Science!

July 8th, 2009 at 04:58pm Will Pfeifer

Simon Hsu isn’t just any film fan. When he’s not watching movies, he spends his time doing research on protein structure at the University of California San Diego’s School of Medicine. He’s been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and will be publishing in an upcoming issue of Biochemistry.

But he is a film fan, and in this post from The House Next Door, he lists and discusses five movie scientists. Skipping the usual subjects who tend to put the word “mad” in front of the word “scientist,” he comes up with some intriguing selections — including one of my personal favorites, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) from Wes Anderson’s THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. Sure, he’s more moviemaker than scientist (and more goof-off than anything else), but as Hsu points out, he’s on a constant search for the truth — not so much in Anderson’s deliberately fake deep blue sea as much as in his own head.

The more I think of it, the more I love THE LIFE AQUATIC. I’m putting together a list of the best movies of the decade for later this year, and this largely ignored oddball epic keeps bobbing up to the top. Here, in case you’ve never seen it, is a sample of its strange charms…

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