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https://nerdist.com/article/whirlybird-sundance-review-bob-tur-zoey/
We take the instantaneousness of media for granted. It’s a cliche now, but we all have machines capable of taking high quality video in our pockets. News outlets looking for amazing and disturbing video can now get it from any of dozens of onlookers with a phone. But in years past, breaking news was the purview of gonzo journalists who made a cottage industry out of putting themselves near danger. The new documentary Whirlybird, premiering at Sundance, tells us the complex story of husband-and-wife team Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, who took to the skies and basically invented helicopter news coverage.
Zoey, known then as Bob, was a self-made, adrenaline junkie news finder. Marika was devoted to getting the scoop and delivering the truth. Together they became the biggest names in breaking news during the chaotic ’80s and ’90s in Los Angeles. Their company, Los Angeles News Service, covered everything from the L.A. riots to the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase. And they taped everything. Documentarian Matt Yoka digitized hundreds of hours of LANS’ footage to create a compelling and upsetting view of Los Angeles of the time, and how success caused Tur to hit rock bottom and go on a journey of discovery.
Los Angeles News ServiceThe footage we get in Whirlybird is astonishing. We see the raw footage, including outtakes before and after the live segments on the news. With this, we see a picture of Tur’s demanding perfectionism and how that eventually turned abusive. The documentary has interviews with Tur, Gerrard, their children Katy (now an NBC correspondent) and Jamie, and pilot Larry Welk. It’s an insular look at what was going on, but this is in no way sugar coated. The footage alone paints the picture of someone seething with rage, terrified of failure, and fighting the inner battle of who they really are.
The story at the heart of the documentary is one of loneliness in the face of family, and failure in the face of success. Tur had a heart attack at 35 from the stress of trying to achieve perfection in a field that would forget about you in a week. And as L.A. became less friendly, Tur became harder and more despondent. In addition to the news footage we see a great many home movies; Tur never decompressed, was always on and capturing the “truth,” perhaps at the expense of everything else.
Los Angeles News ServiceZoey Tur looks back on her life as Bob with such regret, and it’s heartbreaking to see how badly she didn’t know how else to be. A self-proclaimed a-hole, Tur reminded me of a less psychotic version of Louis Bloom from Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. When making a name for yourself in the salacious and voyeuristic world of action news, you have to embrace the darkness. When you have a family, that comes at a price. And it’s especially hefty when you work with your significant other in such a line of work. Early on, the dangerous helicopter footage made me nervous; by the end it was Tur’s volatility that was the real terror.
Featured Image: Los Angeles News Service
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
The post In WHIRLYBIRD, The Cost Of A Scoop Is Your Soul (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.
We take the instantaneousness of media for granted. It’s a cliche now, but we all have machines capable of taking high quality video in our pockets. News outlets looking for amazing and disturbing video can now get it from any of dozens of onlookers with a phone. But in years past, breaking news was the purview of gonzo journalists who made a cottage industry out of putting themselves near danger. The new documentary Whirlybird, premiering at Sundance, tells us the complex story of husband-and-wife team Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, who took to the skies and basically invented helicopter news coverage.
Zoey, known then as Bob, was a self-made, adrenaline junkie news finder. Marika was devoted to getting the scoop and delivering the truth. Together they became the biggest names in breaking news during the chaotic ’80s and ’90s in Los Angeles. Their company, Los Angeles News Service, covered everything from the L.A. riots to the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase. And they taped everything. Documentarian Matt Yoka digitized hundreds of hours of LANS’ footage to create a compelling and upsetting view of Los Angeles of the time, and how success caused Tur to hit rock bottom and go on a journey of discovery.
Los Angeles News ServiceThe footage we get in Whirlybird is astonishing. We see the raw footage, including outtakes before and after the live segments on the news. With this, we see a picture of Tur’s demanding perfectionism and how that eventually turned abusive. The documentary has interviews with Tur, Gerrard, their children Katy (now an NBC correspondent) and Jamie, and pilot Larry Welk. It’s an insular look at what was going on, but this is in no way sugar coated. The footage alone paints the picture of someone seething with rage, terrified of failure, and fighting the inner battle of who they really are.
The story at the heart of the documentary is one of loneliness in the face of family, and failure in the face of success. Tur had a heart attack at 35 from the stress of trying to achieve perfection in a field that would forget about you in a week. And as L.A. became less friendly, Tur became harder and more despondent. In addition to the news footage we see a great many home movies; Tur never decompressed, was always on and capturing the “truth,” perhaps at the expense of everything else.
Los Angeles News ServiceZoey Tur looks back on her life as Bob with such regret, and it’s heartbreaking to see how badly she didn’t know how else to be. A self-proclaimed a-hole, Tur reminded me of a less psychotic version of Louis Bloom from Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. When making a name for yourself in the salacious and voyeuristic world of action news, you have to embrace the darkness. When you have a family, that comes at a price. And it’s especially hefty when you work with your significant other in such a line of work. Early on, the dangerous helicopter footage made me nervous; by the end it was Tur’s volatility that was the real terror.
Featured Image: Los Angeles News Service
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
The post In WHIRLYBIRD, The Cost Of A Scoop Is Your Soul (Review) appeared first on Nerdist.
The beauty of coming to a film festival like Sundance is you’re exposed to movies from a cross section of filmmakers, on topics you probably wouldn’t seek out otherwise. Friday night saw the premiere of Eliza Hittman‘s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a movie I didn’t know much about going in. It’s a staggering piece of filmmaking and acting, about a topic that’s uncomfortable to many. It’s one of the most affecting and heartrending movies I’ve seen in quite a while, and all of that with minimal dialogue, resting on next-level performances from two young actors.
Sidney Flanigan plays Autumn, a 17-year-old high school student in blue collar Pennsylvania. She comes from a home of casual substance abuse and works at a grocery store. Autumn begins to suspect, and fear, that she may be pregnant and goes to a clinic for a test. Sure enough, she is. She then has to make a supremely hard decision, and one she can’t make in her home state, lest her parents find out. Her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) decides the two of them should take a road trip to New York where Autumn can get an abortion without anyone finding out. But two underage girls in the big city with very little money is a supremely dangerous situation and as happens, complications arise.
The narrative of the movie is very straightforward, but the journey is everything. So much of the film rests on the face and inner life of Autumn. She doesn’t talk much, but we know so much about her and what she’s feeling and thinking buried under the surface. Flanigan and Ryder have an amazing on screen bond that feels incredibly truthful. Their relationship, their closeness is innate; we don’t need pages of dialogue to get who these girls are and what their plight is. It’s natural and undeniable.
Hittman has a complete grasp of the story she’s telling. It’s not about moralizing or proselytizing but about exploring a very real predicament that hundreds and thousands of young women in America have to deal with. The movie opens with Autumn performing a song in a school talent show, with her family watching; in the middle of it, a teenage boy shouts “slut” at her. This is the world she comes from. Boys can have sex all they want and it’s cool; if girls do it, they’re castigated. And good luck trying to be pregnant on top of that.
The film’s standout scene is Autumn’s pre-procedure interview at Planned Parenthood. The caseworker asks a series of questions to obtain Autumn’s sexual history. Almost the entire scene is a single shot of Autumn, listening to questions and asked to answer “Never, rarely, sometimes, or always.” With each subsequent question, though no specifics are ever given, we get a full picture of Autumn’s entire life. The most telling of all are the unanswered questions, met with tears and darting eyes. It’s a harrowing but completely moving scene.
Ultimately Never Rarely Sometimes Always is about two women with mountains of societal and community pressures on them, sticking together through the worst of it. So much of their mutual love and affection goes unsaid, but we know they’re in it together. Through every cross-state bus ride or nights in port authority.
This is a triumph of filmmaking. Minimal in approach, but maximum in impact.
Featured Image: Focus Features
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
The post NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS is Stunning and Heartbreaking appeared first on Nerdist.
According to Wikipedia, the widespread use of vaccinations has “greatly reduced the incidence of many diseases in numerous geographic regions,” a fact most people already know. But tracking who’s received vaccinations and which ones remains a daunting task for medical professionals, especially when it comes to keeping tabs on children. Now, a group of MIT researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says that invisible tattoos may be the best way to deal with this tracking issue, although there are some ethical concerns with their proposed solution.
In a paper recently published in the journal Science Translational Medicine (via Futurism), the group of researchers, led by Kevin J. McHugh et al., says that it is exploring a novel approach for maintaining accurate vaccination records by testing the implantation of “near-infrared quantum dots,” or NIR QDs, into pig skin, rat skin, cadaver flesh, and synthetic human skin. NIR QDs are water-soluable, biocompatible fluorescent nanocrystals—with diameters ranging from 2 to 10 nanometers—that emit near-infrared light and are safe for deep tissue insertion. As of right now, researchers are exploring NIR QDs for numerous medical uses, including, most notably, in vivo tumor imagining.
An illustration of how the NIR QDs would be applied and read. Kevin McHugh / Rice University
In the case of vaccinations, the plan is to inject NIR QDs concurrently with a given vaccine via a small patch of partially dissolvable microneedles. (The video below offers a demonstration of this process on synthetic human skin.) After insertion into a person’s skin, the NIR QDs would then continuously emit a wavelength of light not visible to the human eye, but easily imaged by certain types of cameras. This would effectively imprint a kind of invisible tattoo on people who receive vaccinations, identifing them as already inoculated. The NIR QDs used in this particular study were readable with a modified smartphone aided by machine learning algorithms.
The fight to #EndPolio has vaccinated more than 2.5 billion children and mobilized 20 million volunteers around the world since 1988.
We’re 99.9% of the way there. With continued support, we will overcome the last hurdles to eradication! pic.twitter.com/6ZoOaHwKaT
— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) January 24, 2020
The researchers say that they could read NIR QDs nine months after initial injection into rat skin, and resisted photobleaching even after receiving the simulated equivalent of five years of exposure to sunlight. The researchers also found that the NIR QDs didn’t interfere with the efficacy of the vaccines they accompanied, and they can easily customize their injection patterns in order to label or distinguish between different types of vaccinations.
This method of injecting invisible tattoos along with immunizations could potentially address the challenge of keeping accurate vaccination records in poorer countries, where centralized medical databases are hard to create or maintain. According to the researchers, if this method does indeed prove itself to be effective, it could eventually help to mitigate the 1.5 million vaccine-preventable deaths that occur each year. This would be particularly critical for children, who are especially susceptible to infectious diseases thanks to their relatively underdeveloped immune systems.
A look at the partially soluble patch of microneedles. Kevin McHugh / Rice University
Looking forward, these researchers would like to survey health care workers in various developing countries in Africa, with the intent of gaining insight into the most effective way to implement this kind of tattooed record keeping. But there people who are wary of this method of invasive record keeping, like Grace Lee, an infectious disease pediatrician at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Lee, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Smithsonian Magazine that this kind of record keeping could potentially lead to confusion, as the NIR QDs could be misapplied, or misread thanks to their fading over time. Lee also told Smithsonian that this kind of on-the-body record keeping could lead to privacy concerns and discrimination, which could potentially render the benefits of the invisible on-the-body vaccination records totally moot.
A video of the soluble patch of microneedles containing the NIR QDs being applied to synthetic skin.
What do you think about this method of using invisible markers to keep track of who and who hasn’t been vaccinated? Is this a brilliant way to save tons of lives in developing countries, or just a frightening invasion of privacy? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Feature image: Kevin McHugh / Rice University
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