Good Will Hunting

Great movie!

Will Hunting (played by Matt Damon) is a mathematical genius with a photographic memory. Shunning formal academic recognition, Will is violent and does not have any direction in his life. He gets "discovered" by this professor at the university where he is a janitor.

But being unmanageable, he gets passed on to this psychologist played by Robin Williams. He is made to discover what he wants. Of course, it ends up being: "I've got to go see about a girl" and it's Minnie Driver - his soulmate.

Yummy!

• Starring Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Ben Affleck, Minnie Driver, and Stellan Skarsgård.
• Written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for this film.
• Directed by Gus Van Sant.
• Rated R for strong language, including some sex-related dialogue.

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STANDARD EDITION DVD

Running time: 126 minutes
Released by Miramax Home Entertainment

Technical Features

• Region 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Widescreen letterbox
• Single layer
• Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)

Special Features

• Theatrical trailer
• Miss Misery music video

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COLLECTOR'S EDITION DVD

Running time: 126 minutes
Released by Miramax Home Entertainment

Technical Features

• Region 1
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Widescreen letterbox
• Single layer
• Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1)

Special Features

• Theatrical trailers
• TV trailers
• 11 deleted scenes with audio commentary
• Commentary by director Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck
• Production Featurette
• Academy Award Best Picture Montage
• Miss Misery Music Video
• Behind the Scenes Footage

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I was really hoping the audio on the collector's edition would be improved over the standard edition version, but it's just as poor.  They also didn't go the extra mile and make the film anamorphic widescreen.  So, if you really want to hear the audio commentary or the Academy Award montage, go with the Collector's Edition, otherwise save yourself a bundle of cash and stay with the old edition.

A movie littered with mathematical errors. Some of the most irritating are:

• Gerald Lambeau (played by Stellan Skarsgård) says there is an "advanced Fourier system" on the blackboard, when in fact it is an elementary graph theory problem. At least the answers given were correct.
  
  
• The second problem that supposedly took Lambeau and his colleagues "two years to prove" is, in fact, another straight forward graph theory problem: the number of spanning trees on a complete graph. The answer, n^n-2 was proven by Cayley in 1889. Also, those tree graphs that Will is drawing have no connection to this theorem.
  
  
• Will and Lambeau determine the chromatic polynomial of a graph by simplifying a rational function. This doesn't make any sense. You cannot determine a chromatic polynomial in this manner. The answer they get, however, is correct.