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such_heights and sheafrotherdon: ...and Harrison Ford as Dr. Chen (at Angry Asian Man)
Excerpt:
Basically, it's a crappy Lifetime-esque movie about a father with very sick children who takes, wait for it, extraordinary measures to save his children, through starting a pharmaceutical company to produce the medicine they need. There's just one thing, though. The geneticist who develops the cure, played by Harrison Ford, was not, in RL, a gruff old white dude in Nebraska, like the movie wants us to think. He was a graduate of Taiwan University named Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, who was at Duke University at the time and who has been mentioned as a Nobel candidate.
Roger Ebert makes a really excellent point in the article I just linked -- Ford's character isn't even good. There's absolutely no reason for the fictional Dr. Stonehill to have replaced the real-life Dr. Chen at ALL, and one can only imagine that the story would have been far better in innumerable ways had they, you know, stuck with the ACTUAL FACTS. (It's not just the Chen/Stonehill switch that the story got wrong, btw -- Ebert goes into other factual hand-waving, as well.)
I haven't seen the movie, but I HAVE read the script, back when it was The Untitled Crowley Project -- I interned for the production company behind this movie a couple of springs ago. At the time that I read the script, I was totally aware of how crappy a script it was, but had not thought to go through and fact-check. What the scriptwriters and the people behind this movie did to the actual story is not just sad and upsetting on a racefail and fact-fail front, it also reduced a complex and potentially very compelling story into something that nearly put me to sleep while reading it. I can't imagine the movie is any better.
such_heights and sheafrotherdon: ...and Harrison Ford as Dr. Chen (at Angry Asian Man)Excerpt:
Extradorinary Measures, starring Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser, opens in theaters today. It's a medical drama about a desperate father who finances a cure for the rare Pompe disease that is killing his children. It doesn't look very good, but it's noteworthy as yet another movie that should've starred Asians. Or at least one Asian actor.
Basically, it's a crappy Lifetime-esque movie about a father with very sick children who takes, wait for it, extraordinary measures to save his children, through starting a pharmaceutical company to produce the medicine they need. There's just one thing, though. The geneticist who develops the cure, played by Harrison Ford, was not, in RL, a gruff old white dude in Nebraska, like the movie wants us to think. He was a graduate of Taiwan University named Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, who was at Duke University at the time and who has been mentioned as a Nobel candidate.
Roger Ebert makes a really excellent point in the article I just linked -- Ford's character isn't even good. There's absolutely no reason for the fictional Dr. Stonehill to have replaced the real-life Dr. Chen at ALL, and one can only imagine that the story would have been far better in innumerable ways had they, you know, stuck with the ACTUAL FACTS. (It's not just the Chen/Stonehill switch that the story got wrong, btw -- Ebert goes into other factual hand-waving, as well.)
I haven't seen the movie, but I HAVE read the script, back when it was The Untitled Crowley Project -- I interned for the production company behind this movie a couple of springs ago. At the time that I read the script, I was totally aware of how crappy a script it was, but had not thought to go through and fact-check. What the scriptwriters and the people behind this movie did to the actual story is not just sad and upsetting on a racefail and fact-fail front, it also reduced a complex and potentially very compelling story into something that nearly put me to sleep while reading it. I can't imagine the movie is any better.