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Filtering by Tag: Smithsonian Air & Space

Memorandum No. 56: Watch Sex Hygiene, the movie wherein John Ford directed Superman and Batman

Chris Klimek

"Most men know less about their own bodies than they do about their automobiles."

John Ford, who made Stagecoach and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and who won the Academy Award for Best Director four times – not for any of the first-rate pictures I've just named – also made a sex-ed film for G.I.s in 1942, the same year he collected his third Best Director Oscar for How Green Was My Valley.

Okay, maybe that's only funny to me. Anyway, if you think it's worth 26 minutes of your life to learn how not to catch syphilis from – in the charming patois of Sex Hygiene – "a contaminated woman," you can watch this not-so-casually misogynistic but highly informative short above. Even if you're already fully briefed on how to protect yourself from the predatory vaginas of dirty, dirty whores, this film has at least two other things to recommend it.

1) It features the greatest reaction shots ever captured on film.

2) Eisenhower-era TV Superman George Reeves and Robert Lowery, who played Batman in the 1949 serial Batman and Robin, appear together briefly in an early scene, so if you want a preview of what next year's Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice will be like, well... it will probably be like this, at least in hair-gel terms.

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categories movies
tags John Ford, World War II, venereal disease, sex education, Mark Harris, Smithsonian Air & Space

Can of Wormholes, or Accretion Discography: My Interview with Kip Thorne, Interstellar Progenitor and Scientific Adviser

Chris Klimek

Kip Thorne on the set of Interstellar. (Paramount/Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures)

Kip Thorne on the set of Interstellar. (Paramount/Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures)

For my day job at Air & Space / Smithsonian, I interviewed Kip Thorne, the theoretical physicist who with his friend the movie producer Lynda Obst, conceived the film Interstellar back in 2006. Thorne remained closely involved with the picture throughout its writing, production, and editing, and has now published a 324-page companion to the film called The Science of "Interstellar" laying out his scientific rationalization for every aspect of its story -- even the Love Tesseract Wormhole.

DUH: Don't read this interview if you intend to see Interstellar but haven't yet.

And if that's your situation, and you live anywhere in the Washington, DC diaspora, make sure to catch the movie in 70mm IMAX at either the National Air & Space Museum downtown or at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center out by Dulles International Airport. I've seen it both this way and in digital IMAX, and the 70mm presentation is more painterly and majestic. It also sounds better, curiously. The muddy sound mix we talked about on Pop Culture Happy Hour last week (based on a digital IMAX screening in Silver Spring, Maryland) was not a problem when I saw the film again at NASM in 70mm.

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categories inteviews, movies, science
tags movies, interviews, INTERSTELLAR, physics, Smithsonian Air & Space, space, Kip Thorne

Infrared Dawn: On the James Webb Space Telescope in the July 2014 issue of Air & Space / Smithsonian

Chris Klimek

And now for something completely different, and completely intimidating -- at least initially. The current issue of Air & Space magazine has my first-ever astronomy story, about the James Webb Space Telescope, the remarkable $8.8 billion dollar replacement for the aging Hubble Space Telescope.

As JWST orbits the Earth from a million miles away, its six-meter mirror of gold-coated beryllium will collect light that's fainter, farther away, and billions of years older than we've ever been able to see, showing us some of the earliest objects that formed in the universe after the Big Bang. As with most of NASA's flagship projects, JWST has taken longer and cost far more than NASA had said and Congress had hoped. It's now set for launch in October 2018.

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categories science
tags NASA, James Webb Space Telescope, astronomy, Smithsonian Air & Space, Heather Goss