Word: smarts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...brings him into contact with Janet Hartigan (Sarah Jessica Parker), to whom he once gave a bad grade, but who is unaccountably willing to forget and forgive - a process he does not make easy for her. He does not make living with him easy for anyone. Not his super smart daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page), doing a role reversal, in which she plays a sort of surrogate parent to him; not for Chuck, his feckless brother (hilariously played by Thomas Haden Church)- not for anyone who crosses his lurching path...
...point of Smart People (which is directed by Noam Murro) is to return its anti-hero to something like civility, which is not exactly a startlingly original comic notion. Neither is its familiar academic setting, where so many mid-list novels are set. Indeed, we are told by Mark Poirier (who wrote the screenplay) that he originally conceived the story as a novel about university life, which I suppose somewhat limits its appeal to a mass audience. That said, its pretty conventional characters are often pretty funny. Or maybe I should say, surprisingly interesting. Ellen Page (recently of Juno ) brings...
...play mulish, churlish or just to do some hard-charging action, we always sense an underlying decency in him - he has a good soldier quality that can be very appealing. In a way, his work is emblematic of the movie as a whole. There's nothing world shattering about Smart People. No one is ever going to call it a "must see" movie. But it is a trim, intelligent, reasonably amusing little movie. Call it a "could see" - something you can drop in on when you have nothing better to do and emerge from feeling not at all cheated...
...model of conservation is so smart, why did it take bonobos to push us there? There's no denying that human beings are powerfully drawn to other high primates--and to bonobos perhaps most of all. Depending on which lab report you use, bonobos vie with chimpanzees for the title of man's closest relative, with a 98.4%-to-98.6% DNA match. As a result, says Coxe, understanding the bonobo is "fundamental to our understanding of ourselves...
...Mathew Morton, BostonVirtual reality thus far has focused on bizarre, interesting perceptual thrills. I'd like to see them move on and try to really tell interactive stories. How do you put the user in control? It's a nuanced problem that's going to take a lot of smart people working for a long, long time...