Has anyone here seen Michael Frayn’s plays, or Tom Stoppard’s? Stuff like Frayn’s Copenhagen, about the conversations physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had during WW2? Or Stoppard’s Arcadia, which explores concepts of time and the certainty of knowledge?
These feel like Aaron Sorkin-type grown-up, smart dialogue about complex scientific, moral and ethical issues. And the characters discuss them seriously and in a non-dumbed-down sort of way…
Al Swearengen in Deadwood. Best evil genius ever: he’s not an academic, but he really is the smartest guy in town. He understands things that the people around him simply can’t grasp, and that superior intelligence is how he holds his position: it isn’t just a quirk or a way to shoe-horn exposition into the plot, it’s what shapes his every move and interaction.
An out-of-left-field one I thought of: Ferris Bueller. He’s not very mature or responsible, but he’s certainly smart.
Gil Grissom in CSI
Matthau was good, but the portrayals of Godel and Podolsky were just awful - Larry and Curly to Einstein’s Moe. No one watching the movie would ever know that they were geniuses also. Godel for Og’s sake!
The gas station they used was down the road from where I lived at the time, and I was pulled out of the movie a bit when he rode his bicycle around the modern Nassau Square, but it wasn’t bad.
Good one! Part of his relationship with Bullock is that Bullock’s just about the only guy in town who can keep up with him. Bullock isn’t a schemer, but he’s able to think, and even though he spends a lot of his time thwarting Swearengen, Al ends up liking him a lot because the guy’s no dummy. It’s a lot of fun watching Swearengen’s contempt and disgust for his goons as he has to dumb down his plans so they can understand what the hell they’re supposed to do. He never has to do that with Bullock.
On the humanities side, I enjoyed Laurence Fishburne as the ultra-literate English professor in Akeelah and the Bee.
I agree, in fact you might say my omission of them while even praising Meg Ryan’s character was telling. A good job with Einstein and Meg’s character, not so good with the rest sums it up well.
Zeus, but I loved Sports Night. Far, far more than I loved The West Wing, and I adored the latter show.
As I think on it, Little Bill in Unforgiven was also extremely intelligent; definitely the smartest man in town.
I like Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact”. She has the IQ but gets tripped up by her lack of emotional intelligence and at times seems bewildered by how this can happen, which occurs to a lot of high IQ people.
Well, sorta. I know a lot of engineers. Electrical engineers, mostly, some mechanicals too. While they’re nerdy, I guess (I’m nerdy myself, so probably don’t notice it as much), very few of them make flowcharts outside of the office or in social situations. Or for social situations, come to that.
Not saying they’re not analytical and super intelligent, but they don’t do charts.
I do have to admit a bias, though - I’m a little tired of the meme that engineers are socially awkward nerds that can barely speak to others. All the engineers I know are friendly, fun, really awesome people to hang around. A little nerdy, yes, but they generally don’t bring the Star Wars or vector analysis until after they know you better.
Does “lack of emotional intelligence” mean “not a pandering sleezeball”? Because that is what I got from her testimony to Congress.
How many decades before America has an Atheist President?
& Abigail “Abby” Sciuto
& Penelope Garcia
Dr. Rush on SGU.
Many, many decades. I predict an openly gay President before an Atheist President.
I must admit I don’t find very many portrayals very realistic. I understand “smart” to mean that their mind moves fast, not that they know a lot of trivia, or even knowledge within their field (if that knowledge is easy to come by if you just read enough).
Oftentimes characters are blown up to be super geniuses (phd in math before age 24 for instance), and it seems completely unrealistic, and not much else in the character seems to indicate that they are that smart. For instance, the new girl in House, or the guy in Fringe, are unbelievable to me.
I think that House works, I especially like that we often see him actually sitting and thinking. Also Swearengen was a good one.
Quoth Snickers:
Of course, he was in the company of other nerds, there. He never would have done that if there were a girl present he was trying to impress.
True. I’m pretty definitively a nerd. I have good social skills with friends, and generally have a great sense of humor. Put with with a couple of people I know well and I get along great. But I never learned how a party works and am utterly useless at one. I don’t know how to “network”. And it was nothing short of a miracle that I ever got laid in the first place.
Nobody has an equal level of social awkwardness in all situations.
My favorite scene of a genius at work: Jim Broadbent as W. S. Gilbert in the movie Topsy-Turvy. In this scene he has the inspiration for The Mikado. You can see the whole thing playing in Gilbert’s mind on Broadbent’s face.
Gillian Anderson as Dana Sculley (leaving aside how intelligent one can be if one is still a skeptic after all the stuff she witnessed in the show).