Return of the superheroes
The slew of Marvel superhero movies in recent years has culminated with Joss Whedon’s multimillion dollar brainchild, The Avengers. Each Marvel installment had a pleasant dosage of witty lines and heroic bravado, but when all of these characters come together, there is a little too much of everything. Still, the special effects, comical dialogue, and some stellar acting make the movie worth both the money and the time.
Mother, I’m hungry
Just a month before the end of the semester — and my life at MIT — I decided to go out and have a nice, stress-relieving dinner. On Tuesday we went to Hungry Mother, a tiny restaurant just in the corner of Portland and Bristol streets, in front of the Kendall Square Cinema. I discovered it by luck and since then I had always planned to visit it. What an amazing surprise!
Return of the superheroes
When I found out that Marvel was making a movie called The Avengers where they dumped all their famous superheroes together, I figured it was just another franchise film. Marvel films are known for their explosions, ruggedly handsome actors, and romantic subplots. After watching so many of such films, I anticipated the typical formula. While The Avengers did follow that formula to some extent, it also showed Hollywood how real entertainment should be done.
Enjoy life: skip the latter half of The Atheist’s Guide
The advice not to judge a book by its cover proves wise in the case of Alex Rosenberg’s latest tome. A fetching title and subtitle, which seem to fly out of the page from a Big-Bangish burst of white over the background of a colorful deep-space image, promise hours of thoughtful and imaginative reading about how freethinkers can enjoy life without resort to nonsense. It’s a beautiful, exciting cover, for what turns out to be a rather dull and overall underwhelming book. The book starts strong, by boldly stating its goal, namely answering the “unavoidable questions” in life. It also demarcates its audience: “This is a book for atheists,” we are told, for “people who are comfortable with the truth about reality.” It is certainly not for “people who believe in religion,” not even for “just doubters and agnostics” that are still undecided. No. It’s solely for those who “have moved past that point” and know for certain that “belief in God is on par with belief in Santa Claus.”
Is Schrödinger’s cat dead?
Dustin R. Katzin ’12 is a quintessential MIT renaissance scholar, whose impressively diverse achievements are a testament to the remarkable breadth of MIT education and simultaneously set stratospheric standards for the rest of us. A scientist and artist in one, in the four short years of college, Dustin has managed not only to complete a double major in physics and mathematics, dazzle his peers with musical artistry and stay involved in myriad other extracurriculars, but also to have fun while doing it. His crowning artistic achievement is Schrödinger’s Cat: a Musical Journey into the Strange World of Quantum Mechanics, a programmatic orchestral work that was premiered by MITSO last Friday. I sat down with Dustin to talk about music and life at MIT.
Dark humor, Dark Shadows
Remember being five and giggling about clumsy characters and silly scenes such as a vampire not seeing himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth, an orphan under a bed sheet trying to scare away a guest, or even a vampire chilling out with stoners before sucking their blood and perhaps inviting Alice Cooper to his house later that week?
Prints come alive
I’m sure that most of us are familiar with the “experimental” nature of contemporary art. While some of these works are stimulating, when I consider the great paintings from the Renaissance or the Impressionists in comparison to conceptual art and other modern art movements, I sometimes wonder if figure painting will ever “come back.”
Intrigue in Boston
Next House presented their self-produced musical Curtains over CPW and last Sunday, in celebration of the dorm’s 30th anniversary. Curtains, originally written by Rupert Holmes, tells the tale of the murder case that occurs in a Boston theater. The star of the show, Jessica Cranshaw (Tiffany J. Lin ’11), is shot in the beginning of her performance and a detective by the name of Lieutenant Frank Cioffi (Staly Chin ’15) comes to unravel the mystery of the murder. Baffled by the fact that Cranshaw’s costars and director were glad that she passed away, the detective puts everyone on his suspects list. In this play, there are relationship issues with cast members, rekindling of love, mother-daughter issues, boat shows, and newspaper critics from The Boston Globe!
Urine good hands?
Corporate profits soar. A corrupt politician is bribed into raising fees for a necessary service, at the expense of the people. The people’s protest is brutally suppressed by the police.
Putting the horse in front of the cart
A front page for The Onion dated November 22, 1963 reads: “Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Freemasons.” I’d bet you a nickel that many people find that headline funny. I know it made me laugh. Although the assassination of John F. Kennedy is one of the most traumatic events in American history, the joke works because the reader is familiar with the barrage of wildly speculative and imaginative conspiracy theories that followed the tragedy, regarding the identity and motives of the killer. Yet most, if not all, of the parties mentioned above in jest have been proposed in all seriousness at some point as conspirators in Kennedy’s assassination in hundreds of books and documentaries. Such is the level of ridicule to which assassination theories have sunk in their efforts to seek closure to what is obviously still an unanswered question, and an open wound.
In the Family is delicate and slow-brewing
An admirable debut from writer-director-actor Patrick Wang ’98, In the Family examines the timeless story of a father’s love with a topical twist. The gay, Southern-born, Asian-American Joey Williams (Wang) lives in Tennessee with his partner, the schoolteacher Cody Hines (Trevor St. John), and Cody’s 6-year-old biological son, Chip (the talented Sebastian Brodziak). Joey’s an average guy with a big heart; he comes from a foster family background and changed his Asian birth name in memory of his foster parents. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn how Joey met Cody: A contractor by trade, Joey met the then-married Cody as a client; the two formed a close bond after Cody’s wife passed away, and both of them were surprised when it turned into a romance.
“Just don’t be so silly”
Victor Stenger has written a wickedly powerful book, so sharp and heretical that had it been published four centuries ago, the author would have been extra-crispy by the time the nearest bishop was done reading the preface. God and the Folly of Faith, with its straightforward argumentation and encyclopedic scope, is a veritable handbook on the fundamental incompatibility of modern science and religion. In the context of the new atheism movement, Stenger’s book serves as the prosecutor’s closing argument in their collective case against religion. The book’s ambitious agenda, with the simultaneous grinding of many axes (from near death experiences and quantum consciousness to intelligent design and cosmic fine-tuning), takes a toll on the reader. The dissection of the multiple arguments and counterarguments that are currently used to support and refute faith makes this no light reading for a lazy spring afternoon. Albeit peppered with zingers, the work as a whole comes across as what it is: a thick and serious discourse on one of the most important intellectual conflicts in history, very much alive to this day.
Catching up with the universe
I grew up in the Panamanian countryside, under pristine skies bursting with stars. Defenseless against the nightly spectacle, I had no choice but to become a backyard astronomer. A Spanish translation of Isaac Asimov’s The Universe (1966) transformed a romantic interest in constellations into a healthy scientific understanding of the cosmos. Asimov’s tome, although dated, satisfied my thirst for cosmological knowledge long enough for me to shift my attention to more mundane things. Two decades went by until I discovered — with a mix of delight and trepidation — that while I was not looking, a third revolution in cosmology, by no means smaller than those triggered by Copernicus and Hubble, was taking place right under my nose, during my lifetime.
Fine dining by the sea
When was the last time you ate at a restaurant alone? For that matter, when was the last time you went out alone, took a walk alone, or amused yourself alone? It seems to me that when people have fun, they go in duos, trios, quartets, a whole crowd. Those that dine solo are branded “forever alone” by society and self. However, recent failures in my love life have made the thought of dining company intolerable, so I recently decided to eat lunch alone at Strega Waterfront.
Film brings book action to life
The Hunger Games, like its prior fantasy predecessors, Twilight and Harry Potter, is a behemoth. It has the hopes and dreams of millions of tween fangirls and fanboys on the line. When I discovered that they were making the bestselling book series into movies, I could not say I was surprised — what I did not anticipate was being impressed by the first movie. Even for those who have not read the series, the movie is a solid standalone film. It has all the necessary elements: beautiful cinematography, breadth of colorful characters, and the right moments to pull the audience’s heartstrings. What makes premise of The Hunger Games so unique though is that the most monstrous creatures the protagonist faces are other humans.
Have kids, not a relationship
With a mini-reunion of the cast of Bridesmaids, Friends with Kids had some high standards to live up to. Friends with Kids did succeed in telling the same old love story in a new way, but it did not compare in the comedy department. Still, the movie offers a cute and unique story, and the low budget makes the end result all the more charming.
The incredible shrinking argument
Back in November 2009, I reviewed a book by Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man, which discusses at length his theory about the origins of early Christianity without invoking a historical Jesus. After calling Doherty’s theory marginally superior to the predominant view, the atheist philosopher Richard Carrier stated in his review of Doherty’s work that “the tables have turned.” A refutation to Doherty’s theory, Carrier said, would require developing a single, coherent theory in favor of Jesus’ historicity that can explain all the evidence at least as well as Doherty’s. With funding from both atheists and believers, Carrier himself has taken on the question formally, and his work will soon be published in two volumes.
A symphony fit for the goddesses
Last Wednesday, over a thousand Zelda fans descended on San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in the heart of the city. The event? The 25th anniversary celebration of one of Nintendo’s most beloved franchise: The Legend of Zelda. “Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses,” is a musical tribute to the history of Zelda and the great scores composed by Koji Kondo. The concert, directed by Irish conductor Eímear Noone, works with local musicians in each town to put together an entire orchestra to play the show.
Brains and brawn team up to form an unlikely (and hilarious) duo
In this loose adaptation of the 1980s TV show 21 Jump Street, high school enemies turned best buds, Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are a motley pair of rookie cops who find themselves transferred to the Jump Street unit, a revived undercover police program from the ’80s. In an attempt to find a drug supplier at Sagan High, Jenko and Schmidt pose as students and find themselves awkwardly navigating the social waters of high school once again. Fortified by his glory days as ruthless bully and super-star jock, Jenko confidently approaches the high-school scene while Schmidt anxiously anticipates a repeat of his teenage misery. This time around, however, Schmidt fits in with the new-age popular crowd, while Jenko’s antiquated notion of “cool” quickly undercuts his chances of moving up Sagan High’s social ladder.
The sounds behind Final Fantasy
The Tech had the chance to speak with Grammy award-winning conductor, composer, and music director Arnold Roth about his performance of Final Fantasy soundtracks at Boston’s Symphony Hall last Saturday as part of his Distant Worlds concert series. He reveals his connection to video game and film music, talks about the relationship to his close friend Nobuo Uematsu, the original composer of the Final Fantasy soundtracks, and explains what makes video game fans a great audience for classical music in our exclusive interview!