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The British movie Essay The implication of escape is shadowed in the present film. One treats Gal as a criminal more eagerly than a fugitive. However, this character is haunted in both direct and figurative meanings. Whereas Don abuses Gal’s stable mode of living by fierce jokes and physical violence, the whole Gal’s background abuses the hero’s soul by ominous signs (e. g. , the rock falling to the pool) and dreams. The conflict between the escapee (Gal) and the persecutor (Don and the criminal world) is revealed in the very title. In the East End vernacular, the phrase sexy beast is used as a compliment and means â€Å"a handsome chap, a reliable mate or a trustworthy accomplice† (Earnshaw 2001, p. 5). The title hints at the positive side of Gal’s London past (material wealth, friends, familiar environment) and, simultaneously, at the darkest sides of the hero’s background made explicit in the dream of a hairy beast pursuing Gal at nights. The same type of the hero as a fugitive is present in Kitano’s Hana-bi. The Japanese title of this film consists of two words, translated to English as ‘fire’ and ‘flowers’ [the English aka ‘Fireworks’]. The main character of the film, Yoshitaka Nishi (Takeshi Kitano), seems to be torn between the ‘flowers’ of his life to the mortally ill wife and the impaired friend, and the ‘fire’ of his hopeless race for peace and stability. Nishi used to be a cop. Nevertheless, hardly can this story be considered a ‘cop’ narrative. The film traces the evolution of the hero from the stage of a law-abider to the one of a fugitive and an outlaw. The narrative implicitly promotes the idea that there are certain moral principles equating a cop, a fugitive and a criminal – the love for the family, the affection for the friend, the acid mourning over acid unbearable existence. Nishi quits his beloved job to take care of his wife. He desperately needs money and borrows a large sum from yakuza. They send over young thugs to play rough with Nishi when he refuses to pay back the interest. The ex-cop assaults the intruders, thus, turning momentarily from a fugitive into a criminal. The movie provides no classification for its heroes. Instead, it shows â€Å"an endless circle† (Cannon, 1997, para. 2, lines 6-8) of the global crime net where plain people such as Nishi, the kin young policemen who replaced Nishi and Horibe, Nishi’s wife and friend try to survive and establish some kind or order and justice. As Cannon (1997, para. 4, lines 2-4) stated, the main character is the embodiment of contradiction: â€Å"[I]n one instant a warm and gentle husband, in the next a sadistic and ruthless bully†. Due to this ambivalence, Hana-bi may be referred to as a critical film which emphasises â€Å"the impossibility of heroism and the inevitability of injustice† (Rafter 2000, p. 12). An avenger The British movie Get Carter and the American film Gangs of New York provide the viewer with remarkable portraits of avengers. Chibnall and Murphy (1999, p. 4) defined revenge films as the ones â€Å"where a wronged man, denied access to the law, pursues his own path of justice†. The movie Get Carter was criticised for its â€Å"perfunctory plot, its mechanical manipulation of characters or a vision of the British underworld that relies totally on cliche† (Andrews 1971 cited Murphy 1999, p. 128). However, the treatment of the main character’s features can hardly be called mechanical. Jack Carter, the hero of the British cult film Get Carter, is â€Å"an implacable avenging angel in a black raincoat† (Billson 1991 cited Murphy 1999, p. 129) revenging on the criminals for killing his brother and seducing his niece. But despite Carter’s motivations for being an almost mythical angel of wrath, he never stopped to be a cruel criminal himself having killed four people and being responsible for even more cases of violence. Jack Carter is neither an upholder of justice nor a saviour of the weak and humble, but he operates by a strict code that he expects his colleagues and enemies to share. [†¦] Carter is confronted by a society afflicted by pornographic malaise. But his righteous anger is less about sleaze itself than about how it has leaked out of its proper underworld milieu to engulf his niece and destroy his brother. Carter is not so self-consciously evil [†¦] or [†¦] morbidly obsessed [†¦] but he does share some of the characteristics of the Jacobean revenge tragedy protagonist. A wrong has been done-less to Carter himself than to his family – which must be righted at whatever cost. (Murphy, 1999, p. 132) Carter is synthetic in his nature. On the one hand, he reaches almost legendary heights in his revengeful crusade. On the other hand, his â€Å"fussy concern with nose drops, vitamin pills and the cleanliness of British Railways cutlery† stands for his â€Å"human frailty† (Murphy 1999, p. 129). The hero of the American film Gangs of New York is neither a pure type of an avenger. On the one hand, Amsterdam Vallon infiltrates the gang of The Butcher Cutting to revenge for the death of Vallon-father. On the other hand, Amsterdam finds the substitute of the father in his once hated target. The character of Amsterdam provides an interesting synthetic type of ‘a man-on-the-run’ (he spent some years in anonymity after his father’s murder till the re-emergence in the rival gang) and ‘a man-in-disguise’.

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The movie, A Beautiful Mind, tells the true story of Princeton professor John Nash’s lifelong struggle with schizophrenia. The movie opens with John Nash as a graduate student at Princeton. It is at this point in his life that he meets his friend Charles, who is later discovered to be a hallucination. When Nash graduates and goes off to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles does not come with him. Instead, his hallucinations subside and he meets a woman, Alicia Larde and they soon become married. It isn’t until he returns to Princeton that he is reunited with Charles, who is accompanied now by his niece Marcee, also a figment of Nash’s imagination. On his return to Princeton, Nash is invited to a secret United States Department of defense facility at the Pentagon to crack a complex enemy encryption. When Nash is able to solve the code, William Parcher, a new hallucination, gives him the assignment to look for patterns in the news to help foil Soviet plans, and to report his findings. Things take a terrible turn for Nash and his disorder, when he is â€Å"chased by R...

Relationship of Neanderthals to Modern Humans

Relationship of Neanderthals to Modern Humans After extracting ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals, scientists have obtained a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, yielding important new insights into the evolution of modern humans. No other ancient people have aroused more controversy and confusion over the last century and a half than have the Neanderthals (3,4). There is an on-going debate as to whether they should be considered Homo sapiens.While the idea that modern humans originated in Africa and spread out to other parts of the world is widely accepted, several scenarios have been proposed to account for the replacement of neanderthal populations. The multi regional hypothesis holds that neanderthal populations in Eurasia and Africa were held together by gene flow. Fossil and genetic evidence supports an African origin for Modern Humans (1,3,5,9,10).A decade after scientists first cracked the human genome, researchers announced that they have done t he same for Neanderthals, the species of hominid that existed from roughly 400,000 to 30,000 years ago, when their closest relatives, early modern humans, may have driven them to extinction (1,3,5,9,10). Led by ancient-DNA expert Svante Paabo of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, scientists reconstructed about 60% of the Neanderthal genome by analyzing tiny chains of ancient DNA extracted from bone fragments of three female Neanderthals excavated in the late 1970s and early '80s from a cave in Croatia (6,8).The bones are 38,000 to 44,000 years old. The genetic information turned up some intriguing findings, indicating, for instance, that at some point after early modern humans migrated out of Africa, they mingled and mated with Neanderthals, possibly in the Middle East or North Africa as much as 80,000 years ago (5,7,10). If that is the case, it occurred significantly earlier than scientists who support the interbreeding hypothesis would have expected. Com parisons with DNA from modern humans show that some Neanderthal DNA has survived to the present (3,4,7).Moreover, by analyzing ancient DNA alongside modern samples, scientists were able to identify a handful of genetic changes that evolved in modern humans sometime after their ancestors and Neanderthals diverged, 440,000 to 270,000 years ago (2,4). Researchers compared the Neanderthal genome with the genomes of five living people: one San from southern Africa, one Yoruba from West Africa, one Papua New Guinean, one Han Chinese and one French person (2,4,6).Scientists discovered that 1% to 4% of the latter three DNA samples is shared with Neanderthals — proof that Neanderthals and early modern humans interbred. The absence of Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of the two present-day Africans indicates that interbreeding occurred after some root population of early modern humans left Africa but before the species evolved into distinct groups in Europe and Asia (1,3,5,9,10). All stu dies of Neanderthal genomic DNA use material obtained from fossilized Neanderthal bones that are tens of thousands of years old.As one might expect, the quality of the material that can be recovered from such specimens is very poor, as DNA degrades over time. Consequently, there is wide variability in DNA preservation among available Neanderthal specimens, and most Neanderthal bones yield no usable DNA (2,3,4). When present, Neanderthal genomic DNA is recovered in short (50- to 100-bp) fragments (2,3,4) The information content of Neanderthal DNA is also degraded: Individual nucleotides are subject to chemical modification, with deamination of cytosine to uracil the most common lesion (2,4).Moreover, the fragments of Neanderthal genomic DNA are mixed with microbial contaminants that constitute >90% of the recovered DNA. The amount of DNA damage and microbial contamination are dependent on ambient environmental conditions: The ancient specimens that have provided the most intact DNA a re mammoth remains recovered from permafrost. These specimens often include preserved hair shafts and soft tissues from which relatively high-quality DNA can be recovered (2,4,5).None of the Neanderthal specimens providing the DNA for whole-genome sequencing approach this level of preservation (2,4,5,6). In addition to these challenges, ancient specimens frequently become contaminated with modern human DNA during handling and DNA extraction (2). This poses obvious problems for distinguishing modern human from Neanderthal DNA, since the frequency of single-base mismatches between the two genomes is estimated to be

The, The Road, And The Original Trilogy Of Star Wars

Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist of Stanford University famed for the notorious Zimbardo Prison Experiment once said that â€Å"Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.† In hindsight, it’s a greatly fitting reflection on the Zimbardo Prison Experiment when so many otherwise innocent people started abusing their power simply because they could. However, the quote, in other words, means that only those who can act in the highest moral standards regardless of what is instinctual as well as forced by the environment are the â€Å"heroes,† or people embodying the purest virtues of humanity. Throughout some works of literature such as The Road, The Kite Runner, and the original trilogy of Star Wars, authors not only display humanity’s struggle between the noblest of ideals and the basest of emotions, but also depict the eventual triumph of hum anity over the basest of emotions. The Road is a novel by Cormac McCarthy depicting the toil of a man and a boy in a rather depressing world. However, on a larger scale, the man symbolizes the need for survival based instinctive action whereas the boy represents the pure virtue that is seldom found in a post apocalyptic world. First, the pair approach the man struck by lighting and the boy desires to help. However, the man understands the futility of any help for the man as well as the need to conserve resources. The man claims toShow MoreRelatedThe Story Of Star Wars1213 Words   |  5 Pagesneed to start with the story of Star Wars. In 19xx George Lucas has an idea that become Star Wars. 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