November 15, 2016

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Today in Movie Culture: 'A Wrinkle in Time' Mannequin Challenge, 'Harry Potter' Franchise Recap and More

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

Production Video of the Day:

Ava DuVernay and the very inclusive crew of A Wrinkle in Time revealed their April 6, 2018, release date in a great mannequin challenge video.

Late entry! 102 crew members! 27 departments! Release date news! #WrinkleInTime #InclusiveCrew #MannequinChallenge pic.twitter.com/5GfmztP9fI

— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC) November 14, 2016

Franchise Recap of the Day:

To get you ready for this week’s release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, here’s a recap of the Harry Potter series in Lego form:

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Film Score Cover of the Day:

Also in honor of the Wizarding World returning, here’s an a capella cover of the Harry Potter theme:

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Music Video of the Day:

Speaking of cover songs, here’s a music video for Alessia Cara’s version of the Moana tune “How Far I’ll Go” (via Twitter):

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Mashup of the Day:

Speaking of Disney properties, technically the X-Men are a Disney property, via Marvel Comics, so this mashup with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from Darth Blender is a natural fit:

Movie Takedown of the Day:

Still speaking of Disney animated features, Honest Trailers filets Finding Dory by calling it lesser Pixar and only made for money:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Beverly D’Angelo, who was born on this day in 1951, poses with Chevy Chase in 1982 for a publicity still for National Lampoon’s Vacation:

Filmmaker in Focus:

Kino highlights point of view shots in the films of John Carpenter for a look at the relationship between the camera and the subject (via Film School Rejects):

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Cosplay of the Day:

It’s always fun when cosplayers reenact a specific scene, as these guys did for Ghostbusters (via Paul Feig):

@paulfeig and @katiedippold taught us the importance of the Swiss Army knife. Lesson learned. pic.twitter.com/GHdlj1DfE5

— Ghostbusters of BC (@Ghostbusters_BC) November 14, 2016

Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Space Jam. Watch the original trailer for the Michael Jordan-led Looney Tunes movie below.

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and

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Following Election, NRA Goes On 'Offense'; Here's What It Could Aim To Do

Range safety officers look over a line of 1,000 Henry Golden Boy Silver rifles before an NRA-sponsored event in Phoenix. Each participant took two shots, celebrating the presidential election results. Nathan Rott/NPR hide caption

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Nathan Rott/NPR

“Our time is now.” That’s the message from Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, to his group’s members and gun owners across America, following last week’s election.

With a Republican-held Congress and Donald Trump headed to the White House — helped, in no small part, by the support of the NRA — big changes could be coming to the nation’s gun laws.

At an NRA-sponsored event Monday, in the desert north of Phoenix, more than 1,000 gun owners and enthusiasts gathered for a so-called 1000 Man Shoot. Men and women from 16 states lined up shoulder to shoulder to fire 1,000 Henry Golden Boy Silver rifles simultaneously. They fired two rounds at a long row of targets. In the cheers after the second, a shooting safety officer in a lime green shirt and red hat said: “Can you hear us now, Hillary?”

“We made history last week,” Pete Brownell, the first vice president of the NRA, told the crowd. “And I have to tell you it feels great to be on offense again.”

Brownell and other gun rights advocates say that they’ve had to be on defense for the past eight years under the Obama administration.

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“We’ve always had to be looking out for how our rights are going to be taken away from us as individuals; how our constitutional rights are going to be impinged upon,” Brownell says. “Now, the ball’s going to be in our court.”

There are a number of laws that the NRA and gun enthusiasts would like to see change under the Trump administration. We’ve listed some of those laws below and asked Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at the UCLA School of Law and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, what the chances are for each proposal.

We should note that this is not a comprehensive list. And if you’re wondering why it’s not longer, Winkler says, “It’s because the NRA has been so successful over the last 40 years in American politics that it’s already accomplished almost everything on the list of its agenda items.”

1. National reciprocity for concealed-carry permits

This is the biggest-ticket item for the NRA and it’s the most likely to happen. Trump, a concealed-carry-permit holder, has said that concealed carry “is a right, not a privilege,” and that a permit should be valid in all 50 states, similar to a driver’s license.

That’s what national reciprocity would do — it would give a concealed-carry-permit holder in a state such as Texas the right to carry a gun in a state such as New York, regardless of New York’s concealed-carry laws. There are two versions of this law that have already been proposed in Congress, the broader of which would allow a person to get a concealed-carry permit outside his state of residence.

“That’s the more controversial version of national reciprocity,” Winkler says. “I’m not sure that’s the one we’ll get, but the NRA is most likely going to push for the broadest version of national reciprocity.”

Winkler believes that some version is likely to pass, but he says that Democrats could filibuster. He also notes that some Republicans could withhold support from national reciprocity because of states’ rights.

“If you believe in any local autonomy, as Republicans claim to, then the broad version of reciprocity undermines that significantly,” Winkler says. “Because a state or city like Los Angeles would no longer be able to control who carries guns in public.”

2. An end to gun-free military zones

At a rally in January, Trump said, “My first day, there’s no more gun-free zones.” He was talking about schools and military bases. He later clarified his position on schools, saying that school resource officers or teachers should be allowed to carry them. He has not publicly changed his opinion on military bases.

Currently, most gun owners on military bases must register their firearm and store it in an armory while on base. The only people who can carry guns while on a military base are on-duty military, state or local police.

There have been pushes by the NRA and Republican lawmakers to allow more military personnel to carry firearms on base, following mass shootings at Fort Hood in 2009 and the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard in 2013, but the Department of Defense has not changed its position. Under Trump, it might.

“This is very easy,” Winkler says. “Allowing carrying of firearms on military bases is something that the president will probably be able to do through executive order. I believe that [Trump] will.”

3. Removing suppressors from the National Firearms Act

Gun owners can already use suppressors — or silencers — in most states, but gun rights groups say that the process to get one is onerous. Suppressors are regulated under the National Firearms Act, which was originally enacted in 1934 following the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to tax the making and transfer of certain firearms. The underlying purpose of the act, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was to “curtail, if not prohibit, transactions in NFA firearms.”

Gun rights advocates and shooters have long argued that suppressors should not be regulated by the NFA and have made a public health argument for their use: Guns are loud. “Everybody that you know that’s an old shooter is deaf,” says Michelle Camp, the leader of the Utah chapter of The Well-Armed Woman. “To have the ability to get [suppressors] easier would be really helpful.”

Winkler says it would take legislative action to get suppressors off the NFA list and that a piece of legislation already exists: the Hearing Protection Act of 2015, proposed in the House of Representatives. Winkler says he doesn’t expect it to be a priority for Congress, but “if the NRA decides to get behind silencer legislation, I think it will pass,” he says. Hours after Trump won last week’s election, the NRA dropped this tweet:

4. Revamping federal background check process

Nobody is entirely happy with the federal government’s current background check process or its database, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Gun control groups argue that there are too many loopholes in it, and many gun rights groups concur — a rare show of agreement — though not in the details.

The system is supposed to prevent a felon or someone who is mentally ill from purchasing a gun, but it has obstacles like underfunding and inaccurate, out-of-date data. Gun control groups would like to see things in the current system fixed, including the straw purchasing loophole. Gun rights groups say they’d like to find ways to get the system better data to work with.

During his campaign, Trump said that he was against expanding background checks and that the current system needs to be fixed.

“Unfortunately, I feel the efforts to ‘fix’ the background check system will be really efforts to gut the background check system,” Winkler says. “To make it less effective, less streamlined, and make it harder for prosecutors to find gun criminals. That’s been the NRA’s practice with regard to background checks in the past.”

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Biomedical Researchers Ponder Future After Trump Election

The federal government spends more than $30 billion a year to fund the National Institutes of Health. What changes are in store under a new administration? NIH/Flickr hide caption

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NIH/Flickr

What could the world of medical research look like under a Trump administration?

It’s hardly an idle question.

The federal government spends more than $30 billion a year to fund the National Institutes of Health. That’s the single largest chunk of federal research funding spent outside the Pentagon’s sphere of influence.

Policy insiders confronted that question — albeit with an acute shortage of actual data — Monday at a meeting of health advocates in New York City.

The biotech and pharmaceutical companies, which are at the end of the drug-development pipeline, see encouraging signs for their enterprises. The stock market didn’t swoon. Oft-mentioned tax breaks could conceivably encourage drugmakers that have been harboring hundreds of billions of dollars in profits overseas, to bring some of that money back to the U.S.

And the Trump campaign’s anti-regulation rhetoric also rings as good news in the ears of Big Pharma.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign to rein in prescription drug prices also looks to be on the ropes, which may be more welcome news for companies than for consumers who have been shocked by rapid price increases.

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At the Partnering for Cures meeting, Kay Holcombe, senior vice president of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a trade group, said she hoped Clinton’s drug-price campaign would fade. Holcombe told attendees that she prefers “a nonshrieking environment.”

What’s good for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry may not necessarily appeal to President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters, however. It doesn’t translate to rapid gains for struggling workers in the Rust Belt.

And there are fewer tea leaves to read when it comes to Trump’s support for universities and other government-funded parts of the nation’s biomedical enterprise. His campaign said little about research and development in general, or health research in particular.

“The fact that he did not take an ideological position may be a positive thing,” said Tanisha Carino, vice president for U.S. public policy at U.K.-based GlaxoSmithKline. Perhaps there’s a blank slate that can be influenced by people who care deeply about these issues.

She noted that science is an international endeavor (her company alone operates in 150 countries), and it could be harmed if isolationism were to hit medical research and related industries.

Antibiotic resistance, for example, is a global problem, with drug-resistant germs emerging and spreading all over the world. “We as a country can’t solve that,” she said.

And Keith Yamamoto, vice chancellor for science policy at the University of California, San Francisco, said he hopes there’s an opening to remind the Trump administration and its supporters in Congress that NIH research dollars are spent in their districts and support robust economies.

He also said he’d argue that bolstering basic biomedical research could speed up innovation and reduce the expense of drug development. “Let’s get back to the basics,” Yamamoto said. “That’s the kind of message that I would try to send.”

Yamamoto is among a group of prominent scientists who had drawn up policy plans for the next administration. Yamamoto acknowledged that he wasn’t exactly expecting to have the conversation with the Trump transition team.

There is at least one person close to Trump who has long been an advocate for a significant cash infusion for medical research: Newt Gingrich. He’s on some shortlists for a position that could direct his attention elsewhere. Even so, people at the advocates’ meeting in New York nodded in ready agreement when someone suggested that he’s one key person to watch.

You can contact Richard Harris with comments: rharris@npr.org.

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Jamaican Bobsled Team Stranded After Van Breaks Down

David Schnerch came across the stranded team in Alberta, Canada, while he was running errands. He drove the team to Canada Olympic Park. The 1988 debut of the team inspired the movie Cool Runnings.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I’m David Greene. Out for an errand in Alberta, Canada, David Schnerch came across a bobsled team from Jamaica – yes, the Jamaican bobsled team, made famous by their 1988 Olympic debut. They’re still at it – until their van broke down. Schnerch wasn’t having that. He drove the team to the Olympic Park himself. And afterwards, with another competition to get to, Schnerch handed them the keys to his truck, saying just focus on the race; we’ll get you what you need. It’s MORNING EDITION.

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