Erin Von Knauer

La La Land is nothing without music, and the use of diegetic sound brings us into the story world. We pass by different car windows and hear different radio stations until we land on the actress who starts "Another Day of Sun." Just as we hear the different car radios, we see different singers contribute their verse, as Whitman would say. We are introduced to the idea of the multiplicity of dreams from this ensemble number. We get a glimpse at one of the visual motifs -- yellow -- from...

Nietzsche famously said, "It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989) is a kind of response to Nietzsche, known for being about whether men and women can really be friends. The film's success as a balanced romance and comedy comes from Reiner's close collaboration with Nora Ephron, which can be seen in their conversation in this YouTube video . It took years to develop the project that became When Harry Met Sally ...

In organic chemistry, “chiral” is a word used to describe a specific kind of reflection or mirroring. Chiral objects or images cannot be superimposed. If they are, they are revealed to have different forms, as in the case if one were to transpose the image of a right hand over the image of a left hand. If a pair of hands were superimposed, one thumb would extend out to the left while the other thumb would extend to the right. Chiral objects have two distinct forms - as in the case of hands,...