Word: savants
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Scorsese won his great renown for films about the brotherhood of deranged machismo: Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York. But as his documentaries about American and Italian cinema show, he is also an encyclopedic connoisseur, scholar and rescuer of old movies - a video savant - who makes occasional forays into genre territory. He's done romantic comedy (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore), Merchant-Ivoryish period drama (The Age of Innocence), a musical (New York, New York) and a thriller remake (Cape Fear). Even The Departed is an American version of a Hong Kong cop movie...
...cornfed mystic who bemusedly observes her employers’ frantic railing against racism, fate, and Karl Rove. Her dialogue is laconic, but her inner monologue is full of surprisingly acute observations. Moore gives Tassie an interest in the unsavory and a preoccupation with Sufism, extending Tassie’s savant-like eccentricities to ridiculous levels. Just when her confusion at the hypocrisies of people around her begins to cross the line between clever and insufferable, she’ll use her roommate’s vibrator to stir a glass of chocolate milk, or write a college paper about...
...Peek's skills floored screenwriter Barry Morrow and helped inspire Dustin Hoffman's savant character in the Oscar-winning drama Rain Man. Peek became an overnight star and spent the rest of his life showcasing his gifts to more than 64 million people. Had he chosen to, he might have memorized every name...
...your main characters, Perkus Tooth, is this oddball recluse, a pop-culture savant obsessed with Marlon Brando and cult movies. What is it about American pop culture that makes it so easy for us to become obsessed with it? I guess for me, it stands in for the information surrounding us that we're trying to make sense of, including our own behavior, our own culture, other people's lives. With people like Perkus - the most exaggerated collectors or self-appointed experts - there's a poignancy to it. I love that kind of behavior, and I guess I'm guilty...
...parents both graduated from Tsinghua before attending the real MIT or that he's the most qualified leader ever at the Department of Energy (DOE) - which is a bit like being the most likable character ever on NYC Prep. It's also that Chu is the kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers...