Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 31, 2014

Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 31, 2014 
B2 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT Mountain Views-News Saturday, May 31, 2014 
B2 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT 
SEAN’S SHAMELESS 
REVIEWS: 


By Sean Kayden 

BLUE RUIN 

Official 2013 Cannes Film Festival entry “Blue Ruin” is a taut, grim and 

satisfying revenge thriller that doesn’t rely on any cinematic tropes seen in 
countless other tales. While the story of an every man turned vigilante isn’t anything new, “Blue 
Ruin” positions itself as anything but ordinary. The 
first twenty minutes is tense and almost entirely 

Written and Directed By: 

wordless. We follow a heavily bearded man known 

Jeremy Saulnier 

as Dwight, who sleeps in a broken blue Pontiac 
and eats out of dumpsters. It seems he’s been Rated R for strong bloody violence, and 
aimlessly wandering around for quite some time. language 
It’s not until a sympathetic officer knocks on the 

Release Date: April 25th, 2014

window to take up Dwight and takes him to jail 

 (Limited & VOD) 

where we find out what his story is. While he isn’t 
in any trouble, she told him about this man (Wade 
Cleland, Jr.) who would be let out of prison in a few days. We come to learn this man was responsible 
for a double murder in 1993. As the tale unravels, small things are revealed such as the mysterious 
Dwight who returns to his childhood home in Virginia to carry out an act of vengeance to the man 
who murdered his parents. Writer, director, and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier isn’t afraid of 
silence here. Some of the most intense scenes have no words but actions. “Blue Ruin” is all about the 
characters, mostly carried by the compelling Dwight (played by Macon Blair) and the skillful way it 
was constructed. 

The peaceful demeanor of Dwight soon erupts once he follows Wade Cleland to a restaurant with his 
family to celebrate his release from prison. In a bathroom stall, Dwight busts out and stabs Wade. He 
doesn’t go down and goes for Dwight’s throat. As panic floods Dwight’s face, he is able to stab Wade 
right in the temple that quickly turns into a bloody and gruesome scene. Dwight sneaks out toward 
the back of the restaurant only to realize his neck chain, which has his car key attached to it is not on 
his neck. With time not on his side, he runs over to the limo that picked up Wade to discover those 
keys lying there. He explosively drives away as the family of Wade starts shooting at the limo. After 
clearing the scene, Dwight discovers someone else in the limo. He pulls off to the side of the highway 
where this young boy tells him that you killed the wrong guy. Dwight, fearful that Wade’s family will 
be hunting him down (after all he left his car at the restaurant which is registered to him) returns to 
his estranged sister’s house to inform her what he has done. Dwight knows what to expect now, but it 
doesn’t make anything easier. Blue Ruin isn’t about a man who miraculously becomes an unstoppable 
killing machine like most Hollywood revenge thrillers. It features a reluctant man trying to save his 
family from very bad people. “Blue Ruin” is this small, Kickstarter funded film that accomplishes 
some of the biggest Hollywood thrillers with big time stars could only wish to achieve. 

The indie picture is a classic tale of an eye for an eye. It uses violence and most of all guns as a way of 
handling a problem. It’s extremely violent at times, but there’s no way around that. This low budget 
film is engrossing and rarely displays a dull moment. It’s not as entirely slow paced as I’d imagined 
going into it. Saulnier’s cinematography screams with beauty and vitality. His award winning film is 
nerve-racking, gnawing, and meticulously crafted. It’s one of the strongest American films of the year 
and even if this riveting film never garners the attention it much deserves, it certainly won’t be the last 
time we hear from Saulnier. 

Grade: 4 out of 5 

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Scientists working with data from NASA’s Cassini mission 
have developed a new way to understand the atmospheres of 
exoplanets by using Saturn’s smog-enshrouded moon Titan as a 
stand-in. The new technique shows the dramatic influence that 
hazy skies could have on our ability to learn about these alien 
worlds orbiting distant stars.

 The work was performed by a team of researchers led by Tyler 
Robinson, a NASA Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NASA’s Ames 
Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

 “It turns out there’s a lot you can learn from looking at a sunset,” 
Robinson said.

 Light from sunsets, stars and planets can be separated into its 
component colors to create spectra, as prisms do with sunlight, 
in order to obtain hidden information. Despite the staggering 
distances to other planetary systems, in recent years researchers 
have begun to develop techniques for collecting spectra of 
exoplanets. When one of these worlds transits, or passes in front 
of its host star as seen from Earth, some of the star’s light travels 
through the exoplanet’s atmosphere, where it is changed in subtle, 
but measurable, ways. This process imprints information about 
the planet that can be collected by telescopes. The resulting 
spectra are a record of that imprint. 

Spectra enable scientists to tease out details about what exoplanets 
are like, such as aspects of the temperature, composition and 
structure of their atmospheres.

 Robinson and his colleagues exploited a similarity between 
exoplanet transits and sunsets witnessed by the Cassini spacecraftat Titan. These observations, called solar occultations, effectively 
allowed the scientists to observe Titan as a transiting exoplanet 
without having to leave the solar system. In the process, Titan’s 
sunsets revealed just how dramatic the effects of hazes can be.

 Multiple worlds in our own solar system, including Titan, are 
blanketed by clouds and high-altitude hazes. Scientists expect that 
many exoplanets would be similarly obscured. Clouds and hazes 
create a variety of complicated effects that researchers must work 
to disentangle from the signature of these alien atmospheres. 

*******

 JUPITER’S GREAT RED SPOT IS SHRINKING. Jupiter’s 
trademark Great Red Spot—a swirling storm feature larger than 
Earth—is shrinking. This downsizing, which is changing the 
shape of the spot from an oval into a circle, has been known about 
since the 1930s, but now a striking new Hubble Space Telescope 
image captures the spot at a smaller size than ever before.

 Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a churning anticyclonic storm. It 
shows up in images of the giant planet as a conspicuous deep red 
eye embedded in swirling layers of pale yellow, orange and white. 
Winds inside this Jovian storm rage at immense speeds, reaching 
several hundreds of miles per hour.

 Historic observations as far back as the late 1800s gauged this 
turbulent spot to span about 25,000 miles at its widest point—
wide enough to fit three Earths comfortably side by side. In 
1979 and 1980 the NASA Voyager fly-bys measured the spot at a 


Jeff’s Book Picks By Jeff Brown

REVOLUTIONARY CHARACTERS: WHAT 
MADE THE FOUNDERS DIFFERENT 


by Gordon S. Wood 

In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of 
the men who came to be known as the Founding 
Fathers, the Pulitzer Prize winning Gordon Wood 
has written a book that seriously asks, What made 
these men great? and shows us, among many other 
things, just how much character did in fact matter. 
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, 
Madison, Paine are presented individually as well 
as collectively, but the thread that binds these 
portraits together is the idea of character as a lived 
reality. They were members of the first generation in 
history that was self-consciously self-made men who 
understood that the arc of lives, as of nations, is one 
of moral progress. A wonderful book about the founders. 



JOHN QUINCY ADAMS: AMERICAN VISIONARY by Fred Kaplan 

The award-winning author of Lincoln,returns with an illuminating biography of one of the most 
overlooked presidents in American history, a leader of sweeping perspective whose values helped 
shape the course of the nation.This fresh and lively biography rich in literary analysis and new 
historical detail brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams, the little known and 
much misunderstood 6th president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail 
Adams, and demonstrates how his inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape 
the course of America. Kaplan draws on unpublished archival material to trace Adams's evolution 
from his childhood during the Revolutionary War to his brilliant years as Secretary of State to the 
White House and beyond. He examines many sides: the public and private man, the statesman 
and writer, the wise thinker and passionate advocate, the leading abolitionist and fervent federalist 
who believed strongly in both individual liberty and the government's role as an engine of progress 
and prosperity. In these ways, he was a predecessor of Lincoln and FDR . This biography makes 
clear how Adams's forward-thinking values, his definition of leadership, and his vision for the 
nation's future is as much about twenty-first century America as it is about Adams's own time. 
John Quincy Adams paints a rich portrait of this brilliant leader and his significance to the nation 
and our own lives. 

JAMES MADISON: A LIFE RECONSIDERED by Lynne Cheney 

This new biography of James Madison explores the astonishing story of a man of vaunted 
modesty who audaciously changed the world. Among the Founding Fathers, Madison was a true 
genius of the early republic. Outwardly reserved, Madison was the intellectual force behind the 
Constitution and crucial to its ratification. His visionary political philosophy and rationale for the 
union of states, so eloquently presented in The Federalist papers, helped shape the country. Along 
with Thomas Jefferson, Madison would found the first political party in the country’s history. As 
Jefferson’s secretary of state, he managed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United 
States. As president, Madison led the country in its first war under the Constitution, the War of 
1812. Without precedent to guide him, he would demonstrate that a republic could defend its 
honor and independence. 

SUNSETS ON TITAN REVEAL COMPLEXITY 
THE WORLD AROUND US 
Cassini Observes Sunsets on Titan (Artist's Rendering) Courtesy JPL/NASA 

shrunken 14,000 miles across. Now, Hubble has measured the diameter of this feature to be just under 10,000 miles.

 
You can contact Bob Eklund at: b.eklund@MtnViewsNews.com.