Still Alice...This Will Go Into My Memorable Movie List!

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I think it is better to watch the trailer first!



I try to watch movies without reading the gist, or watching the trailers.  So, the story will be a surprise for me! My mind will be blank to enjoy it fully!

This movie, 'Still Alice' is about a middle aged lady, not a very old lady, Alice, stepping into Alzheimer's disease symptoms slowly.  The movie starts with Alice Howland (Julianne Moore...brilliant acting and got an oscar for this film!) jogging in the morning.  She is slim, tall and runs very fast for her age, 50! Comes home, cooks, cleans, takes care of the family of three children and a husband, goes out to work as a professor at Columbia University (as a linguistic professor to be precise) and she is famous there with her students.  While taking the class, she forgets a word here and there.  She becomes tensed up a bit and checks with a Neurological doctor and gets to know that she is in the early onset of Alzheimer's disease...She comes to know that this disease is genetic and she had got it from her father.  She tries to evade the disease by following some mental exercises.  Her whole family is supportive.

Well, I should not write the whole story.  It is a bit tension filled movie.  But Julianne's acting is so brilliant that we forget about coming out of the movie mode by just switching it off! Her physician husband, John Howland, supports/helps her a lot.  She wants her younger daughter who was in theatre, to finish her degree and be stable in her life.  She wants the daughter to be safe when she won't be there to guide her.  She loses her job because she was not able to be focused.

I liked the speech Julianne gave about the disease at the Alzheimers' conference, when she was half way into it.  You must watch the movie to appreciate it.  Many other memorable scenes/stages are there in the movie.

This movie is  based on Lisa Genova's 2007 best selling novel of the same name and is directed by Richard Glatzer and Wah Westmoreland.

This is from imdb 'trivia' section:
Co-director Richard Glatzer, suffers from ALS and can't speak. He directed the film using a text to speech app on an iPad. Both Moore and Stewart dedicated their "Ice Bucket Challenge" to Glatzer. The team couldn't attend the Oscar function where Julianne received her Best Actress award for this movie, because Glatzer was seriously ill and died later.

(Physicist Stephen Hawking suffered from this ailment and I did a post on his movie here!)

This movie and Julianne got many more awards and the list is in wiki. She is beautiful!!

Long back I read a book by Arthur Hailey, 'The final diagnosis' which was about the lives of intern students in a medical hospital.  Every night, after their classes, the students compare the symptoms of the diseases they studied in the class, on their bodies! That was a very good book.  Like that, I was checking myself at some stages in the movie! As you know, I am 'maradhimanni' i.e. Forgetful queen! I forget nearly on an average, 10 times a day, about words, things, incidents etc.  I think after I started writing here, the symptoms are coming down slowly, still, it is there!  I was a bit nervous, watching the movie! Then, I told myself, when I can do mixture (a bit tough!) and so many sweets at home for festivals, I don't think I will step into Alzheimer's that easily!!!  

I liked the ending in the movie!

Watched this in Tata Sky's Le plex channel! Very good movies are being screened there!

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