Word: screens
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Sometimes bad breaks can bring great fortune. A few years ago, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings movies, planned a big-screen version of the Halo video-game universe and tapped Neill Blomkamp to direct it. When that project collapsed after a few months, Jackson proposed that Blomkamp turn his science-fiction short Alive in Joburg into his first feature film. It would be set in Blomkamp's native South Africa, focus on the country's traumatic tradition of apartheid, have characters who speak in unfamiliar accents or unknown languages, boast no star power - the lead actor had never...
...there are almost no cars in any of the driveways. She picks a house at random, and we go to the back. She figures the odds are high that a squatter has left a door or window open. Indeed, the bathroom window has already been pried open, and the screen is bent, so I bend it a little more and squeeze myself through onto the toilet seat and then open the porch doors and let Boemio and her husband in. There's a Rolodex's worth of real-estate-agent business cards on the kitchen counter, but this home...
...Blomkamp demystifies them and shows off their CGI sophistication. (Virtually all the aliens were created digitally; he used very few puppets.) "I wanted the image to feel incredibly raw and unmanipulated," he says, "almost like it came straight from the camera sensors right onto the screen. So instead of setting the shot up and really making a big deal of the effects and then going back to normal footage, I wanted it to feel as if the effects were completely part of the scene." (See the 100 best movies of all time...
...romance, and so did Audrey Niffenegger. Her 2003 best seller The Time Traveler's Wife is so plangent a tale of fatal love, with two adorable people fighting to beat the odds against them, that it's surprising it took six years for it to get to the big screen. Maybe prospective producers were reluctant to buck the prevailing wisdom of a conventional happy ending. Anyway, here is the film version, directed by Robert Schwentke. It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre, and there's a music score that tries to cue all the emotions...
...doubt that MRIs are more sensitive than mammograms, says Dr. Daniel Hayes, clinical director of breast oncology at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center and a co-author of the commentary, it's not clear that the technique is more specific than mammography. Studies of each diagnostic screen have shown that compared to mammograms, MRIs can pick up additional cancer lesions 16% of the time. "But," says Hayes, "the question is whether they are biologically important...