
A young Hollywood writer/director uses humor and unfailing optimism to fight ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and make his first film.

A young Hollywood writer/director uses humor and unfailing optimism to fight ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and make his first film.
2007-02-03
6
The making of Bickford Shmeckler's Cool Ideas
7.4When an accomplished pianist is diagnosed with the devastating and incurable disease ALS, she hires a directionless young woman who becomes her full-time caregiver. Complete opposites, the strangers form a life-changing bond inspiring each other to live life to fullest, while being brought together by the most challenging of circumstances.
7.8A short kid from a Canadian army base becomes the international pop culture darling of the 1980s—only to find the course of his life altered by a stunning diagnosis. What happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease?
7.4The story of the life and career of the baseball hall of famer, Lou Gehrig.
7.2For over 40 years Val Kilmer, one of Hollywood’s most mercurial and/or misunderstood actors has been documenting his own life and craft through film and video. He has amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers, to time spent in iconic roles for blockbuster movies like Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone, and Batman Forever. This raw, wildly original and unflinching documentary reveals a life lived to extremes and a heart-filled, sometimes hilarious look at what it means to be an artist and a complex man.
6.5A US soldier suffers a traumatic brain injury while fighting in Afghanistan and struggles to adjust to life back home in New Orleans. When she meets local mechanic James, the pair begin to forge an unexpected bond.
6.7Alex, an assassin-for-hire, finds that he's become a target after he refuses to complete a job for a dangerous criminal organization. With the crime syndicate and FBI in hot pursuit, Alex has the skills to stay ahead, except for one thing: he is struggling with severe memory loss, affecting his every move. Alex must question his every action and whom he can ultimately trust.
7.8The Theory of Everything is the extraordinary story of one of the world’s greatest living minds, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who falls deeply in love with fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde.
7.9A funny, intimate and heartbreaking portrait of one of the world’s most beloved and inventive comedians, Robin Williams, told largely through his own words. Celebrates what he brought to comedy and to the culture at large, from the wild days of late-1970s L.A. to his death in 2014.
6.4When top hitman Joe Flood is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he decides to take matters into his own hands – by taking a hit out on himself. But when the very hitmen he hired also target his ex-girlfriend, he must fend off an army of assassin colleagues and win back the love of his life before it's too late.
6.7While caring for her brother along with her audacious mother, a teenager strikes up an unlikely friendship with an eccentric activist who is protesting one of the most landmark medical cases of all time.
6.6When teenage geniuses Mitch Taylor and Chris Knight, working on an advanced laser project, learn that the military wants to use it as a weapon, they decide to thwart the plan.
7.4At three years old, a chatty, energetic little boy named Owen Suskind ceased to speak, disappearing into autism with apparently no way out. Almost four years passed and the only stimuli that engaged Owen were Disney films. Then one day, his father donned a puppet—Iago, the wisecracking parrot from Aladdin—and asked “what’s it like to be you?” And poof! Owen replied, with dialogue from the movie. Life, Animated tells the remarkable story of how Owen found in Disney animation a pathway to language and a framework for making sense of the world.
7.5Greg is coasting through senior year of high school as anonymously as possible, avoiding social interactions like the plague while secretly making spirited, bizarre films with Earl, his only friend. But both his anonymity and friendship threaten to unravel when his mother forces him to befriend a classmate with leukemia.
7.5Offbeat documentarian Chris Smith provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Jim Carrey adopted the persona of idiosyncratic comedian Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon.
6.6High school student Lane Meyer sinks into suicidal depression when his girlfriend dumps him for jock Roy Stalin, the high school ski racing champion. Meanwhile, he has to deal with his eccentric family, a tenacious paperboy and an obnoxious neighbor whose mother is hosting a beautiful French exchange student named Monique.
7.2This shows physicist Stephen Hawking's life as he deals with the ALS that renders him immobile and unable to speak without the use of a computer. Hawking's friends, family, classmates, and peers are interviewed not only about his theories but the man himself.
6.7An aspiring young filmmaker gets involved with an eccentric gangster for the financing of his first film.
6.6Dylan is done with relationships. Jamie decides to stop buying into the Hollywood clichés of true love. When the two become friends they decide to try something new and take advantage of their mutual attraction - but without any emotional attachment.
6.5A comedy that follows two high school students -- one overachiever struggling to write his valedictorian speech, the other a senior now going on his 15th year of school.
7.2Filmmakers discuss the legacy of Alfred Hitchcock and the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” (“Le cinéma selon Hitchcock”), written by François Truffaut and published in 1966.