August 25, 2015

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Today in Movie Culture: Honest 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Trailer, the G-Rated Version of 'Fight Club' and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Movie Takedown of the Day:

Okay, it’s not so much a takedown this time, but Honest Trailers does make a few jokes at the expense of Mad Max: Fury Road while also being totally truthful about its awesomeness:

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Movie Redo of the Day:

People of all ages should be able to enjoy Fight Club. Now your kids can, too, with this G-rated animated version:

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Hollywood Satire of the Day:

Funny or Die shows us the real reason that women don’t direct more action movies, starring Catherine Hardwicke, Nicole Holofcener and other great filmmakers (via Film School Rejects):

Vintage Image of the Day:

Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo in Rashomon. Akira Kurosawa‘s masterpiece, which remains the point of reference for all movies with multiple points of view, opened on this day in Tokyo 65 years ago. It would arrive in America in late 1951.

Supercut of the Day:

Jason Statham has punched a lot of people over the years. Just how many? This supercut not only showcases them all, but it also runs a counter to tally them up (via Live for Films):

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Movie Studio Tour of the Day:

RocketJump Film School takes us on a tour of Universal Studios Costume Department, which rents out to professional costume designers, including those working for web content providers.

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Cosplay of the Day:

Pets aren’t allowed at Comic-Con, but that doesn’t mean cats can’t cosplay at their favorite characters from The Fifth Element (via Fashionably Geek):

Filmmakers in Focus:

Video essay master Jacob T. Swinney showcases the POV shots in the movies of the Coen Brothers:

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Movie Trivia of the Day:

Think you know everything about the Back to the Future trilogy? Let’s see if CineFix can stump you with this list of 9 bits of trivia:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

Douglas Sirk‘s melodrama masterpiece All That Heaven Allows, starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, made its debut in London on this day 60 years ago. Watch the original trailer for its U.S. release a few months later below.

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Justin Wilson, IndyCar Driver Who Died Monday, Helps 6 With Organ Donations

Justin Wilson, seen here in May, had designated himself as an organ donor. "He just keeps setting the bar higher," his younger brother, Stefan, said Tuesday.

Justin Wilson, seen here in May, had designated himself as an organ donor. “He just keeps setting the bar higher,” his younger brother, Stefan, said Tuesday. Sarah Crabill/Getty Images hide caption

itoggle caption Sarah Crabill/Getty Images

One day after the racing community was shocked by the death of driver Justin Wilson at age 37, news has emerged that Wilson, a well-known advocate for charities who often spoke about his dyslexia, donated his organs to others — and gave vital help to six people.

Wilson died Monday after suffering a head injury during a race at the Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa., Sunday. He was struck by airborne debris from another car and then crashed into a wall on the track.

A native of Sheffield, England, Wilson raced in Formula 1 before moving to the U.S. In racing circles, the 6-foot, 4-inch Brit was often viewed as a gracious and friendly driver whose talent allowed him to overcome setbacks and compete against drivers who often had superior cars.

Wilson is survived by his wife, Julia, and two daughters, ages 5 and 7. His younger brother and fellow racer, Stefan, said on Twitter Tuesday that Justin Wilson’s organ donation “saved 6 lives today.”

With #giftoflife @justin_wilson saved 6 lives today. He just keeps setting the bar higher. Keep Julia & the girls in your prayers #myherojw

— Stefan Wilson (@stef_wilson) August 25, 2015

From the Racer website:

” ‘It sums up who he was; he’s touching people he doesn’t even know, and it shows what kind of person Justin Wilson was,’ said Stefan, who was with his brother when he passed. ‘We lost him yesterday, and it’s one of those tough questions that come up afterwards. He carried a donor card, they asked us, and we clarified that he wanted to donate. It’s a tough thing to consider; you want him to be whole, but it’s something he’d discussed with Julia and we honored what he wanted and went ahead with it.”

Tributes to the driver have flowed forth on Twitter and elsewhere; Tony DiZinno, a journalist who covered him for years, wrote an appreciation of Wilson, saying the driver smiled through the mechanical problems and contract uncertainties of racing.

DiZinno writes:

“Wilson’s most heroic drive likely came in the 2006 season finale at Mexico City. Despite breaking a small bone in his right wrist, Wilson left would-be substitute Adam Carroll waiting in the wings and made a triumphant, surprise return. He damn near beat Bourdais with one hand, losing out only by several tenths at race’s end.”

Wilson had seven career Indy car wins; he also competed in several endurance races, co-driving the winning car in the 24 Hours of Daytona in 2012. He drove for the Andretti Autosport team for several races this season.

Speaking about Wilson, Road Racing Club President Bobby Rahal said:

“Losing his life in an incident that was beyond his control is difficult to accept. His expert driving skills and keen awareness of all that was going on around him could not save him. We mourn his passing and will honor his memory as a championship-caliber driver who left us way too soon.”

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Online Magazine Searches For The Worst Store Name Puns

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NPR’s Ari Shapiro and Audie Cornish talk to Reyhan Harmanci of the website Atlas Obscura about its reader contest to select the worst businesses that use puns in their names.

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

There is a subset of puns – businesses that name themselves based on a pun. You know, the kind of thing you see on a storefront sign that makes you groan or maybe laugh, depending on your mood.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

So, for example, I’ve been living in East London for the last couple years in the neighborhood where actually Jack the Ripper operated, and there is a hair salon near my apartment called Jack The Clipper.

CORNISH: That’s a very good one. Another good one is an e-cigarette emporium named Darth Vapor.

SHAPIRO: You know, if there were only a map of businesses with names like this so you could seek them out or maybe steer clear of them.

CORNISH: Well, Ari, it’s happening.

SHAPIRO: Yes.

CORNISH: Reyhan Harmanci is on the case. She’s with the online magazine Atlas Obscura, and she’s asking for you or anyone to submit your favorite punny business names. Reyhan Harmanci, welcome to the show.

REYHAN HARMANCI: Thank you, guys.

CORNISH: First, tell us how this idea came about.

HARMANCI: Well, it’s been a source of much discussion in Atlas Obscura group chat room, and being a place called Atlas Obscura, we traffic in a lot of maps. So this has been a pet project for the last few months.

CORNISH: It’s like lunchroom chatter, basically, you guys going back and forth about maybe business names you’ve seen that you thought, oh, that’s a groaner.

HARMANCI: Yeah. And one of the reasons why we decided to it is when we would bring it up to other people, their response was like, oh, man, there was a place in my hometown or I just drove by a weird nail salon. It felt like it was ripe for some mapping.

SHAPIRO: What kind of trends are you seeing with the submissions you’ve gotten so far?

HARMANCI: Well, it’s funny you mentioned a hair salon in London. I just looked today. We have had already over 600 submissions, and there’s at least 10 different Curl Up And Dyes.

CORNISH: (Laughter).

SHAPIRO: Oh, D-Y-E, Curl Up And Dye.

HARMANCI: Yes, D-Y-E, yeah. So we’re seeing – I mean, I think the bulk have been categorized as restaurants – a lot of Thai restaurants in there. Washington, D.C., is extremely well represented. I think it’s the city with the most submissions thus far.

SHAPIRO: Here in D.C., we have a Bow Tie. We have a Titanic.

HARMANCI: Yes, yes.

CORNISH: Oh, Titanic, yeah, I never thought about that.

HARMANCI: Yes. Other places have a Thaiphoon, appeThaizing. For Vietnamese restaurants, there’s also a lot of submissions involving pho.

SHAPIRO: P-H-O – the Vietnamese soup.

HARMANCI: Yes, exactly, the soup. Beverly Hills apparently has a 9021Pho.

SHAPIRO: Pho.

CORNISH: Very nice.

SHAPIRO: Reyhan Harmanci, how do you anticipate people using this map? Are they going to seek these places out or are they going to avoid them as best they can?

HARMANCI: I will leave that to the discretion of the reader. I think that puns – it’s a funny thing. It’s not like a ha ha thing. It’s kind of like a gut feeling of, like, oof.

(LAUGHTER)

SHAPIRO: Can you distinguish between a great pun and a terrible pun, or are they actually the same thing?

HARMANCI: I think they’re actually the same thing.

CORNISH: Really?

HARMANCI: Yes. I think that the feeling you get from a great pun and a terrible pun is quite similar.

CORNISH: (Laughter).

SHAPIRO: I saw a falafel shop called Pita Pan.

(LAUGHTER)

SHAPIRO: Isn’t that good?

CORNISH: I see how you’re…

SHAPIRO: Pita Pan.

CORNISH: You’re amused. I’m appalled. You’re right. It’s kind of like two sides of the same coin.

SHAPIRO: Two halves of the same coin.

(LAUGHTER)

CORNISH: Reyhan Harmanci – she’s from the online magazine Atlas Obscura. She’s partnering with the news aggregator Digg to create an interactive map of American businesses with pun-based names. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

HARMANCI: Thank you guys so much.

CORNISH: And for people who still want to sneak in some of their top choices, how can they submit to the map?

HARMANCI: You can go to AtlasObscura.com/puns.

Copyright © 2015 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Why Your Doctor Won't Friend You On Facebook

Patients of the Minnesota-based St. Cloud Medical Group can follow a public page on Facebook.

Patients of the Minnesota-based St. Cloud Medical Group can follow a public page on Facebook. Meredith Rizzo/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR

Doctors’ practices are increasingly trying to reach their patients online. But don’t expect your doctor to “friend” you on Facebook – at least, not just yet.

Physicians generally draw a line: Public professional pages – focused on medicine, similar to those other businesses offer – are catching on. Some might email with patients. But doctors aren’t ready to share vacation photos and other more intimate details with patients, or even to advise them on medication or treatment options via private chats. They’re hesitant to blur the lines between personal lives and professional work and nervous about the privacy issues that could arise in discussing specific medical concerns on most Internet platforms.

Some of that may eventually change. One group, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, broke new ground this year in its latest social media guidelines. It declined to advise members against becoming Facebook friends, instead leaving it to physicians to decide.

“If the physician or health care provider trusts the relationships enough … we didn’t feel like it was appropriate to really try to outlaw that,” said Nathaniel DeNicola, an OB-GYN and clinical associate at the University of Pennsylvania, who helped write the ACOG guidelines.

But even the use of these professional pages raises questions: How secure are these forums for talking about often sensitive health information? When does using one complicate the doctor-patient relationship? Where should boundaries be drawn?

For patients, connecting with a physician’s office or group practice on Facebook can be a simple way to keep up with basic health news. It’s not unlike following a favorite sports team, your child’s middle school or the local grocery store.

One Texas-based obstetrics and gynecology practice, for instance, uses a public Facebook page to share tips about pregnancy and childcare, with posts ranging from suggestions on how to stay cool in the summer to new research on effective exercise for post-birth weight gain. Practices have also been known to share healthy recipes, medical research news, and scheduling details for the flu shot season.

“I have people come up to me and say, ‘I follow you on Facebook — thank you for posting this particular article. It helped me and my husband and my family,’ ” said Lisa Shaver, a primary care physician based in Portland, Ore.

But unless they’re already friends, she won’t add patients to her personal account, where, she said, she posts less health information and more cat videos.

Historically, professional groups including the American College of Physicians and American Academy of Family Physicians have advised against communicating through personal Facebook pages. The American Medical Association notes social media can be a valuable way to spread health information, but urged doctors in its 2010 guidelines to separate their personal and professional online identities to “maintain professional boundaries.”

Finding ways to use Facebook and other forms of social media to connect with patients — even if it may just be through professional pages — fits a trend in which patients seek more equal footing with their doctors, said Zack Berger, an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies patient-doctor relationships and social media.

It also follows what James Colbert, a hospitalist at Massachusetts-based Newton Wellesley Hospital, described as the growing consumer approach to medicine, including the notion that patients should be able to reach their physicians at all hours. Colbert is also an instructor at Harvard Medical School who researches how patients want to fit social technology into their health care.

Email can be a particularly convenient method, though it isn’t without concerns. Eva Schweber, 44, emails her doctor from a personal account and sends messages through an online portal — a more digitally secure system that is being adopted by a growing number of practices. The portal, she said, is for discussing complex, specific information. She’ll email her doctor from her personal email for less private concerns: scheduling, filling prescriptions and asking if certain symptoms might warrant a checkup.

“The unsecure email is easier, in that I can do it from my phone, my tablet, whatever,” said Schweber, of Portland, Ore.

In a recent study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, almost 20 percent of patient respondents reported trying to contact doctors through Facebook, and almost 40 percent through email. “Patients want to communicate with doctors [in whatever way] is convenient,” said Joy Lee, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the study’s lead author.

Doctors don’t yet seem to share that enthusiasm, Colbert said.

Meanwhile, security questions persist.

Social networking platforms aren’t usually digitally encrypted, increasing the odds they could get hacked or shared with third parties. The same worries hold true for other, casual forms of online communication such as email and text-messaging.

That means doctors who discuss specific health concerns with patients through those could break the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the patient privacy law.

“Those concerns are always going to be there,” said David Fleming, past president of the American College of Physicians. “How private is it when we share, when we talk to people? … Once I’ve written it or once I’ve emailed it, it’s gone, and I have no control.”

But because HIPAA was written before email and social media’s ascent, it may not address patient preferences or behavior, Colbert said. With more patients becoming comfortable using personal accounts for health needs, he said, the law perhaps deserves another look.

“Should we allow patients to be able to share or send messages without going through these privacy safeguards if they’re willing to do so? Or do we say that that’s not safe and even if patients don’t care about privacy we need to protect them,” he said. “That’s an open question.”

That public nature is a real worry for patients like Katie Cardenas, 45, who lives in Garner, N.C. She doesn’t think Facebook is secure enough for personal medical details. For sensitive information, she’ll usually send messages through a patient portal, the more secure website her doctor’s practice has set up.

Doctors could address that, several said, by using social media in other ways. These include maintaining active Twitter presences and professional Facebook pages for less-tailored health tips. That way, patients can get useful information and a sense of their doctors as people, but privacy stays intact and physicians maintain distance.

At the Minnesota-based St. Cloud Medical Group, patients can follow a public page. Doctors who are part of the practice post updates with safety tips and seasonal health reminders, or use the page to coordinate and publicize small projects, such as a week-long initiative geared to reducing children’s screen time.

Julie Anderson, a family physician who is also part of the practice, sees the value in this option, but doesn’t personally befriend patients on Facebook. Beyond patient privacy, she said, she fears blurring her personal and professional lives, or patients using that access to seek extra care when she’s off the clock.

“I’ve known colleagues that have friended somebody and have had inappropriate questions asked online, in terms of kind of abusing service,” she said. “Or abusing that … Facebook friendship, where they’re asking medical advice and you’re not even their physician.”

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Today in Movie Culture: 'Toy Story' and 'Straight Outta Compton' Meet Batman Villains and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Movie Mashup of the Day:

Can you guess what “Toy Squad” is? That’s right, a mashup featuring footage from Toy Story and audio from the Suicide Squad trailer (via Cinematic Montage Creators).

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Song Parody of the Day:

Speaking of DC Comics characters, in honor of Straight Outta Compton holding onto its box office crown this weekend, here’s a new parody of the title song as performed by Batman villains. Here is “Straight Outta Gotham”:

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Supercut of the Day:

Speaking of Batman, he may a good guy, but he’s also a killer. Here is a supercut counting all the lives he’s ended in all of his movies:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Yesterday was the birthday of Bolaji Badejo, the 6’10” (some places list him at 7’2″) actor who played the alien in Alien. He would have turned 62, but he died 23 years ago. Here he is in the iconic costume:

Cosplay of the Day:

Does Iron Man‘s armor work underwater? Either way, this Iron Merman cosplay looks like a great way to get the Avenger seaworthy (via Fashionably Geek):

Star Wars of the Day:

I’ll let the Facebook post below explain today’s adorable bit of Star Wars fandom, which is followed by a video of the fan in action at Disneyland (via Fashionably Geek).

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Fan Poster of the Day:

Fitting in with our earlier post on The Karate Kid today, here’s a fan-made poster representing the fight between Johnny and Daniel as cobra vs. crane (via Geek Tyrant):

Video Essay of the Day:

We’ve seen plenty of supercuts of people breaking the fourth wall in movies. Now here’s a video essay from Now You See It on how the technique is used in those movies:

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Movie Redo of the Day:

How do they tell the story of Mad Max: Fury Road in the world of Mad Max? Probably through oral history and spoken legend, but maybe through hieroglyphics, like so (via Neatorama):

Classic Trailer of the Day:

Sam Raimi‘s Darkman hit theaters on this day 25 years ago, and although it’s only considered a cult classic today, it was actually the box office champ its opening weekend. Watch the original trailer for the superhero movie below.

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