This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Whogus The Whatsler: Do we really need the snarky comment about Good Will Hunting? I've always thought the movie wasn't about "you can achieve anything despite lowly beginnings", but about the more complex idea of why a person might have impressive natural abilities but choose to hide them away, and to what degree they should be forced to acknowledge their gift.
The broken aesop you're talking about there can be better applied, I think, to the movie The Pursuit of Happyness. That really is a film about how you can make your dreams come true if you just work hard enough, and while it's a fun and engaging film it really bypasses the point that the main character's success was largely due to his extremely high IQ, not to mention the fact the rest of the people in the intern program also worked very hard and met with failure.
I am so sick of people writing that Severian's memory is actually fallible in Book of the New Sun without backing it up. Seriously, what the hell, even people who have read it don't want to go back over four volumes to find inconsistencies. BACK. IT. UP.
Neophos: Shawn from Psych actually does have true photographic memory. In episode 5 of season 2, he's shown to be able to get new details from an old memory. This is also supported by his downright ridicolous memory of details such as serial numbers and amounts of small diamonds in a ring. I'm editing the example to reflect this.
Long list of examples available for harvesting at the other wiki
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