Movies For A Scientific Mind

摘要

It will be a good year for films about science, judging from the screenings at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, held in Park City, Utah, last month. Aside from environmental documentaries, some of the more intriguing films on offer examined the human mind.rnThe documentary Boy Interrupted chronicled the life of a teen with bipolar disorder who jumped to his death after his parents took him off lithium, and Over the Hills and Far Away followed a couple scouring Mongolia for a shaman to cure their son's autism. Two fiction films, starring Kevin Spacey and Chazz Palminteri, told the stories of psychiatrists negotiating their own mental breakdowns.rnSome of the best films got inside the twisted minds of fighters. Bronson made theatre of the psychopathic exploits of a British prisoner, and the documentary Tyson wove the musings of the boxer into a portrait of an exquisitely vulnerable man. Not all films reached this standard. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, about a female anthropologist studying how men view sex, did not retain the cranky charm of David Foster Wallace's novel. Adam, in which a schoolteacher falls for a young engineer with Asperger's syndrome, was stiff and preachy. Yet it won the Alfred P. Sloan prize for films depicting scientists.