T
his Week:Who is This Man?, The Picasso of DNA, Geneticist George Church Needs Volunteers, Movies This Week, Iron Man 2 Review, Yogi Without Food or Water Studied, and more…

THIS MAN. Who are the people who we see, know, and have relationships with in our dreams?

Have you seen this man? Bryan Bertino, who wrote and directed the Rogue Pictures sleeper hit The Strangers, (it sure scared me!) will write and direct This Man, a thriller that has a clever fact-based hook. The protagonist is an ordinary man who discovers that people he has never met have somehow seen him in their nightmares. A Web site, created by Italian sociologist Andrea Natella, connects those who have seen the actual man in their dreams.

Is it a well-crafted marketing hoax?

Here is the “History” from Natella’s THIS MAN Web site. Judge for yourself.

In January 2006 in New York, the patient of a well-known psychiatrist draws the face of a man that has been repeatedly appearing in her dreams. In more than one occasion that man has given her advice on her private life. The woman swears she has never met the man in her life.

That portrait lies forgotten on the psychiatrist’s desk for a few days until one day another patient recognizes that face and says that the man has often visited him in his dreams. He also claims he has never seen that man in his waking life.

The psychiatrist decides to send the portrait to some of his colleagues that have patients with recurrent dreams. Within a few months, four patients recognize the man as a frequent presence in their own dreams. All the patients refer to him as THIS MAN.

From January 2006 until today, at least 2000 people have claimed they have seen this man in their dreams, in many cities all over the world.

At the moment there is no ascertained relation or common trait among the people that have dreamed of seeing this man. Moreover, no living man has ever been recognized as resembling the man of the portrait by the people who have seen this man in their dreams. www.thisman.org

Movies This Week. Princess Kaiulani (NO), Iron Man 2 (NO), North Face (Yes).

IRON MAN 2. A major disappointment. I hated arrogant, bratty, foot-stomping man-baby Tony Stark and prissy Pepper Potts. Too much brattle and no story.

I’m sick of Robert Downey, Jr.’s narcissistic prancing and arch-arrogance that is way overboard in IM2. Isn’t Tony Stark too old to be misbehaving and dancing around on a self-glorification “I Love Me” stage in an ugly suit?

And what about destroying millions and millions of dollars of his stuff and not giving a good goddamn? He’s a frivolous bore and a show-off.

Tony Stark has OCD? He will not let anyone touch him. So I guess intimacy with Pepper is exclusively phone sex with racy industry banter.

Ugly suits and Sam Rockwell’s boorish over-acting. Since there is no story to discuss, let’s focus on TS’s fey suits, Rockwell’s hysterical performance, Gwyneth Paltrow and Scarlett Johansson’s “stick up the butt” acting, and blowhard Garry Shandling (as Senator Stern).

Only Mickey Rourke (as Ivan Vanko) took this job because he thought it would be a serious acting gig. He is the best thing in IM2. He doesn’t overplay it but was it necessary for the filmmakers to tattoo War and Peace on his body?

For no good reason, writer Justin Theroux has given director Jon Favreau a much bigger role. Let’s hope Stark’s limo driver Happy Hogan isn’t angling for a spin-off. Maybe Theroux is looking for the writing gig for IM3.

Must we see Stan Lee everywhere in commercials and doing a “Hitchcock” in the movie? It is so sad to me that a man of his age (88) and wealth should be such a fame-whore.

Theroux’s screenplay is dreary with too much military wordsmithing and a non-story screenplay. Who wrote Justin Hammer’s (Sam Rockwell) “I call it the ‘ex-wife’” speech? Certainly not Theroux—it just does not fit in the redundant and hopeless dialogue of all the characters. Someone must have goosed-up the screenplay.

Because big movie stars refuse to be hidden away behind a mask and a silly get-up, we have Tony Stark announcing he is Iron Man. So now in IRON MAN 2 he is all upfront about it and he states that he has “privatized peace.” He is the world’s showboating savior. The military wants his suit to be able to kill lots of enemy combatants without getting their soldiers hurt. Stark yells “No! It’s mine and you can’t have it! You’re not the boss of me!”

Tony Stark is sick and unhappy. His father never told him he loved him! And he wasn’t breast-fed so he’s hungry for attention and big ticket items as nipple substitution. That’s my psychological theory of Tony Stark—I could go on and on. What does the invulnerable suit represent in his life? Why all the hardcore metal? What is Stark compensating for?

Stark thinks he is dying. So he is giving away his art collection and installing Pepper as Stark Enterprises CEO.

Pepper might be Stark’s nanny and newly-minted CEO, but she is not the object of his lust—young, new assistant Natalie (Scarlett Johansson) arrives to challenge the tepid, unsexy boss-secretary office romance. But, Natalie has a meager flirtation with Stark. No sparks fly for Stark!

I was led to believe Johansson would be a sexy addition to IM2, but both Paltrow and Johansson are awkwardly directed. Favreau does not know how to work with actresses. Theroux does not have any solid idea what to do with them either.

Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Pepper’s sexual awakening happens when she eyes Ivan with his electric whips? Ah, the threat to Stark would have been dynamic, after all, his mommy-substitute is interested in another man-child. Stark clearly has abandonment issues.

Why do sequels always involve exotic locations? Not only do the stars get big paydays, they get an exotic location-vacation for three months but it does nothing to enhance the movie or story.

So Stark’s rival for the ultra-killing machine is wealthy Justin Hammer. Hammer is not a genius but a buffoon. So how did he become an adversary to Stark in the highly competitive world of military war wizardry?

Lt. Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle) walks through the movie getting his paycheck until he steals one of Stark’s suits and flies off. They battle Vanko in a silly metal-bashing CGI extravaganza.

All I can say is, thank God IM2 is not in 3D.

NORTH FACE. Philipp Stölzl’s film is the movie to see and it is playing at Regal’s Village Square theater here in Las Vegas. It is based on a true story of two German climbers Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, set to scale the Eiger’s 5,900-foot near-vertical north wall, then unconquered, in mid-July 1936.

The build-up is sluggish and the love story improbable, but once the mountaineers are on the mountain, the story becomes riveting. Climbing Eiger’s north wall, called “the last problem of the Western Alps” by alpinists, was something of an obsession for the Nazis in the weeks leading up to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Eiger’s summit had been reached by other routes as early as 1858. Scaling the “death wall,” as it was nicknamed, would be a perfectly timed propaganda coup.

The Picasso of DNA. Discover magazine (March 2010) had a fascinating article on “The Picasso of DNA,” George M. Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Personal Genome Project. Church wants to re-sculpt human DNA and he is confident he can do it.

Church believes he will change human evolution. “Church has proposed a way of altering the elephant genome until it is identical to a woolly mammoth’s, or turning a human’s DNA into a Neaderthal’s.” Of course, these tools must have a positive goal, so Church says his re-engineering of human DNA could also be used to make people resistant to viruses, lengthen life span, and increase human intelligence. The text by Ed Regis continues: “[The tools] could advance evolution—our evolution—to places it has never gone before.”

After the Neanderthal genome has been fully sequenced, Church will compare it to the modern human genome. Any genes that made Neanderthals different from humans will be reworked back into a human stem cell. “The result will be a freshly minted Neanderthal genome in a living cell. From there, creating a living, breathing Neanderthal would merely require implanting the cell into the uterus of a chimpanzee, or perhaps into an adventurous human female.”

A portion of the current human race is part Neanderthal. (Some Neanderthals were probably redheads, a new genetic study has suggested. The experts that carried out the research, whose results were published in Science journal, extracted DNA from the remains of two Neanderthals and they conserved part of an important gene called MC1R. In modern people, a change or mutation in this gene produces the red hair but, until now, no one knew what hair color our extinct relatives had.

Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.

A team of biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has reconstructed the genome of Neanderthals. After recovering 60 percent of the genome, the team has found that around 1 to 4 percent of the genome of non-Africans comes from Neanderthals.

Church Needs Your Genome. Church is looking for volunteers for his Personal Genome Project (PGP-10). All of the volunteers’ personal information will be available to be viewed, downloaded, and used without restriction at personalgenomes.org. Any U.S. resident who is 21 or older and is willing to share genetic, medical, and life experience information may apply. If you are accepted, your genome will be sequenced for free.

Survival Without Food or Water. I’ve written about this incredible yogi before. He’s back and being observed by doctors. Indian doctors are studying an 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent the last seven decades without food and water.

Military doctors hope the experiments on Prahlad Jani can help soldiers develop their survival strategies.

The yogi is under 24-hour observation by a team of 30 specialists during three weeks of tests at a hospital in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad.

Two cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile camera films him when he goes outside, guaranteeing round-the-clock observation. His body will be scanned and his brain and heart activity measured with electrodes.

“The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water,” said Dr. G. Ilavazahagan, who is directing the research. “This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race.”

Since the experiment began on April 22, Jani has had no food or water and has not been to the toilet.

“The exercise of taking this yogi under the medical scanner is to understand what energy supports his existence,” Ilavazahagan added. “Jani says he meditates to get energy.”

He claims to have been blessed by a goddess when he was 8-years-old, which has enabled him to survive without sustenance.”