March 30, 2017

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Today in Movie Culture: 'Big Bang Theory' Redoes 'Justice League' Trailer, Brad Pitt as Cable in 'Deadpool 2' and More

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

Reworked Trailer of the Day:

Darth Blender redid the Justice League trailer using costumed clips from The Big Bang Theory:

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Dream Casting Rendition of the Day:

With the news that Brad Pitt was considering playing Cable in Deadpool 2, BossLogic shows us what that could have looked like:

Thanks to your feedback on the last Pitt cable I redid it in a front view and went with a more metallic arm, hope you like – @robertliefeldpic.twitter.com/gJ5fYJuUjy

— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) March 29, 2017

Fan Art of the Day:

Speaking of X-Men characters, here’s an awesome piece by artist Fajareka Setiawan showing what Logan‘s Dafne Keen would look like in the famous Wolverine costume (via Geek Tyrant):

Movie Trivia of the Day:

With the Ghost in the Shell remake opening this weekend, ScreenCrush shares trivia about the animated original:

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Movie Science of the Day:

Also inspired by Ghost in the Shell, Kyle Hill scientifically explains how much our “ghost,” or consciousness, would weigh:

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Movie Comparison of the Day:

And one more: Couch Tomato shows 24 reasons why Ghost in the Shell is the same movie as I Robot:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Warren Beatty, who turns 70 today, gets some direction from Arthur Penn on the set of Bonnie and Clyde in 1966:

Actor in the Spotlight:

The Onion humorously looks at the issue of movie ratings with specific attention to the work of actor Willem Dafoe:

Why Does It Seem Like Movie Ratings Are So Much Harder On Willem Dafoe Sex Than Willem Dafoe Violence? pic.twitter.com/BrwysJhjKy

— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 29, 2017

Supercut of the Day:

Burger Fiction would like you to laugh nonstop for 12 minutes with this supercut of the funniest movie scenes of all time:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

This weekend is the 40th anniversary of John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday. Watch the original trailer for the classic action thriller below.

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and

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Restaurants Strive For Equitable Wages With Revenue Sharing

Restaurants are trying “revenue sharing” in an attempt to close the wage gap between tipped and not tipped workers, and to help fix the labor shortage in Boston.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Some big city restaurants can’t find enough kitchen staff. Restaurant owners say that’s because of low wages and a gap in pay between employees who get tips and those that don’t. To bridge that gap and raise wages, some restaurants are experimenting with pay structure. Simone Rios of member station WBUR takes us to a Jewish deli in Cambridge, Mass.

SIMON RIOS, BYLINE: The lunchtime rush is over at Mamaleh’s Delicatessen, but the place is still buzzing. Customers nosh on knishes, pastrami and lox. Then there’s the chopped liver being made by line cooks like Marvin Bonilla.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Twenty-three ribs and…

RIOS: He came here three years ago from Honduras.

MARVIN BONILLA: If you want to have a good food, just try our matzo ball soup. You can get our pastrami and the house lox salmon. You will love it.

RIOS: And Bonilla loves his job, but there’s a but. On average at Mamaleh’s, those who work in the front of the house and earn tips make twice as much as people in the kitchen.

BONILLA: If we get busy or we’re slow, we make the same, but for these people, if they got busy, they make more money. And then you see who, like, really do the hard job. We’re like – the back kitchen is the fire of the restaurant, and we’re, like, making the whole food.

RIOS: Restaurant owners say the wage gap is at the root of a shortage of kitchen workers. To address the problem, Mamaleh’s Deli is one of at least a dozen restaurants in the Boston area to adopt what they call revenue sharing. It varies from restaurant to restaurant, but the mechanics of revenue sharing are simple. Take a percentage of sales and funnel it to kitchen workers. At Keith Harmon’s three Boston restaurants, a 3 percent fee on all sales goes directly to the kitchen.

KEITH HARMON: Now what you’re doing is you’re converting the idea that the busier the restaurant is, the better it is for everyone who’s working in back of house.

RIOS: Harmon says that before revenue sharing, tipped employees earned about two and a half times as much as back of the house staff. Now the gap has been cut by about a third. The reason it’s a fee is because simply raising prices would also increase tips and perpetuate the wage gap. And Harmon wanted a way to close the wage gap without eliminating tipping entirely.

HARMON: We didn’t want to alienate the tipstaff to take care of the non-tipstaff, so we kind of came up with this pennies-on-the-dollar approach.

RIOS: Revenue sharing has already taken off in California. A spokesperson for the California Restaurant Association calls revenue sharing the emerging new norm, but it seems to be confined to a handful of wealthy cities on the East and West Coast. At Mamaleh’s Deli in Cambridge, they’re experimenting with raising prices and dedicating 5 percent of food sales to kitchen staff. Dan Meyers is a regular at the Jewish deli, and he says hard work should pay well.

DAN MEYERS: I’m happy to pay another 20 percent. No, really. I mean, it’s a great thing. And it shows that the people running the place and owning the place – it’s not just lip service. They care about their people.

RIOS: Mamaleh’s Deli also cares about keeping its kitchens staffed. The restaurant is constantly hiring, and they hope revenue sharing will reduce turnover. The only thing line cook Marvin Bonilla’s turning over are the potato latkes. He’s beaming at the idea that his pay will go up as much as three dollars an hour.

BONILLA: We are all happy about that. We invited people that are, like – maybe they were looking for a job, and they would, like, maybe want to get a good place to work. This is one of the best place I ever work in my life.

RIOS: And then there are the fringe benefits – all the matzo balls, chopped liver and latke a line cook could want. For NPR News, I’m Simon Rios in Boston.

(SOUNDBITE OF JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE SONG, “WHAT GOES AROUND… COMES AROUND”)

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Why The Newly Proposed Sepsis Treatment Needs More Study

A well-regarded intensive care doctor in Virginia says he has had good success in treating 150 sepsis patients with a mix of IV corticosteroids, vitamin C and vitamin B, along with careful management of fluids. Other doctors want more proof — the sort that comes only via more rigorous tests.

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The astronomer Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Last week, a physician made the extraordinary claim that he had an effective treatment for sepsis, sometimes known as blood poisoning.

Sepsis is a bodywide inflammation, usually triggered by infection, and the leading cause of death in hospitals, taking 300,000 lives a year. So, even a 15 percent improvement in survival would save 40,000 lives — the number of Americans who die on the highway each year, or from breast cancer.

Dr. Paul Marik, a well-regarded intensive care physician at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Va., is the doctor with the extraordinary claim. As we reported last week, he says he has treated about 150 patients with sepsis and that only one died of that often fatal condition (though some died of other causes).

The question is how to find out whether he is right — and, ideally, how to do that quickly.

Marik’s treatment involves a mix of intravenous corticosteroids, vitamin C and vitamin B, along with careful management of fluids. And his experience, so far, falls far short of the “extraordinary evidence” that a claim like his requires.

The first step in getting more evidence is to confront an appropriate skepticism that has grown up around purported treatments for sepsis.

“Nothing has worked despite all the great ideas people have had, often ballyhooed with observational data like this, claiming that it’s a big effect,” says Dr. Robert Califf, who recently returned to Duke University after running the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“So, I’d say the odds are still that it doesn’t work,” Califf says, “but every once in a while something works in an unexpected way.”

He wants to see solid evidence. In the world of medicine, that’s a randomized controlled trial, in which patients are randomly assigned to get the experimental treatment or the standard of care, and neither patients nor medical personnel know who is getting what. An experiment like this should also be run at multiple hospitals.

Considering how big an effect Marik is reporting, “it would take a very small study, done by people independent of him, to prove it,” Califf says. “And then the whole world would benefit,” whatever the results may be.

But these trials don’t happen overnight. There’s no new drug to test, so pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested. The National Institutes of Health, which funds many of these studies, would welcome a research proposal, says Sarah Dunsmore at NIGMS. But the experiment must be designed and approved by researchers first, she says, and then it would likely go into the standard nine-month review process, where it would compete for scarce funds with other research proposals.

Califf just started a nonprofit called the People-Centered Clinical Research Foundation and says this is potentially a project the foundation could fund. Likewise the Society for Critical Care Medicine is interested in sponsoring a study to follow up on the research, says Dr. Craig Coopersmith, an Emory University professor of surgery and associate director of the medical school’s critical care center.

Even so, under the best-case scenario, results wouldn’t be available from a randomized controlled trial for about two years.

Some doctors aren’t waiting. Dr. David Carlbom, medical director of the sepsis program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, heard Marik give a talk about his protocol and decided to offer it to his sepsis patients.

“Because of the potential benefit and I think very few harms, I talk to families when I’m caring for a septic shock patient and discuss this with them and get their consent when trying this therapy,” he says. (Septic shock is a particularly severe form of sepsis.)

Carlbom’s impressions, after just five patients, are strictly impressionistic, not scientific, but he says some patients seem to haveresponded well.

“I don’t know if it’s the medicine; maybe it’s just us taking good care of them,” he says. “Maybe it’s them and their disease. But I was a little surprised. They did seem to heal faster from their septic shock.”

Carlbom says he is an early adopter. Other doctors who work in his hospital’s intensive care unit are taking a “wait and see” approach. Of course, Carlbom is eager for scientific evidence as well.

Dr. Mark Rumbak, a pulmonologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is also trying the protocol. Marik is an old friend, Rumbak says, so he heard about Marik’s treatment months ago. So far, Rumbak has tried it on at least 30 patients, and most have done well, he says.

“Not only do they do better; they do better quickly,” he says. “Within 24 to 48 hours you see the patients responding. It’s actually quite nice, it’s quite dramatic.”

Some of the skepticism around this treatment has arisen because it includes vitamin Cwhich has been hailed repeatedly for its curative powers, though those claims have rarely been backed by solid science.

In this case, Rumbak suspects that vitamin C is making the body more receptive to another part of the treatment — corticosteroids — which are well-established drugs.

Dr. Berry Fowler, head of pulmonary disease at Virginia Commonwealth University’s school of medicine, inspired Marik to use vitamin C in his hospital. Marik had heard about Fowler’s experiments with IV vitamin C for sepsis and so started his own protocol with the mix of vitamins and steroids.

Fowler is now running a controlled trial of vitamin C for sepsis, but his study does not include the corticosteroids or the vitamin B, which are part of the Marik protocol.

Part of the challenge is that there is no agreed-upon treatment for sepsis. Doctors have different beliefs about how much fluid to give patients, which kinds of fluids to give, which kinds of antibiotics and whether to administer corticosteroids. So there is no established “standard care” to use as a clear point of comparison.

Dr. Gordon Bernard, a pulmonary medicine and critical care specialist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who has been studying sepsis for 30 years, is firmly in the skeptics’ camp on this potential treatment.

Bernard says wishful thinking might have led Marik to conclude that only one out of 150 of his patientshas died of sepsis.

“You could spend all day long adjudicating some of these cases, as to whether these people died of sepsis or something else,” Bernard says. That question would get careful scrutiny in a randomized study.

Yet scientists know there’s also a danger in being too skeptical of extraordinary claims, because sometimes they do turn out to be true.

In 1982, two scientists in Australia concluded that stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium and could be treated successfully with antibiotics. It took well over a decade for doctors to believe it and start using that effective treatment.

“We always have to be aware that every now and then something works,” Califf says. “And we don’t want to miss that opportunity.”

You can contact Richard Harris at rharris@npr.org.

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