Despite its tantalizing material, "The Man Who Invented the Computer" ultimately offers both too little computer and too little man.
Thus, despite the intrinsic fascination of the times in which Chiang lived, reliable materials on the man are extremely rare.
In a director's statement distributed with the publicity materials for "The Man Without a Past," Mr. Kaurismaki, with characteristically impish forthrightness, writes that "my social, economical and political views of the state of society, morals and love can hopefully be found from the film itself".
He summoned me to his office, which was cluttered with reading material: Poultry, "The Man in the Arena: Citizenship in a Republic," "The European Convention on Human Rights," "Curtain Inspiration".
The involvement of a congressman and a woman who later disappears could not be effective material because the man would have engaged our sympathy and so lost our interest by telling the truth.
It is not very long, but more than a quarter of it consists of potted accounts of other people's debts to Humboldt (Simon Bolivar, Darwin, John Muir and others), at the expense of material on the man himself.
Federal officials investigating Saturday's incident said it was unclear whether there was enough explosive material in the man's sneakers, or if it was of sufficient potency, to bring down the American Airlines Boeing 767-300, wasch waboutout a third of the way across the Atlantic Ocean, with 183 passengers and a crew of 14, when the incident occurred.
Keep your eyes peeled for more material from the man himself shortly.
We're not trying to tidy it up, and we're not constrained by reverence for the material or the man, or by expectations of how an O'Neill play is supposed to look and feel.
The plot was abandoned in September 2009, after the bomb components had already been assembled with common household materials, when the men discovered that they were being watched by law enforcement officials.
