movie review
jstemwedel | December 28, 2009While the sprogs were hanging out at the aquarium with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment, my better half and I went to see a 3-D IMAX screening of Avatar. My big concerns going in were that all the 3-D IMAX goodness would make me motion-sick, and that if that didn't get me, then the story by James Cameron might make me lose my lunch.
I am happy to report that neither of these outcomes came to pass. Not that the plot here is especially sophisticated, nor the characters terribly complex, but they weren't as dreadful as I had feared from the Twitterati and the Facebookers.
The main…
jstemwedel | April 21, 2009
I've mentioned before that I grew up in a family that was fairly captivated by the U.S. space program, especially the Apollo program that brought humans to the Moon. But as impressive as those manned missions to the Moon were, what did the Apollo program accomplish? Where are our moon-bases?
Orphans of Apollo, a documentary film by Michael Potter, explores what one group of space exploration enthusiasts did when NASA's commitment to the space age seemed to falter. By the mid-1970s, the Apollo program that put Americans on the moon was done, with two planned Apollo missions cancelled.…
jstemwedel | April 17, 2009I've been noticing a little spike in traffic from search engine searches on "Luk Van Parijs" (about whom I have blogged here and here and here and here).
So of course, I wonder: why the sudden spike in interest? Has there been a new development since the Office of Research Integrity "final action" on Van Parijs's research misconduct? Is he applying for jobs and getting Googled? What's the story?
jstemwedel | October 3, 2008
Americans for Medical Progress has produced a new DVD titled Veterinarians - Speaking for Research. (You can get your own free copy at the Americans for Medical Progress website.)
You might consider this DVD a follow-up of their previous DVD, Physicians - Speaking for Research (reviewed here). However, the two are pretty different, perhaps suggesting some differences not only in the intended audiences for the DVDs (veterinarians vs. physicians) but also in the concerns of the segments of the public each set of professionals is likely to encounter.
In this post, I'll first discuss…
jstemwedel | July 14, 2008Randy Olson's newest film, Sizzle, bears the subtitle, "a global warming comedy". To my mind, it delivered neither the laughs nor the engagement with the issue of global warming that it promised. Maybe this is just a sign that I fall outside the bounds of Olson's intended audience, but perhaps the biggest question this movie left me with was who precisely Olson is trying to reach with Sizzle.
The film starts out presenting itself almost as Olson's own follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth; Olson notes that he liked Al Gore's movie a lot but wondered where all the scientists were. He…
laelaps | October 27, 2007
Until I saw this 1972 film I had no idea that amphibians wanted to rule the world, but apparently they are cold-blooded masterminds bent on destroying Homo sapiens, or at least wrecking a crotchety old man's birthday. Oddly enough, however, Frogs doesn't even live up to it's own name, there being only one frog in the entire film (most of the "frogs" are really toads), but such considerations didn't stop the filmmakers from buying everything that slinked, slithered, or crawled from the local pet shops and creating a classic, putrid piece of movie cheese.
The eco-thriller is a bit of a sub-…
laelaps | October 20, 2007
I knew this movie was going to be painful, but Supercroc makes last week's film (Raptor Island) look like classic American cinema by comparison. I'm actually surprised that the film was not called "The Thing That Ate Los Angeles," although the film's super-sized antagonist seemed to accidentally step on/fall on its victims rather than consume them. At least it was short; mercifully, anticlimactically so.
Playing with relative sizes of organisms to make human beings helpless is a classic technique in science fiction and horror films, most notably seen in pictures like 1957's The Incredible…
laelaps | October 13, 2007What do you get when you put dinosaurs, terrorists, and Navy SEALs all in one place? The answer in "A mess," and in this case such a disaster carries the title Raptor Island. Starring Lorenzo Lamas, the film continues the long standing tradition of putting guns and monsters in the same place in the hopes that something good will come out on film. Indeed, it seems that more effort is required to serve up a plate of Hamburger Helper than was put into the story and dialog of this slice of movie cheese, and its painfully apparent from the very first scene.
We meet our hero, "Hack" (Lamas) and his…
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007 The other day I received a DVD made by Americans for Medical Progress called Physicians - Speaking for Research. (They indicate on their site that the DVDs are free for the asking.)
This is a DVD aimed at physicians, rather than at research scientists or the general public. However, the aim of the DVD is to help physicians to be better at communicating with the general public (primarily their patients, but also their family members and neighbors) about the role animal research has played in medical advances upon which we depend today, and the continued importance animal research will…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2007On this blog I occasionally note a major motion picture that is (tangentially) related to ethics in science, not to mention seeking your advice on my movie-viewing decisions (the votes are running 2 to 1 in favor of my watching Flash Gordon; if I do, I may have to live-blog it).
Today, I'm going to give you an actual review* of a DVD whose subject is ethical scientific research.
Because you ought to have options when planning your weekend!
A member of the Adventures in Ethics and Science Field Team brought me a DVD to review, "Ethics in Biomedical Research". This is a DVD produced by the…