Couple of films I’m going to try to catch before my work starts hotting up again… and also before I head off to the hot zones to ask a lot of questions to students and teachers! 
According to Salon.com – this is what Austin Powers could have done if it were French and funny:
Do you wish that the Austin Powers movies were not, you know, quite so stupid? Or that their efforts to poke fun at the social mores and global politics of another age were pitched somewhere north of an eighth-grade sensibility? Let me direct you to the hit French comedy “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies,” featuring explosively weird Gallic comic Jean Dujardin as its eponymous super-spy, an unhinged cross-Channel cousin of Sean Connery’s 007. (In his original, more straight-faced incarnation, OSS 117 was the hero of more than 250 French pulp novels and several 1950s and ’60s films.)
Since I know of quite a few good films that were taken from French originals (True Lies, Assassin/Point of No Return, Cousins, Just Visiting, Eye of the Beholder; Twelve Monkeys, which took a concept and ran with it… oh, I’m still waiting to see if anyone has the stomach to remake one of my favorites: Love Me If You Dare…) I’m rather keen to check this one out.
Speaking of films, New Scientist has popped up a response to their fondness for Iron Man with a list of ‘Five Science Fiction Movies That Get The Science Right’ – earlier I blogged about the fantastic lecture I attended by Biotechnology Australia, who did a study on the influence that films have on attitudes towards biotechnology (seems everyone approves of GATTACA):
In fact movies have a very long tradition of taking liberties with scientific accuracy. In George Melies’ 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, [another French film!] six adventurers are sent to the moon in a capsule fired from a large cannon. In a memorable scene the capsule crashes into the eye of the moon, and the explorers then encounter moon people who kidnap them. After escaping back to their capsule, the moon people push them off the moon and they fall back to earth, landing safely in the ocean.
Another study, of 222 movies that portrayed science, conducted by Weingart, Muhl and Pansegrau, found that the most alarming scientific depictions related to “modification of, and intervention into, the human body, the violation of human nature, and threats to human health by means of science.” They stated that, “The threat is dramatized by being associated with the image of the scientists as pursuing the quest for new knowledge in secrecy, outside the controls of academic institutions and peer.”
This study looks at 33 movies made between 1971 and 2005 that address human reproductive cloning and it categorises the films based on their genre and potential influence.
I must admit, they mention a German film called Blueprint that was considered fairly reasonable in the study:
At the age of thirty the world-famous composer Iris Sellin learns that she has an incurable illness. She – a person who wanted to live for ever – does however not give in. In order to preserve her art and also herself, beyond death, for all posterity, she has herself cloned. Her daughter Siri, whom, in this way, she turns into her virtual twin, learns as a child that she is the world’s first cloned human being. In fact a blueprint: a blueprint of her mother.
I’ve yet to see the film version of a novel I enjoyed as a teenager, Anna to the Infinite Power, one of the films that is difficult to find. I’ll certainly make a lot of noise if they ever make Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake into a movie!
Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?
If you’re a teacher like myself, some of the recommendations I’d have for getting a few discussions going on the issues of either cloning (or when teaching GATTACA), include the site Futurist Movies, the game MetaPet and the fake site GenoChoice, which says you can
…even specifically choose genes that may determine favorable characteristics in your child. With the special help of GenoChoice©, you can truly offer your progeny “the best of nature… before you nurture!”
Oh, speaking of further studies, I’m hoping that a more updated study on this 2007 paper – Scrambled eggheads: ambivalent representations of scientists in six Hollywood film comedies from 1961 to 1965:
This essay considers how six popular Hollywood films from a largely neglected genre —comedy— projected ambivalent images of scientists from 1961 to 1965. It argues that scientists were often respected for their intelligence, but were mocked or even feared for their intellect. In the comedic subgenres of the family film and slapstick, scientists who were safely contained at institutions of higher education committed merely social transgressions and became objects of mockery. In the political satire of Dr. Strangelove, however, the direct threat of nuclear annihilation cast the scientist as an object of fear and a real threat to the security of the nation. This discussion of popular comedies thus accounts for an under-studied cultural barometer and powerful medium in the popularization of science.
How far can comedy be pushed when it puts down science, I wonder? Then again, I guess the point of comedy is taking liberties and seeing what can be pushed in the name of funny.
Oh, considering what I know about British humour… do you think BBC News were trying to be funny with this headline? Great tits cope well with warming.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
‘Love me if you dare’ seems like a great concept and if I see it subtitled, I will get it. I think science is like open source software, nobody can be guaranteed completely right, until everything is done and understood. As far as ‘Blueprint’, it is my understanding that, by accident, 1:10,000 female animals can have their own clones. I am not sure where I read that and now that you will question me on it, I will try to find the source. The movie ‘Dr Strangelove’ continues to unfold in reality. Slide 4.
Here is the link to parthenogenesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis
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