BLADE RUNNER - Commentary by Ridley Scott

 

Fascinating director's commentary by Ridley Scott. Video cued to start at a point where Scott talks about the conceptual background for the film. The subsequent ~15m are really great, including dreams of unicorns, memories of green, origami, Deckard as replicant.

He also mentions that he envisioned Alien and Blade Runner taking place in the same universe.

... a special feature on the Prometheus Blu-ray release makes the film even more interesting by tying it into the Blade Runner universe. Included as an entry in the journal of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), who in the film was obsessed with creating artificial life, is the following gem: 

A mentor and long-departed competitor once told me that it was time to put away childish things and abandon my “toys.” He encouraged me to come work for him and together we would take over the world and become the new Gods. That’s how he ran his corporation, like a God on top of a pyramid overlooking a city of angels. Of course, he chose to replicate the power of creation in an unoriginal way, by simply copying God. And look how that turned out for the poor bastard. Literally blew up in the old man’s face. I always suggested he stick with simple robotics instead of those genetic abominations he enslaved and sold off-world, although his idea to implant them with false memories was, well… “amusing,” is how I would put it politely.

Bonus: at 1h18m in the video, Tyrell cryogenically preserved at the heart of his great pyramid!

The Night Porter (1974)

I first watched The Night Porter while in graduate school, and came across it again last weekend as a byproduct of ordering HBOMax to see the new Dune movie. There are quite a few film classics buried below the top level HBOMax recommendation engine -- you just have to search a bit. See also here on Kanopy. 

Opinions of the film vary widely. In my view it's a masterpiece: the performances by Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde are incredible, although I must say that I find the film very difficult to watch. 

Rampling portrays the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in the new Dune -- see director Denis Villeneuve's analysis of her Gom Jabbar scene.  

I've always wondered about the origins of The Night Porter and how it got made. The material is sensationalistic, even borders on exploitation, but the treatment has psychological and cinematic depth. 

This video contains remarkable interviews with the director Liliana Cavani, writer Italo Moscati, and Rampling. Short clips are interspersed with the interviews so you can get a sense of the film if you've never seen it. Unfortunately, these clips caused the video to be age restricted on YouTube so you have to click through and log in to your Google user account to view it.

Bogarde is not interviewed in the video, but his Wikipedia bio notes that

Bogarde was one of the first Allied officers in April 1945 to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, an experience that had the most profound effect on him and about which he found it difficult to speak for many years afterward.[6] [ Video of the interview below.]

"I think it was on the 13th of April—I'm not quite sure what the date was" ... "when we opened up Belsen Camp, which was the first concentration camp any of us had seen, we didn't even know what they were, we'd heard vague rumours that they were. I mean nothing could be worse than that. The gates were opened and then I realised that I was looking at Dante's Inferno, I mean ... I ... I still haven't seen anything as dreadful. And never will. And a girl came up who spoke English, because she recognised one of the badges, and she ... her breasts were like, sort of, empty purses, she had no top on, and a pair of man's pyjamas, you know, the prison pyjamas, and no hair. But I knew she was a girl because of her breasts, which were empty. She was I suppose, oh I don't know, twenty four, twenty five, and we talked, and she was, you know, so excited and thrilled, and all around us there were mountains of dead people, I mean mountains of them, and they were slushy, and they were slimy, so when you walked through them ... or walked—you tried not to, but it was like .... well you just walked through them. 

... there was a very nice British MP [Royal Military Police], and he said 'Don't have any more, come away, come away sir, if you don't mind, because they've all got typhoid and you'll get it, you shouldn't be here swanning-around' and she saw in the back of the jeep, the unexpired portion of the daily ration, wrapped in a piece of the Daily Mirror, and she said could she have it, and he" [the Military Police] "said 'Don't give her food, because they eat it immediately and they die, within ten minutes', but she didn't want the food, she wanted the piece of Daily Mirror—she hadn't seen newsprint for about eight years or five years, whatever it was she had been in the camp for. ... she was Estonian. ... that's all she wanted. She gave me a big kiss, which was very moving. The corporal" [Military Police] "was out of his mind and I was just dragged off. I never saw her again, of course she died. I mean, I gather they all did. But, I can't really describe it very well, I don't really want to. I went through some of the huts and there were tiers and tiers of rotting people, but some of them who were alive underneath the rot, and were lifting their heads and trying .... trying to do the victory thing. That was the worst."[4]

In her interview Rampling notes that it was Bogarde who insisted that she be given the role of Lucia.

 

Dune 2021

I have high hopes for this new version of Dune.

 

Below, a re-post with two Frank Herbert interviews. Highly recommended to fans of the novel. 

Frank Herbert interview on the origins of Dune (1969)

The interviewer is Willis E. McNelly, a professor of English (specializing in science fiction). Herbert discusses artistic as well as conceptual decisions made in the writing and background world building for Dune. Highly recommended for any fan of the book.

See also Dune and The Butlerian Jihad and Darwin Among the Machines.

The Bene Gesserit program had as its target the breeding of a person they labeled "Kwisatz Haderach," a term signifying "one who can be many places at once." In simpler terms, what they sought was a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions.

They were breeding for a super-Mentat, a human computer with some of the prescient abilities found in Guild navigators. Now, attend these facts carefully:

Muad'Dib, born Paul Atreides, was the son of the Duke Leto, a man whose bloodline had been watched carefully for more than a thousand years. The Prophet's mother, Lady Jessica, was a natural daughter of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and carried gene-markers whose supreme importance to the breeding program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project.

The Lady Jessica was ordered to produce an Atreides daughter. The plan was to inbreed this daughter with Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, a nephew of the Baron Vladimir, with the high probability of a Kwisatz Haderach from that union. Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son. This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme. But there were other far more important indications that they virtually ignored ...

"Kwisatz Haderach" is similar to the Hebrew "Kefitzat Haderech", which literally means "contracting the path"; Herbert defines Kwisatz Haderach as "the Shortening of the Way" (Dune: Appendix IV).

Another good recording of Herbert, but much later in his life.

Human Nature (film) at SXSW

I'll be at SXSW for the premiere of this documentary on CRISPR and genetic engineering. First screening is March 10 (Sun) at the Atom Theatre; I'll participate in a Q&A afterwards.

There is a launch party that evening for which I have an extra ticket. Taking bids from interested parties 8-)

Human Nature SXSW Schedule.

Life and Fate, Before Sunset

This Hollywood oral history tells the story of Richard Linklater's "Before" Trilogy: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. The films appeared 9 years apart, and tell the story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. I find the second film to be the most interesting, really a masterpiece of filmmaking (I have a copy on the hard drive of the laptop I write this on :-). The events in Before Sunset take place in real time -- i.e., the story transpires over the run time of the movie, a single afternoon. Shooting it must have been extremely challenging for Delpy and Hawke, and for the crew.

The video above should start at 23:30, and explains how Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke came together to do the sequel. I think that event was, in some sense, the most contingent of those responsible for the trilogy. The first movie made very little money, and hence the idea to make a second, very different film -- about the complexity of life, the passage of time, lost chances -- was neither obvious nor inevitable.

The first movie is about a one night tryst between 20-something travelers, but the second movie takes place a decade later. The protagonists, while still young, have experienced more of life and the second film is richer and more complex, despite taking place over an even shorter period of time. I remember being excited to see it, not so much because of Before Sunrise (which I found entertaining, but not as special), but because of the intriguing premise of two lovers meeting again by chance after losing track of each other for so long.

Here's a scene from Before Sunset: a long take of walking and conversation in beautiful Paris, camera following Hawke and Delpy in a totally naturalistic way.




I hesitate to include this trailer because it's kind of cheesy, but if you're not familiar with the trilogy it explains the premise of the first two films.




The video below is a nice discussion of the trilogy. Just now I learned (thanks, AI!) that Before Sunrise is based on actual events in Linklater's life -- see here for the poignant story of the real life muse for these films.




Richard Linklater also directed Dazed and Confused -- one of the greatest high school movies ever made, and a beautiful evocation of adolescence in late-70s, early-80s America.

The History of Synth Pop (video documentary)

I had a vague awareness of synth pop groups like Depeche Mode, Joy Division, New Order, Human League, OMD when I was growing up. I loved the music but knew almost nothing about the bands and the context from which they emerged. This documentary locates them in the post-punk, Kraftwerk-influenced UK of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Highly recommended if songs from these groups give you a jolt of exuberant nostalgia :-)

Now that I'm older I really enjoy this kind of exploration, in which writers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs reminisce about their youthful moments of creation and discovery. How did it look at the time? And now, in the fullness of life? All those moments, lost in time like tears in rain.

I watched Atomic Blonde on a recent flight and, other than one long fight scene near the end -- "Stoy! Stoy!" (pleading... Bang!), found it mostly forgettable. But the incredible 1980s soundtrack got me thinking about this music again...

Blade Runner 2049: Demis Hassabis (Deep Mind) interviews director Villeneuve

Hassabis refers to AI in the original Blade Runner, but it is apparent from the sequel that replicants are merely genetically engineered humans. AI appears in Blade Runner 2049 in the form of Joi. There seems to be widespread confusion, including in the movie itself, about whether to think about replicants as robots (i.e., hardware) with "artificial" brains, or simply superhumans engineered (by manipulation of DNA and memories) to serve as slaves. The latter, while potentially very alien psychologically (detectable by Voight-Kampff machine, etc.), presumably have souls like ours. (Hassabis refers to Rutger Hauer's decision to have Roy Batty release the dove when he dies as symbolic of Batty's soul escaping from his body.)

Dick himself seems a bit imprecise in his use of the term android (hardware or wet bioware?) in this context. "Electric" sheep? In a bioengineered android brain that is structurally almost identical to a normal human's?

Q&A at 27min is excellent -- concerning the dispute between Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford as to whether Deckard is a replicant, and how Villeneuve handled it, inspired by the original Dick novel.

Addendum: Blade Runner, meet Alien

The Tyrell-Weyland connection

Robots (David, of Alien Prometheus) vs Genetically Engineered Slaves (replicants) with false memories

The Loveless (1982) and Born to Run

The Loveless (free now on Amazon Prime) was the first film directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Point Break, Zero Dark Thirty) and also the first first film role for a young Willem Dafoe. Dafoe has more leading man star power in this role than in most of his subsequent work.

Loveless was shot in 22 days, when Bigelow was fresh out of Columbia film school. The movie could be characterized as a biker art film with some camp elements, but overall a fairly dark and nihilistic mood. The video above is a fan mash up of Loveless and Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run. It works well on its own terms, although Born to Run is more romantic than nihilistic, at least musically. The lyrics by themselves, however, fit the film rather well.

Born To Run

Bruce Springsteen

In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway nine,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin' out over the line
H-Oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
`Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

Yes, girl we were

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend
I want to guard your dreams and visions
Just wrap your legs 'round these velvet rims
And strap your hands 'cross my engines
Together we could break this trap
We'll run till we drop, baby we'll never go back
H-Oh, Will you walk with me out on the wire
`Cause baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta know how it feels
I want to know if love is wild
Babe I want to know if love is real

Oh, can you show me

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard
Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
And the boys try to look so hard
The amusement park rises bold and stark
Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist
I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight
In an everlasting kiss

One, two, three, four

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybody's out on the run tonight
But there's no place left to hide
Together Wendy we can live with the sadness
I'll love you with all the madness in my soul
H-Oh, Someday girl I don't know when
We're gonna get to that place
Where we really wanna go
And we'll walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us
Baby we were born to run
Oh honey, tramps like us
Baby we were born to run
Come on with me, tramps like us
Baby we were born to run

The Prestige: Are You Watching Closely?

2016 was the 10th anniversary of The Prestige, one of the most clever films ever made. This video reveals aspects of the movie that will be new even to fans who have watched it several times. Highly recommended!

Wikipedia: The Prestige is a 2006 British-American mystery thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan, from a screenplay adapted by Nolan and his brother Jonathan from Christopher Priest's 1995 novel of the same name. Its story follows Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, rival stage magicians in London at the end of the 19th century. Obsessed with creating the best stage illusion, they engage in competitive one-upmanship with tragic results. The film stars Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. It also stars Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, Piper Perabo, Andy Serkis, and Rebecca Hall.

See also Feynman and Magic -- Feynman was extremely good at reverse-engineering magic tricks.

American Psycho

Author Bret Easton Ellis, Christian Bale (Patrick Bateman), and Director Mary Herron discuss American Psycho.




This is a rare 1999 documentary about Ellis. It mixes interviews with dramatizations of scenes from his writing. The American Psycho bits are terrible, especially compared to the actual movie, which was released in 2000. Rewatching the movie today, my main reaction is that Bale is simply brilliant as Patrick Bateman: e.g., Hip to be Square (reprised by Huey Lewis himself here).




It seems likely that the title American Psycho is partly an homage to the late 1970s film American Gigolo, which had a big impact on Ellis. (I highly recommend BEE's podcast to anyone interested in film or literature.)

Rolling Stone: 'American Psycho' at 25

Before American Psycho came out, 25 years ago this month, it was already the most controversial novel of the Nineties. Its vivid depictions of gruesome murders of women, men, children and animals preceded wherever it went. The original publisher dropped it and told author Bret Easton Ellis to keep the money — but to please go away. The New York Times titled its book review "Snuff This Book!" On the opposite coast, Los Angeles Times begrudgingly wrote that "Free Speech Protects Even an 'American Psycho.'" The National Organization of Women attempted to organize boycotts. Stores refused to order it. And Ellis, who turned 27 around its release, received death threats. ...

Has the way that Patrick Bateman has become a cult character surprised you?
What if I said, no? [Pause.] I'm kidding [laughs]. Of course, it was surprising to me. American Psycho was an experimental novel. I wasn't really quite sure, nor did I care, how many copies it was going to sell. I really didn't care who connected with it.

Why is that?
I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties – a very specific time and place ...

... Beginning in the Eighties, men were prettifying themselves and in ways they weren't. And they were taking on a lot of the tropes of gay male culture and bringing it into straight male culture — in terms of grooming, looking a certain way, going to the gym, waxing, and being almost the gay porn ideals. You can track that down to the way Calvin Klein advertised underwear, a movie like American Gigolo, the re-emergence of Gentlemen's Quarterly. All of these things really informed American Psycho when I was writing it. So that seemed to me much more interesting than whether he is or is not a serial killer, because that really is a small section of the book. ...

... Patrick Bateman, who was obsessed with Donald Trump, would likely be pretty happy with his campaign.
Or would he be embarrassed? Trump today isn't the Trump of 1987. He's not the Trump of Art of the Deal. He seemed much more elitist in '87, '88. Now he seems to be giving a voice to white, angry, blue-collar voters. I think, in a way, Patrick Bateman may be disappointed by how Trump is coming off and who he's connecting with.

To the guys that I was talking to in the Eighties when I was researching American Psycho, Donald Trump was an aspirational figure. That's why the jokes are throughout the book. It wasn't like I pulled that out of my hat; that was happening. And so I just thought it was funny that "OK, well, Patrick Bateman's gonna be obsessed with Donald Trump. He's gonna want to aspire to be Donald Trump." And I don't know if he would think that today. ...

The Making of Blade Runner: Like Tears in Rain

I always wondered how Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became Ridley Scott's cyberpunk noir Blade Runner. Watch this documentary to find out!

See also Philip K. Dick's First Science Fiction Story.

Mind Out of Time: Arrival, Ted Chiang, and Sapir-Whorf

Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang: Story of Your Life.

Despite what some have said, the main plot idea (as I remember from the story; I have yet to see the film) goes well beyond the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- it also requires that human consciousness (potentially) extend beyond the confines of the usual time span we perceive. This is a modification of fundamental physics, not just of cognitive linguistics.

See also A Modern Borges? and Beyond Human Science.

Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis on American Gigolo

https://www.podcastone.com/episode/B.E.E.---Paul-Schrader---10/17/16-1685639

Highly recommended to readers with literary or cinematic interests. Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis discuss American Gigolo. (Best brief summary of the movie and its impact is @5-12 min.) Ellis is the author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. Schrader wrote and directed American Gigolo (1980), which had a huge cultural impact and made Richard Gere a star. (Intro soundtrack is Blondie's Call Me.)

This is an old interview with Ellis (translated from the French):

ALEX ISRAEL - We've spoken about your interest in Paul Schrader's American Gigolo. Tell me about your relationship to the film.
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was 16 when it came out and back then it seemed very shocking. It was Paramount's big spring movie of 1980 and it reverberated through our cultivation and started to change things. What Was shocking Was That there HAD never-been movie That Looked at a male beauty in the way American Gigolo DID. We'd seen women bed, Addressed, and undressed fait que fashion, we aim'd never seen a movie about Essentially male beauty. It was the first metrosexual movie. I think it has Anticipated changes in culture, That Would Be seen with more clarity later on in Calvin Klein ads and in the photographs of Herb Ritts.

ALEX ISRAEL - So it offered a new way of thinking about male sexuality's role in mass culture?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - A lot of movies-have Dealt with male sexuality. Purpose Does American Gigolo really deal with male sexuality? Richard Gere plays a prostitute in it. It's a film noir. Regardless of what Paul Schrader Was going for at the time, it: has a heavy homoerotic element. Purpose It Was not a gay film. It was Saying, look, this is Where We're headed as a culture male beauty in straight Culture is going to be Embraced in this way - not as it is in gay culture, in order --other this way. I remember seeing the movie a number of times, Knowing That It Was not a great film, That goal It was very suggestive. Now, 30 years later, it's a key THE movie.

ALEX ISRAEL - An Especially key movie for you, right?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - Completely, right down to the fact That I named Julian in Less Than Zero after Gere's character in American Gigolo. For better or worse, in 1980 I Began working on Less Than Zero. There Was not really a character Julian in the first draft of That book. When That character Began to announce Itself in subsequent drafts He Was named Julian - in homage to American Gigolo.

...

ALEX ISRAEL - What you Influenced When You Were writing Less Than Zero, other than American Gigolo?
BRET EASTON ELLIS - I Was a Southern California kid Who wanted to write about youth culture and about the people I Knew. The language of movies and it cam from punk rock and from Joan Didion. I do not know if There Was a specific cultural influences That inspired Less Than Zero. I do not know what it Would Have been. I knew that I wanted to write a novel, and I Was That very much Influenced by Joan Didion and Ernest Hemingway, not that much profit by Fitzgerald.

The death of Sol (Soylent Green)

I first saw Soylent Green on television when I was a kid. (CBS Late Night Movie of the Week, or something like that :-) It was terrifying -- the sweaty dystopian desperation, the riot scenes, but most of all Sol's final moments at the euthanasia center.

Backstage: ... it is unlikely that an actor will ever give a last performance with the stunning emotional resonance of Edward G. Robinson’s work in 1973’s “Soylent Green.”

The film is an environmental parable and, along with “Planet of the Apes,” could be considered the granddaddy of the “dystopian future” genre. But in 1973, the notion of a world destroyed by pollution, overpopulation, and food shortages was frightening and fresh. The fact that every ill depicted in “Soylent Green” (set in the then-distant world of 2022) is actually coming to pass has only made the film seem prescient.

Robinson plays Sol Roth, the partner, friend, and father figure to Charlton Heston’s Detective Thorn, a cop tasked with saving the world. As a man who remembers the Earth’s beauty before it was compromised, Robinson’s Sol symbolizes nothing less than humanity itself, and is given scene after scene where he conveys the wonder and longing for a world that exists only in his memory. These moments—Robinson remembering, for example, how food used to taste when he was young—are both chilling and touching. He breaks your heart, but Robinson is never sentimental.

That Robinson was dying of cancer during filming makes his rich performance even more psychologically intricate. In real life, Robinson died two weeks after filming ended—and he dies in the film itself. “Soylent Green” imagines Sol Roth’s elective euthanasia scene as the final word in personalized shopping. After making his AV preferences for his final journey, Roth is escorted to a large room where he lies on a gurney, imbibes some sort of (presumably) fatal drink, and begins what can only be described as one of the most poetic and powerful death scenes in film history.

As the soundtrack plays an assortment of elegiac Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Sol watches a 1973 version of an IMAX screen project the breathtaking beauty of the vanished world: sunsets, birds, oceans, plains, flowers. Director Richard Fleischer gives the actor a series of wonderful close-ups, and what Robinson is able to convey with only his eyes is stunning in both its precision and economy. In these close-ups, the actor is able to wordlessly communicate a great many things: the brilliance of the late silent period; the scope of his personal struggles; the totality of his expansive body of work—all with an incredibly light, unmannered touch.

Though he was inexplicably overlooked for an Oscar nomination for “Soylent Green” (and, indeed, for his entire career), he was awarded a richly deserved posthumous Oscar for lifetime achievement. Here’s to you, Mr. Robinson.

See also Soylent is for People.

Happy Birthday Roy Batty (Blade Runner)

Gizmodo: According to Ridley Scott’s 34-year-old (!!!) scifi classic Blade Runner, January 8th, 2016, is the day the replicant designated N6MAA10816 was first incepted. But you may know him better as Roy Batty, the philosophical, sociopathic antagonist played by Rutger Hauer in the film.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears...in...rain. Time to die.

Vangelis and Tangerine Dream

Eighties forever! :-)

Mein Krieg: time and memory

The footage in this documentary will appeal to any History or WWII buff. The interviews with the old men, juxtaposed with moving images of their wartime youth, are a poignant meditation on time and memory.

Mein Krieg (1991)
Review/Film; Movies Shot By 6 Germans In the War

By JANET MASLIN (NYTimes)

The documentary "Mein Krieg" ("My Private War") offers stunningly un-self-conscious World War II memories from six German veterans, each of whom took a home movie camera with him into the fray. As directed with chilling simplicity by Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus, it presents both a compilation of eerie wartime scenes and a catalogue of the photographers' present-day attitudes toward their experience. "I wouldn't be talking about these things if my conscience weren't clear as crystal," one of them calmly declares.

The film makers have their own ideas about their interviewees' complicity, as demonstrated by the emphasis they place on that particular remark. But their approach is restrained as they allow each of these six veterans to reminisce about everything from the condition of their movie cameras (which are well maintained and have yielded high-quality home movies) to the indelible sights they have seen. "Here we're going into Warsaw, and this is a tour of the buildings destroyed in '39," one man says, casually describing his images of wholesale destruction.

Much of the material seen here has a peculiar gentleness, as German soldiers cook and exercise and smile for the cameras. (There do not appear to have been restrictions on what the soldiers could photograph, since the later part of the film also includes glimpses of mass graves and civilian casualties.) And some of it recalls the more calculated wartime images we are more used to seeing in connection with Allied troops. So pretty nurses beam at Nazi soldiers; the soldiers' faces betray both fear and determination; the troops are seen celebrating after they shoot down an enemy plane. They were, a photographer recalls about the plane's dead Russian pilot, "full of joy over having been able to destroy this hornet." ...

DNA Dreams at Harvard

This is a panel discussion of the documentary film DNA Dreams (see below), about BGI and its Cognitive Genomics Lab.

DNA DREAMS

Moderator: Dr. Evelynn Hammonds, Director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research/Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science

Panelists include: (L to R)
1. George Church, Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
2. Bregjte van der Haak, Filmmaker
3. Arthur Kleinman, Director of the Harvard University Asia Center and Professor of Anthropology and Medical Anthropology at Harvard University
4. Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor, Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University

Peter Galison is dismissive of "single parameter" measures of cognitive ability. George Church replies quite effectively. Certainly anyone who has thought seriously about IQ or g knows that it is only a crude measure of (compressed approximation to) a multi-dimensional set of mental abilities. I wonder how Peter would react to learning that his grandchild would be born with a mutation depressing the meaningless "single parameter" in question to an SD below normal. Would he just shrug it off as unimportant?

I believe this is the entire documentary:

Cosmopolitans -- Whit Stillman returns on Amazon

The pilot isn't bad -- American expats in Paris :-) The cinematography is beautiful, but then it's hard to go wrong in Paris.

More Whit Stillman.

So Money

An oral history of Swingers (Grantland).

Jon Favreau (Mike): When I set out to write Swingers, I didn’t know I was even writing a movie. My dad had given me a screenwriting program and I started the script just as an exercise to see if I could write a screenplay. Swingers is what came out.

Ron Livingston (Rob): Jon was really busted up over his breakup. That’s right about the age when your first long-term thing comes apart. Having your heart ripped out like that — that’s a lot different than the cheerleader who doesn’t like you back.

Favreau: I started writing, just drawing from the environment I was living in. I had characters loosely based on people I knew. None of the events were real; it was all a story that came out of my head without an outline.

Alex Désert (Charles): I like to say Swingers was us times 10. I wish I could be that cool.

...

Livingston: Vince and I, and a couple of other people — Alex Désert, Ahmed Ahmed, who’s in the movie — we started doing all of these staged readings for potential buyers of this script. They came in all shapes and sizes. Every three months or so, we’d get together in somebody’s living room and rehearse for a while and then go to some empty theater space and do it for some guy who had Saudi parking lot money. ...

Vaughn: The reading would always play phenomenally. We did this for over a year and would get huge laughs, great responses. But the business model was always a problem. You have a bunch of guys that don’t really mean anything to Hollywood. Jon had done more than the rest of us, but wasn’t a big enough name to open a movie. ...

Wurmfeld: Literally every single word that comes out of Vince’s mouth is on the page. That’s what totally blows me away about Jon’s writing — his ability to get someone’s voice, because I think that’s not an easy task. One might think that Vince is improvising, and certainly he can, but I just was amazed that all those jokes and stuff were actually on the page.

Livingston: He grabbed “You’re so money” from the Spike Lee–Michael Jordan commercials, where Spike Lee called Michael Jordan “Money,” you know, “Like the shoes, Money.” Nobody was really doing that, I think, other than just Spike Lee and Michael Jordan. So when the movie came out, that was still kind of a new thing.