Movie Monday 6/15

We had a really hectic, busy week so not a lot of time for movies. My mom and her husband came to visit this weekend, and I gave her a set of DVDs containing all of our home movies from when I was a kid (I had them converted from the old 8 mm films recently). So, we had a lot of fun watching old home movies on Friday night! I never get tired of them and love seeing so many family members who are now gone.

My husband and I did watch one movie last week on Thursday evening, The Theory of Everything, the biographical movie about Stephen Hawking's early life. Hawking is the famed physicist with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) who wrote A Brief History of Time. Actor Eddie Redmayne did an amazing job of capturing Hawking in each stage of his illness. As the movie opens, Hawking is a carefree graduate student with a great sense of humor at Cambridge, impressing his professors and fellow students with his intelligence and insights. He meets and falls in love with Jane, an Arts major, but before their relationship can progress very far, Stephen's clumsiness becomes more serious, and he is diagnosed with ALS, a damaging and progressive disease, and given two years to live. Jane loves him, though, and they get married in spite of his prognosis. He continues to work (and amaze the experts in his field with his breakthrough theories), and he and Jane have a baby. As Stephen's illness progresses, Jane has to become his nurse as well as his wife. The movie follows him and their relationship through several decades (it's no spoiler to say that he beat his dire prognosis, since he is still alive today, 50 years later!). We both enjoyed this fascinating look into Hawking's inner life. What he has accomplished in spite of his severe and ever-worsening disability is absolutely incredible and very inspiring.

Have you seen any good movies lately?