Infinity
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Product details
Actor: Dori Brenner, Horton Foote Jr., Melissa DeLizia, Patricia Arquette, Raffi Di BlasioPrimary Contributor: Patricia Arquette
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Running Time: 119 minutes
Release Date: 1998-01-27
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Publisher: Bmg Video Label
Studio: Bmg Video Label
VHS Movie Reviews of Infinity
Movie Review: Your context determines how you will appreciate this film
Summary: 3 Stars
This is a difficult review for me to write. I purchased this film a few years after seeing the film, because I'm trying to compare 3 different media on the same story (author audio which later became text, same text read orally by a professional reader, and the interpretation of the film makers (the Brodericks)).
I count myself incredibly fortunate to have been in the audience for a class to hear to Richard Feynman reminisce about his war time experience at Los Alamos. Whereas our professor, Larry Badash (with 2 other editors) published a bookReminiscences of Los Alamos 1943-1945 (Studies in the History of Modern Science), the reissue of Surely Your Joking in the form of Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character (with New Live CD) can't be over looked. You get to hear Feynman's New York cabbie voice (as others have described it). Buy this book with the CD.
I only recently found the audio version of Surely Your Joking which includes material before Los Alamos which was taken from a Chris Sykes documentary interview (this forms the basis for scenes on inertia and lack of meaning about words (birds) in the film. Sykes's own biography based on getting to know Feynman late in his life pointed out early that some reviewers of old Feynman videos thought Feynman sounded less than a great teacher. In the end, the audio version reread "didn't do it" for me.
These lectures and recordings form the basis for the Infinity film.
Infinity attempts to cover a number of events in Feynman's early life revolving around this romance with his first wife Arline while culminating with both her loss and working on nuclear theory in the Manhattan Project on the first atomic bomb.
The Broderick's interpretation of Feynman's early life just didn't quite "do" that for me. They had a hard time trying to convey Feynman's enthusiasm and excitement and his personal romance. So much context gets left out (like why he has to brief the kids working for him
Yes: perhaps it's me, that I have too much context, but that would go for anyone attempting to understand Feynman including the English critics mentioned by Sykes No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman. He's not for every one. I could have used a guy like him when I was much younger (he can be very inspiring to a certain kind of person).
My suggestion is to go the the real sources: the book with the CD and the books (Sure and What do you Care? authored by Feynman) first. Compare Feynman's own words and voice to the scene going out the Los Alamos gate and in via a hole in the fence three times. The filmed scene isn't quite as effective. Try a library and read his Red books (his physics text book in 3 volumes, much harder).
Movie Review: A love story with history
Summary: 4 Stars
This obscure gem of a film is clearly a labor of love by Matthew Broderick, who directed it and stars as Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman in the story of his first marriage.
Broderick ensures that we get a picture of Feynman's quirky personality, the very embodiment of the Scientific Method and iconoclastic clowning. But, the focus is clearly on his growing love for Aline, their marriage, and their life together.
The film has a little more science than most Americans are comfortable with, but it's not overwhelming, and it serves to illuminate the relationship between Richard and Aline.
Movie Review: Lovely overlooked story
Summary: 4 Stars
The first time I saw Dr. Richard Feynman was when he was demonstrating why the space shuttle "Challenger" blew up with a rubber ring and a glass of ice water. He amazed me then.
I didn't actually think about Dr. Feynman's life until I saw "Infinity" available. Matthew Broderick, who both plays Feynman in the film and directs it. According to Feynman, he thought of the time depicted in this film as a romance, but it was also time where everything changed in the country.
The story begins with Feynman (Broderick) meeting Arlene Greenbaum (Arquette). They fall in love during pre WWII times. They're engaged when they learn that Arlene has TB. Feynman takes his undergrad at MIT and later grad work at Princeton. When he's offered a job at Alamosa, NM to work on the bomb, he accepts so he and Arlene can be wed. The story briefly touches physics and the development of the a-bomb.
What the story really is about is coping with illness during different times. Back then, doctors didn't want patients to know what their diagnoses were. Families didn't want their children to marry if there were severe illnesses involved, either. Aside from his scientific genius, what marked Feynman as extraordinary was that he worked so hard at his marriage and making his wife as happy as she could be.
This quiet, overlooked film takes us back to a different time in this country's life. Broderick did an excellent job of taking us back. It's well worth a watch if you are interested in either quiet romances or films from this period of time.
Rebecca Kyle, September 2008
Movie Review: Where's the FEYNMAN?
Summary: 2 Stars
Glad somebody did it but damn why a love story and a boring one at that which doesn't even show the mans intellect or his very humors nature. Disappointing on so many levelsMovie Review: Good Story
Summary: 4 Stars
As noted elsewhere, this is a love story about Dick and Arlene Feynman. It doesn't have much in it about the famous antics of one of the most human and personable physicists ever. More's the pity. It's a good film, but it leaves room for several future movies that incorporate all the stories that he left us.
Summary of Infinity
Actor Matthew Broderick (WarGames, Ferris Bueller's Day Off) offered up this, his 1996 directorial debut, as a whimsical romance and a tribute to an extraordinary scientist. Broderick plays the brilliant and eccentric Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman in a story based on his early life. The fun-loving Feynman and his young bride Arlene, played by Patricia Arquette (True Romance) enjoy their courtship and young married life in New York until Feynman is called away to New Mexico to participate in the Manhattan Project and the development of the hydrogen bomb. Their storybook romance is further complicated when Arlene discovers she is seriously ill, and Feynman must confront not only the morality of his participation in the development of the bomb but the nature of life and death and the love he has for his wife. A nice, small sweet romance that aims low but scores high, Infinity is a quirky but poignant love story and a fine directorial debut. --Robert LaneBiography Video
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