Word: parallels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones that prevail, those memes best at getting themselves transmitted from human to human are the ones that come to form the human environment...
Does that mean you could go back, kill your own grandfather and keep yourself from being born--a seeming absurdity? Maybe not, say some physicists. In one interpretation of quantum physics, the world splits at each moment into an infinite number of universes that proceed in parallel; if you killed your grandfather, it might be in an alternate universe, so it would have no effect on the universe you inhabit...
...OMIKRON What other game boasts a virtual David Bowie? French designer Quantic Dream drops you into a parallel world that owes much to Blade Runner and 1984. With more than 400 locations--including the club where Bowie's character sings--Omikron is a game you don't so much play as live...
...rapidity, Jewison now whips up righteous lawyers who passionately rail against the judicial system as well as shady police officers who threaten the three Canadians who decide to rally to Carter's cause. And as if we weren't more than inundated with inspirational themes, we even have a parallel story of another poor black boy Lesra Martin (Vicellous Shannon) who also has to overcome hardships of race, and who becomes a good friend of Carter after reading his book...
...especially not to moan the unused talent of the marvelous Hannah in particular. Depalowski is the flattest, most stereo-typical, most singularly bland villain imaginable. The three Canadians, despite interesting flashes, are really nothing more than ornament to the film. And Martin, in Jewison's single-minded determination to parallel his story to Carter's, becomes no more than a rather tedious character...