Green Card (1990)

Green Card is a 1990 American/Australian/French romantic comedy film written, produced, and directed by Peter Weir. The screenplay focuses on an American woman who enters into a marriage of convenience with a Frenchman so he can obtain a green card and remain in the United States.

Plot

Brontë Mitchell is a horticulturalist and an environmentalist devoted to the creation of urban gardens and parks on vacant lots. She is anxious to rent an apartment with a greenhouse, but the board of trustees would prefer a married couple as tenants. Her friend Antoine suggests she marry French immigrant Georges Fauré, who needs a green card in order to remain in the country. The two meet at a cafe in downtown Manhattan and after a brief conversation are wed in a quick ceremony at the nearby courthouse.

As a married woman, Brontë qualifies for the apartment of her dreams and, after moving in, she tells the doorman and neighbors her spouse is doing musical research in Africa. When she is contacted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrange an interview to determine her marriage is legitimate, she tracks down Georges, who is working as a waiter. Although the two have little time to get their facts straight, the agents who question them appear to be satisfied with their answers. Georges and Brontë It's only when one of them asks to use the bathroom and Georges directs him to a closet that their suspicions are aroused, and they schedule a full and formal interview to be conducted two weeks later at their office.

Brontë consults an attorney, who advises her she could be charged with a crime if the authorities learn the truth about her marriage. She invites Georges to move in with her to enable them to learn about each other's past and their quirks and habits, and they quickly learn they can barely tolerate each other. Georges is a gregarious slob and heavy smoker who prefers red meat to healthy food, while Brontë is a strait-laced clean freak obsessed with her plants. When her parents arrive at the apartment for an unannounced visit, Georges pretends to be the handyman.

 

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The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit is an American drama streaming television miniseries starring Anya Taylor-Joy based on Walter Tevis's 1983 novel of the same name. It was created by Scott Frank and Allan Scott and released on Netflix on October 23, 2020.

The Queen's Gambit is a fictional story that follows the life of an orphan chess prodigy, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), during her quest to become the world's greatest chess player while struggling with emotional issues and drug and alcohol dependency. The story begins in the mid-1950s and proceeds into the 1960s.

The series starts in a girls' orphanage where a nine-year old Beth, having lost her mother in a car accident, meets Jolene (Moses Ingram), a vibrant and friendly girl a few years older than her; Helen Deardorff (Christiane Seidel), the woman running the orphanage; and Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), the custodian of the orphanage, who teaches Beth her first chess lessons. As was common during the 1950s, the orphanage dispenses daily tranquilizer pills to the girls, which turns into an addiction for Beth. A few years later, Beth is adopted by Alma Wheatley (Marielle Heller) and her husband from Lexington, Kentucky. After being adopted and adjusting to her new home, Beth enrolls herself in chess tournaments even though she has no prior experience. She wins many games and finally gets noticed by others and develops friendships with several people, including former Kentucky state champion Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), chess savant Benny Watts (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and Townes (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As Beth continues to win games and reaps the financial benefits of her success, she becomes more dependent on drugs and alcohol, and starts to lose control of her life.

SPOILER ALERTS!

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Memento (2000)

Memento is a 2000 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd.

The film's script was based on a pitch by Nolan's brother Jonathan, who wrote the 2001 story "Memento Mori" from the concept. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia, resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano co-star.

The film's nonlinear narrative is presented as two different sequences of scenes interspersed during the film: a series in black-and-white that is shown chronologically, and a series of color sequences shown in reverse order (simulating for the audience the mental state of the protagonist). The two sequences meet at the end of the film, producing one complete and cohesive narrative.

Memento premiered at the 57th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2000, and was released in the United States on March 16, 2001. It was acclaimed by critics, who praised its nonlinear structure and motifs of memory, perception, grief, and self-deception, and it earned $40 million over its $9 million budget. Memento received numerous accolades, including Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. The film is now widely regarded as one of Nolan's finest works and one of the best films of the 2000s. In 2017, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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Sargon Chess Software

Sargon (or SARGON) is a line of chess-playing software for personal computers. The original SARGON from 1978 was written in assembly language by Dan and Kathleen "Kathe" Spracklen for the Z80-based Wavemate Jupiter III.^[1]

History

SARGON was introduced at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire where it won the first computer chess tournament held strictly for microcomputers, with a score of 5–0.^[2][3] This success encouraged the authors to seek financial income by selling the program directly to customers. Since magnetic media were not widely available at the time, the authors placed an advert in Byte magazine selling for $15 photocopied listings that would work in any Z80-based microcomputer.^[1] Availability of the source code allowed porting to other machines.^[4] For example, the March–April 1979 issue of Recreational Computing describes a project that converted Sargon to an 8080 program by using macros.^[5] Later the Spracklens were contacted by Hayden Books and a book was published.

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