, someone jokes about the iPad and steers clear of feminine hygiene.)

Enjoy.

And, I suppose, one could regard it as something like a sequel. It’s as if Morgan accompanied Will on his cross-country road trip and we find them somewhere in the southwest. And they’ve lost their accents. And Will got a haircut. And they don’t talk much. And–OK, in spite of the superficial similarities, I guess there’s not actually much of a connection between the two movies, despite how badly I was hoping to find one.

The beginning of the film, however, does almost seem like an oblique, teasing reference to the final scene in Good Will Hunting where we watch Will’s car disappear down the highway while Afternoon Delight plays and the credits roll. Gerry opens in much the same way—a car traveling down a road, through a dry desert-scape.

It’s like we’ve picked up right where we left off! It’s Good Will Hunting, but without the Afternoon Delight!

Alas, nearly immediately it became obvious that these were not Will and Morgan that we were dealing with. Gerry aspires to be a serious, high-art film: lots of long, unbroken takes; awkwardly long close-ups; long stretches where the only soundtrack is the sound of Damon and Affleck’s feet crunching against the gravelly desert ground for whole minutes at a time; grandiose, sweeping shots of the (admittedly stunning) scenery; and a deliberate vagueness as to who exactly our characters are and what they are doing.

It starts out with a long drive, as mentioned, and then our two heroes—both named Gerry—set out on a wilderness trail. They are headed for “the thing,” but after about 45 seconds they decide to “fuck the thing” and turn back. Unfortunately, within moments they manage to become spectacularly lost amidst an ever-changing backdrop of mountains, ravines, and desert scrub. No spoilers here, but you can probably imagine how this will end.

As for the script, I imagine it’s probably about 3 pages long—there isn’t much dialogue, and I got the impression that most of it was improvised.

Certainly, this is no Good Will Hunting, but it isn’t bad. I guess you could say my taste in film veers more towards the popular than the high-art, but in the end I still appreciated this film and its intentions. It’s earnest and thoughtful and interesting, and visually very beautiful.

And I bet Will Hunting would have loved it.

Watch John Doherty, a construction worker in Braintree, MA, read a selection from his favorite poem "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman.  It's cool to see the perspective and inspiration he gets from Whitman — from under his "boot soles" — just as Will finds soul mates in "Shakespeare, Neitzche, Frost, O'Connor, Chaucer, Pope, Kant."

This is part of the Favorite Poem Project.

According to Wikipedia (famous last words, I know — the source of this information has not been cited but Williams Goldman corroborated the details in a WGA seminar in 2003), Matt and Ben’s original story for Good Will Hunting was that of an FBI thriller.  If this is true, it likely stokes the flames of rumors that Matt and Ben weren’t the “real” screenwriters.  (But really, isn’t this sort of questioning of authorship innate in all collaborative, commercial works?)

Affleck and Damon originally wrote the screenplay as a thriller: Young man in the rough-and-tumble streets of South Boston, who possesses a superior intelligence, is targeted by the FBI to become a G-Man. Castle Rock Entertainment president Rob Reiner later urged them to drop the thriller aspect of the story and to focus the relationship between Will Hunting (Damon) and his psychologist (Williams). At Reiner’s request, noted screenwriter William Goldman read the script and further suggested that the film’s climax ought to be Will’s decision to follow his girlfriend Skylar (Driver) to California. Goldman has denied widely spread rumors that he wrote Good Will Hunting or acted as a script doctor.^[1]

Everyone loves a good Brokeback to the Future-esque mashup, so here’s one for Good Will Hunted — a peek into what Good Will Hunting perhaps could have been.

It’s been interesting to see how much attention the guy with the ponytail in the Harvard bar scene is getting these days — he’s a spokesman for a gold reseller, and seemingly everybody cares. Every day on Twitter someone mentions his ads for Goldline (and describes him as the dude from the Good Will Hunting specifically).  This blog has been getting a decent amount of traffic for people searching for “good will hunting guy goldline ads” and similar searches.

Also, Winters (ponytail guy) is hardly just an actor in a role for Goldline; he has described himself as a “long-time client.”  It’s not hard to conflate his Harvard Ponytail Guy persona with his identity as a public figure — in short, a pompous, wealthy conservative.

Stephen Colbert recently did a spot-on send-up of the recent right-wing paranoid rush to stock up on gold.  I was criticized for poking fun at Winters and his gold commercials.  It’s nice to have Colbert and John Slattery chiming in.

You should probably watch this episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — “The Gang Reignites the Rivalry” — particularly for its choice Good Will Hunting references. Charlie “pulls a Good Will Hunting” on some guys at a frat party they are crashing.  At this frat party they have had their bodies painted by hot girls.

Listen to part of what you can look forward to.

Hier hat meine Klasse die Bar Scene aus dem Film Good Will Hunting von 1997 nachgespielt