Best movie ever!

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Most of the movie is incredibly slow moving, as we follow Ben and his brother from elementary school through high school, in "dreadful" Detroit. It feels compelled to show his terrible temper. Half way into the movie, after courting his wife, he is accepted to John Hopkins Hospital as a intern and specializes in head trauma and brain surgery. He pioneered the revival of hemispherical surgery in profound cases of epileptic seizures, where the malfunctioning half of the brain is removed. In 1987, the famous German Binder twins (renamed here as the "Rousch Twins") were separated. Both had separate brains though conjoined skulls. They never thrived and remained far from normal (one vegetative) and both ended up institutionalized. In the movie the operation is a full success. Is it entertaining? Cuba Gooding Jr. does a fair portrayal as Ben Carson in a very uneven film. Quite graphic at times. I did not enjoy it.

This movie is about a young boy who lived with his single mother and his older brother. The movie begins in 1987, where Dr. Ben Carson goes to Germany to visit a couple who have conjoined twins. They are joined at the head and he is asked to separate the twins with out one of them dying. The movie then goes back to his childhood and shows the struggles he had as a child with his temper and having an uneducated mother. His mother spent time in a mental institution. Dr. Carson was willing to taking risk and at one point removed half of a patient's brain to stop them from having seizures.I would recommend this movie to people to see how to over some disadvantages and how having a mother who believes in you can help you go far in life.

Cuba Gooding plays Dr Ben Carson.It starts off with young Ben a black child living with his mother and brother Curtis. Ben is not doing well in school and is being made fun of.His mother keeps telling him he has to study and watch less TV. She has a strong faith in God will not accept excuses. She is hardworking and encourages the kids to read and use their brain.Ben's mother asks him to read some of the things in the cabinet where boxes are. He says he cannot see that far away. She discovers he is having trouble reading because he cannot see and probably needs glasses.She explains to him some excuse about her not see without her glasses but she never told her kids she cannot read. This and other things cause her to get depressed and she seeks help.This story shows the hardship of a black single mom raising two boys. It shows the Ben being made fun of and at times put down because he is smart and also because he black.Ben has little faith in himself but the constant reassurance from his mom helps him succeed as a prominent a brain surgeon.You may cry at times. Ben and his mother and the cast are real good actors. I think this is a wonderful movie. You can see it on YouTube it is in English but there are subtitles.Gifted Hands http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFvRWiFV4N0

This is the story of Dr. Ben Carson. A black man raised by a single mother in difficult circumstances, Carson went on to be a world renowned neurosurgeon and the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. There are so many obstacles that Carson had to overcome, not the least of which was racial discrimination, that there is just too much to cover in one ninety minute movie. We rush through Carson's being labeled as the dumbest kid in the class, to his sudden rise as one of the smartest, then on to Yale, marriage, his internship, and his ultimate successes as a neurosurgeon. There is enough material in any one of those phases in his life for a full length feature. How Carson got from being the at the bottom of his class to brilliant would have been most interesting, but we are asked simply to accept that it happened because his mother limited his TV viewing and asked him to read books. We are given no detail on how Carson developed his appreciation of classical music at a young age. There is minimal background on his wife, except for a brief scene hinting that she is a musician. How Carson met his future wife and how that relationship evolved would have been interesting. His mother's depression is treated in a most cursory manner: she is not depressed, she is depressed, she has a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital, she is not depressed. We get almost no information about Carson's experiences in medical school. For most of this movie we could have gotten as much by simply having read a brief biography.Gooding is fine as Dr. Carson, as is Kimberly Elise as his mother. The kids who play Carson as a youth are not so good--they come across as reading from a script. The filming is less than inventive. In one scene Carson says he feels like a faucet that has run dry and the image of a slowly dripping faucet is shown.A lot of the scenes don't ring true and I was left wondering if anything even remotely close to them ever occurred in real life. The attempted stabbing seemed particularly hard to believe. When Carson was given a scholastic award in junior high, a teacher kept him on stage after the award while she berated the white kids in the class for not performing as well as a fatherless black kid, saying that they should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know, but that seemed over the top in a Michigan public school, even for the early 1960s. Carson's mother got a job as the maid for a professor who had thousands of books in his library and he winds up trying to teach her to read? Not likely. And so on.The swelling music frequently alerts us as to when we should be inspired.The message of "you can be anything you want to be" is a theme. But, not everyone can be a neurosurgeon. For example, Carson was endowed with a strong sense of three dimensional perception as well as having the required highly developed hand-eye coordination. And he has the stamina and mental disposition to handle the rigors of the job. In some ways these inspiring movies can backfire, since achievement at the level of a Dr. Carson is reserved for only a few and comparing oneself with someone like him can be discouraging.The final surgery scene, where Carson separates the Rausch twins who were born joined at the head, is exceedingly realistic. There is only a limited time that Carson has to perform this operation and the scene is played like one of those "you have an hour to save the world" dramas, complete with a clock counting down the minutes. And we know the operation will be successful, otherwise why would so much screen time be devoted to it?The story of Dr. Carson and his extraordinary achievements deserves a more complete and compelling telling than what is given in this movie. A similar story, that of Vivien Thomas, a black man who rose from being a janitor to being a surgeon (also at Johns Hopkins coincidentally), is told in the much more engrossing, "Something the Lord Made."