title: Saruman

text: In Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings", which corresponds to "The Fellowship of the Ring" and part of "The Two Towers", Saruman is voiced by Fraser Kerr. He has only one major scene—his attempt to persuade Gandalf to join him. He appears again briefly before the battle of Helm's Deep, speaking to his army. The character is dressed in red and is called 'Saruman' and 'Aruman' at different points. Smith and Matthews suggest that the use of 'Aruman' was intended to avoid confusion with 'Sauron'. The 1980 Rankin/Bass TV animated version of "The Return of the King" begins roughly where Bakshi's film ends but does not include Saruman's character.


title: Saruman

text: BBC Radio's second adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings", from 1981, presents Saruman much as in the books. Smith and Matthews report Peter Howell's performance as Saruman as "brilliantly ambiguous ..., drifting from mellifluous to almost bestially savage from moment to moment without either mood seeming to contradict the other".


title: Saruman

text: Saruman is played by Matti Pellonpää in the 1993 television miniseries "Hobitit" produced and aired by Finnish broadcaster Yle.


title: Saruman

text: In Peter Jackson's film trilogy (2001–2003), Saruman is significantly more active in the first two films than in the corresponding books, and he appears in several scenes that are not depicted in Tolkien's work. He was portrayed by Christopher Lee. In the films, Saruman is depicted presenting himself outright as a servant of Sauron. Smith and Matthews suggest that Saruman's role is built up as a substitute for Sauron—the story's main antagonist—who never appears directly in the book, which Jackson confirms in the commentary to the DVD. They also suggest that having secured veteran British horror actor Christopher Lee to play Saruman, it made sense to make greater use of his star status. Despite this increased role in the first two films, the scenes involving Saruman that were shot for use in the third film, "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King", were not used in the cinematic release, a decision which "shocked" Lee. Jackson reasoned that it would be anticlimactic to show Saruman's fate in the second movie (after the Battle of Helm's Deep) and too retrospective for the third one. The cut scenes end with Saruman falling to his death from the top of Orthanc after being stabbed by Wormtongue and include material transposed from the chapter "The Scouring of the Shire". They are included at the start of the Extended Edition DVD release of the film.


title: Saruman

text: In Jackson's film adaptation of "The Hobbit", Lee reprises his role as Saruman the White, even though Saruman does not appear in the book. Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond appear at a meeting of the White Council in Rivendell, loosely based on material from the Appendices to "The Lord of the Rings".


title: Saruman

text: In the 2014 video game "", Saruman is voiced by Roger L. Jackson. Saruman appears as a minor villain in "Lego Dimensions", in which he allies himself with main antagonist Lord Vortech.


title: Saruman

text: Asteroid 418532 Saruman was named after the wizard and in honour of the actor Christopher Lee. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 25 September 2018 ().


title: Angel Heart

text: Angel Heart is a 1987 American neo-noir psychological horror film, an adaptation of William Hjortsberg's 1978 novel "Falling Angel". The film was written and directed by Alan Parker, and stars Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet, and Charlotte Rampling. Harry Angel (Rourke), a New York City private investigator, is hired to solve the disappearance of a man known as Johnny Favorite. His investigation takes him to New Orleans, where he becomes embroiled in a series of brutal murders.


title: Angel Heart

text: Following publication of the novel, Hjortsberg began developing the screenplay for a film adaptation, but found that no major studio was willing to produce his script. The project resurfaced in 1985, when producer Elliott Kastner brought the book to Parker's attention. Parker began work on a new script and in doing so made several changes from Hjortsberg's novel. He also met with Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna, who agreed to finance the $18 million production through their independent film studio Carolco Pictures. Filming took place on location in New York and New Orleans, with principal photography lasting from March 1986 to June of that year.


title: Angel Heart

text: Weeks before its theatrical release, "Angel Heart" faced censorship issues from the Motion Picture Association of America for one scene of sexual content. Parker was forced to remove ten seconds of footage to avoid an X rating and secure the R rating that the film's distributor Tri-Star Pictures wanted. An unrated version featuring the removed footage was later released on home video.


title: Angel Heart

text: "Angel Heart" received a mixed reaction from reviewers, who praised the performances of Rourke and Bonet, as well as the production design, score, and cinematography, but criticized Parker's screenwriting. The film underperformed at the North American box office, grossing $17.2 million during its theatrical run, but has since been regarded as underappreciated and influential.


title: Angel Heart

text: In 1955, Harry Angel, a New York City private investigator, is contacted by a man named Louis Cyphre to track down John Liebling, a crooner known professionally as Johnny Favorite who suffered severe neurological trauma resulting from injuries he received in World War II. Favorite's incapacity disrupted a contract with Cyphre regarding unspecified collateral, and Cyphre believes that a private upstate hospital where Favorite was receiving radical psychiatric treatment for shell shock has falsified records.


title: Angel Heart

text: Harry goes to the hospital and discovers that the records showing Favorite's transfer were indeed falsified by a physician named Albert Fowler. After Harry breaks into his home, Fowler admits that years ago he was bribed by a man and woman so that the two could abscond with the disfigured Favorite. Believing that Fowler is still withholding information, Harry locks him in his bedroom, forcing him to suffer withdrawal from a morphine addiction. The next morning, he finds that the doctor has apparently committed suicide.


title: Angel Heart

text: Harry tries to break his contract with Cyphre but agrees to continue the search when Cyphre offers him a large sum of money. He soon discovers that Favorite had a wealthy fiancée named Margaret Krusemark but had also begun a secret love affair with a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot. Harry travels to New Orleans and meets with Margaret, who divulges little information, telling him that Favorite is dead, or at least dead to her. Harry then discovers that Evangeline died several years previously, but is survived by her 17-year-old daughter, Epiphany Proudfoot, who was conceived during her mother's love affair with Favorite.


title: Angel Heart

text: When Epiphany is reluctant to speak, Harry tracks down Toots Sweet, a blues guitarist and former Favorite bandmate. After Harry uses force to try to extract details of Favorite's last known whereabouts, Toots refers him back to Margaret. The following morning, police detectives inform Harry that Toots has been murdered. Harry returns to Margaret's home, where he finds her murdered, her heart removed with a ceremonial knife. He is later attacked by enforcers of Ethan Krusemark—a powerful Louisiana patriarch and Margaret's father—who tell him to leave town.


title: Angel Heart

text: Harry returns to his hotel and finds Epiphany on his doorstep. He invites her into his room, where they have aggressive sex during which Harry has visions of blood dripping from the ceiling and splashing around the room. He later confronts Krusemark in a gumbo hut, where the latter reveals that he and Margaret were the ones who took Favorite from the hospital. He also explains that Favorite was actually a powerful occultist who sold his soul to Satan in exchange for stardom. He got his stardom but then sought to renege on the bargain. To do so, Favorite kidnapped a young soldier from Times Square and performed a Satanic ritual on the boy, murdering him and eating his still-beating heart in order to steal his soul. Favorite planned to assume the identity of the murdered soldier but was drafted and then injured overseas. Suffering severe facial trauma and amnesia, Favorite was sent to the hospital for treatment.


title: Angel Heart

text: After Krusemark and his daughter took him from the hospital, they left him at Times Square on New Year's Eve 1943 (the date on the falsified hospital records). While hearing Krusemark's story, Harry runs into the bathroom, vomits and continually asks the identity of the soldier. He returns to find Krusemark drowned in a cauldron of boiling gumbo.


title: Angel Heart

text: Harry goes to Margaret's home, where he finds a vase containing the soldier's dog tag—stamped with the name Angel, Harold. Harry cries out as he realizes that he and Johnny Favorite are, in fact, the same person. Cyphre appears, and Harry figures out that "Louis Cyphre" is a homophone for Lucifer. His true nature revealed, Cyphre proclaims that he can at long last claim what is his: Favorite's immortal soul. Harry insists that he knows who he is and has never killed anyone, but as he looks at his reflection in a mirror, his repressed memories showing him killing Fowler, Toots, the Krusemarks, and Epiphany come flooding back.


title: Angel Heart

text: A frantic Harry returns to his hotel room, where the police have found Epiphany brutally murdered. Harry's dog tags are on her body. A police officer enters the room carrying Epiphany's young son, who Harry realizes is his grandchild. The police detective tells Harry that he will "burn" for what he has done to Epiphany, to which Harry replies, "I know. In Hell." Harry sees the child's eyes glow, just as Cyphre's had at their last meeting, implying that Satan is the mysterious entity that impregnated Epiphany. During the end credits, Harry is seen standing inside an iron elevator that is interminably descending, presumably to Hell. As the screen fades to black, Cyphre can be heard whispering, "Harry" and "Johnny", asserting dominion over both their souls.


title: Angel Heart

text: Following publication of his 1978 novel "Falling Angel", William Hjortsberg began work on a film adaptation. His friend, production designer Richard Sylbert, took the book's manuscript to producer Robert Evans. The film rights to the novel had been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with Evans slated to produce the film, John Frankenheimer hired to direct, and Hjortsberg acting as screenwriter. Frankenheimer was later replaced by Dick Richards, and Dustin Hoffman was being considered for the lead role. After Paramount's option expired, Hjortsberg discussed the project with Robert Redford and wrote two drafts. Hjortsberg, however, felt that no film studio was willing to produce his script. He reflected, "Even with [Redford] behind the script, studio executives weren't interested. 'Why can't it have a happy ending?' every bigshot demanded."


title: Angel Heart

text: In 1985, producer Elliott Kastner met with Alan Parker at Pinewood Studios to discuss a film adaptation of the novel. Parker, who had read the book following its publication, agreed to write the screenplay. He met with Hjortsberg in London before moving to New York, where he wrote most of the script. After completing the first draft in September 1985, Parker traveled to Rome, Italy, where he brought the script to Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna. The two producers agreed to finance the film through their independent film studio, Carolco Pictures, and Parker was given creative control. Pre-production work on "Angel Heart" began in January 1986 in New York, where Parker selected the creative team, reuniting with several of his past collaborators, including producer Alan Marshall, director of photography Michael Seresin, camera operator Michael Roberts, production designer Brian Morris and editor Gerry Hambling.


title: Angel Heart

text: Parker made several changes from the novel. He titled his script "Angel Heart" as he wanted to distance his film adaptation from the source material. While "Falling Angel" is set entirely in New York City, Parker had the second half of his script take place in New Orleans, based on the novel's perpetual allusions to voodoo and the occult. He discussed the story-setting change to Hjortsberg, who approved of the decision; the author revealed to Parker that he had also thought of setting his novel in New Orleans. "Angel Heart" is set in the year 1955, whereas in the book the events take place in 1959. He explained, "The book is set in 1959 and I moved it to 1955 for a small but selfish reason. 1959 was on the way to the 1960s with its changing attitudes as well as environments. 1955 for me still belonged to the 1940s—and, because of the historical pause button of World War II, conceivably the 1930s—so quite simply, setting it in this year allowed me to give an older look to the film."


title: Angel Heart

text: Other script changes from the novel involved characterization and dialogue. Parker sought to make Harry Angel a character that evoked sympathy. He said, "In the tradition of the down-at-heel gumshoe, his phlegmatic surface disguised an intelligence capable of unraveling a complicated, larger-than-life story with a degree of belief and conciseness. Also he had to be attractive to audiences while enlightening them, little by little, along the way." Parker also established Angel as being born on February 14—Valentine's Day—the same date as his own birthday. He explained that it was "for no particular reason other than Valentine’s Day might be easy to remember in a labyrinthine script and the heart reference seemed to have some resonance". Parker also wanted to create a realistic depiction of Louis Cyphre, as opposed to the character's "larger-than-life" personality in the novel. Another script change involved the ending and the identity of the killer. While Angel is framed for the murders (presumably by Cyphre) in the novel, Parker established the character as the killer for the film's ending.


title: Angel Heart

text: Parker originally wanted Robert De Niro to play the role of Harry Angel, but the actor expressed interest in making a cameo appearance as mysterious benefactor Louis Cyphre. De Niro, however, did not fully commit to the role until after frequent discussions with Parker. The director reflected, "I had been courting [De Niro] to play [Cyphre] in "Angel Heart" for some months and we had met a few times—and he had continued to bombard me with questions examining every dot and comma of my script. I had walked him through the locations we had found, read through the screenplay sitting on the floor of a dank, disused church in Harlem and finally he said ‘yes’."


title: Angel Heart

text: Jack Nicholson and Mickey Rourke were also considered for the role of Angel. Parker met with Nicholson in Los Angeles to discuss the project. Nicholson ultimately passed on the role. Parker said, "I did my pitch and he was most gracious, although, to be honest, he was quite distracted at the time... my movie and the possibility of him taking part seemed to slip from his immediate area of concentration and interest." Parker then met with Rourke, who expressed a strong interest in playing Angel and secured the leading role after a meeting with Parker in New York.


title: Angel Heart

text: Various actresses auditioned for the role of Epiphany Proudfoot before Lisa Bonet secured the part. Bonet was then known for her role on the family-oriented sitcom "The Cosby Show", and her casting in "Angel Heart" sparked significant controversy. Before securing the role, Bonet discussed it with Bill Cosby, who encouraged her decision to appear in the film. Parker cast Bonet based on the strength of her audition and was unaware of her role on "The Cosby Show". "I didn't hire [Bonet] because of "The Cosby Show"," he said. "I have never even seen the show. I hired her because she was right for the role." On preparing for the role, Bonet said, "I did a lot of meditation and a lot of self-inquiry. I did some research on voodoo. My earnest endeavor was really to let go of all my inhibitions. It was really necessary for me to be able to let go of Lisa and let Epiphany take over."


title: Angel Heart

text: Parker had difficulty finding an actress for the role of Margaret Krusemark. "Although it’s a small part in the film, the character is omnipresent in the dialogue and [the actress] had to have the right balance of class and eccentricity," he said. "I read many actresses for the part without much success." Rourke then suggested English actress Charlotte Rampling, who secured the role after Parker contacted her to discuss the part.


title: Angel Heart

text: In January 1986, Parker held an open casting call at a New York nightclub known as The Kamikaze, with more than 1,400 people auditioning for various roles. "I managed to read a short scene with 600 of them as they were filtered through to me," he said. Actress Elizabeth Whitcraft, who had a small role in Parker's previous film "Birdy" was cast as Connie, a journalist who aids Angel in his investigation. Parker held another casting call in New Orleans, where he requested that local musicians audition for possible roles in the film. Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown and Deacon John Moore were among the many musicians who auditioned for roles. Moore was cast as Toots Sweet's bandmate. Parker then returned to New York, where he auditioned other musicians, including Bo Diddley and Dizzy Gillespie. Blues guitarist Brownie McGhee, who plays Toots Sweet, was cast during the film's principal photography.


title: Angel Heart

text: During the casting process, Parker and producer Alan Marshall began scouting locations in New York City. The director looked at Harlem, believing that the neighborhood was "as un-photographed as other parts of New York are over-used." On January 20, 1986, he travelled to New Orleans, where he continued writing the script. Parker looked at unused buildings located on Royal Street that would act as a hotel and an abandoned house on Magazine Street that would serve as the home of Margaret Krusemark (Rampling). He returned to New York, where he looked at Staten Island and Coney Island. Parker's script for "Angel Heart" required that a total of 78 locations be used for filming between New York and New Orleans.


title: Angel Heart

text: Principal photography for "Angel Heart" began on March 31, 1986, and concluded on June 20, 1986, on a budget of $18 million. Filming began in Eldridge Street, Manhattan, New York City, which acted as Harry Angel's neighbourhood. Production designer Brian Morris and the set-decorating team spent two months designing the set prior to filming, hoping to recreate 1950s New York. Because of the warm weather conditions, ice trucks were used to create fake snow. Filming then moved to Alphabet City in Manhattan, where several bar scenes and Angel's intimate bedroom scene with Connie (Whitcraft) were filmed.


title: Angel Heart

text: The production then moved to Harlem to film a chase scene set during a procession before moving to Coney Island, where the cast and crew underwent severely cold weather conditions. The location was used to film a scene in which Angel questions a man, Izzy (George Buck), about the whereabouts of Johnny Favorite while Izzy's wife Bo (Judith Drake) stands waist deep in the ocean. The original actress who was cast as Bo was injured when she was knocked off her feet by a wave while delivering her first line. The actress refused to reshoot the scene, which led to her being replaced by her stand-in, Drake, whom Parker found to be a better actress for the role.


title: Angel Heart

text: Production returned to Manhattan to film the opening credits sequence. Filming then moved to Harlem, New York, where a hospice was used to film a scene involving the character Spider Simpson (Charles Gordone), and many of the hospice's elderly residents acted as extras for the scene. On April 17, 1986, the production team moved to Staten Island to film exterior and interior scenes involving the character Dr. Fowler (Michael Higgins). Filming then moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, which doubled for a scene set in a New Orleans train station. From April 28 to April 29, 1986, the "Angel Heart" production team returned to Harlem, where Parker filmed Rourke and De Niro's scene in a Harlem mission. The two actors next filmed a scene at Lanza's, an Italian restaurant located on the Lower East Side.


title: Angel Heart

text: By May 3, 1986, production had moved to New Orleans. In the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, Parker and his crew discovered an entire plantation workers' village that would serve as a graveyard. He said, "We had the good fortune to find an entire plantation workers’ village almost intact and, with careful dressing, this became Epiphany's world. The graveyard was a dressed set, but much of what we filmed was already there." An unused Louisiana field was used to create a racetrack where Angel meets the wealthy patriarch Ethan Krusemark (Fontelieu). On May 13, the crew encountered some difficulty filming a chase scene involving Angel, as they had to deal with shying horses, trained dogs, gunshots, two hundred chickens, and a horse specially trained to fall on top of Rourke’s stuntman.


title: Angel Heart

text: Production then moved to Magazine Street, where production designer Brian Morris and the art department attempted to recreate 1950s New Orleans. Parker said of the set, "As in New York, we had dressed and clad every single storefront as far as the eye could see in order to be authentic to the period, and drained everything of all primary colours for our monochromatic look." Filming then moved to Jackson Square where the crew filmed one of the final scenes, in which Angel runs from Margaret's home. The production then filmed a voodoo ceremony scene choreographed by Louis Falco. Falco, who had previously choreographed Parker's 1980 film "Fame", based the scene on an actual Haitian ceremony.


title: Angel Heart

text: The sex scene involving Rourke and Bonet was filmed in one of the unused buildings located on Royal Street and took four hours to shoot. Parker limited the crew to himself, cinematographer Michael Seresin, camera operator Michael Roberts, and the camera assistant. To make the actors more comfortable, Parker played music during the shoot. Production then moved to a corner of New Orleans, which doubled for flashback sequences set in 1943 Times Square, New York. The crew then discovered an unused bus depot, which was used to film scenes set in Ethan Krusemark's gumbo hut. Filming then moved to the St. Alphonsus Church, where the crew filmed a dialogue scene between Angel and Cyphre. Production returned to Royal Street in the French Quarter, where the final confrontation between Angel and Cyphre and the film's ending were shot.


title: Angel Heart

text: After filming concluded in June 1986, Parker spent four months editing the film in Europe, with 400,000 feet of film and 1,100 different shots. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave the original cut of "Angel Heart" an X rating, which is widely associated with pornographic films. The board, composed of industry executives and theater owners, expressed concerns over several seconds of the sex scene involving Rourke and Bonet in which Rourke's buttocks are seen thrusting in a sexual motion. Parker appealed the rating but did not receive the two-thirds vote required to reclassify the film to an R rating.


title: Angel Heart

text: The film's distributor Tri-Star Pictures refused to release it with an X rating, as the film would have fewer theaters willing to book it and fewer venues for advertising; Steve Randall, executive vice president of marketing for Tri-Star, stated that it was the studio's "firm policy not to release an X-rated film." With only a few weeks before the film's release, the studio was desperate for the less-restrictive R rating, but Parker was reluctant to alter the film. He filed another appeal, on which the board voted 8 to 6 in favor of the X rating. Parker then removed ten seconds of sexual content from the scene. "That scene was very complex, very intricate, and the cutting quite rapid, involving 60 to 80 cuts in the space of about two minutes," he said. "Eventually, I cut only 10 seconds from the scene, or about 14 feet of film." On February 24, 1987, the film was granted an R rating. Parker later stated that the MPAA's concerns led to "a wasteful, pointless and expensive exercise".


title: Angel Heart

text: The score was produced and composed by Trevor Jones, with saxophone solos by British jazz musician Courtney Pine. Parker hired Jones based on his work for the 1986 film "Runaway Train". After meeting with the director, Jones viewed a rough cut version of the film. He stated, "When I sat in the screening room all by myself and began to see those images, I was shaking like a puppy when the movie ended and when I got out of the room I told [Parker] that it was a great picture, but that I didn’t understand what exactly he wanted from me. He told me that he expected me to deliver something special to the picture and… to approach the movie from whenever I chose."


title: Angel Heart

text: For the score, Jones wanted to explore the concept of evil, explaining, "Evil is the greatest of human fears… I tried to give that feeling to the score using daily ordinary music that would bridge the world of [Harry Angel] to that which he’s getting into, the black magic, his search. It was like a psychological journey for me always trying to relate to the fears and emotions of the audience." He composed the score electronically on a Synclavier. Parker chose Glen Gray's 1937 song "Girl of My Dreams" as a recurring song performed by the unseen character Johnny Favorite. He wanted the song to act as a motif that would haunt viewers as it had haunted Harry Angel. Jones incorporated elements of the song into his score.


title: Angel Heart

text: In addition to Jones's compositions, the soundtrack features a number of blues and R&B performances, including "Honeyman Blues" by Bessie Smith, and "Soul on Fire" by LaVern Baker. Brownie McGhee performed the songs "The Right Key, but the Wrong Keyhole" and "Rainy Rainy Day" for the film, with Lilian Boutte acting as a vocalist. Jones stated, "…the main bulk of the score was worked on with a Synclavier. Basically there were two types of music, one was the electronic stuff from the Synclavier that [Parker] wanted, and the real jazz musicians. The two work very well together in view of the film's intent."


title: Angel Heart

text: During post-production, Jones mixed the music tracks at Angel Recording Studios, a recording studio built in an abandoned church in Islington, North London, with final mixing taking place at Warner Hollywood Studios in Los Angeles. Parker said, "One of the great advantages of working with contemporary recording techniques is that we can mix onto film in a recording studio with all of the various components and options of modern, multi-track recordings. I’ve always been very mistrustful of conventional scoring, whereby a hundred musicians sit in front of the projected film and the conductor strikes up the orchestra." A motion picture soundtrack album was released by the recording labels Antilles Records and Island Records.


title: Angel Heart

text: In North America, "Angel Heart" opened in wide release on March 6, 1987, distributed by Tri-Star Pictures. The film debuted at number four at the weekend box office, garnering ticket sales of $3,688,721 from 815 screens, with an average of $4,526 per theatre. The film's overall domestic gross was $17.2 million, against a production budget of $18 million.


title: Angel Heart

text: The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave "Angel Heart" a score of 82% based on a sample of 33 reviews, with an average score of 7.4/10. The site's consensus reads: ""Angel Heart" lures viewers into its disturbing, brutal mystery with authentic noir flair and a palpably hypnotic mood". William Hjortsberg, author of "Falling Angel", voiced his support of the film adaptation, stating, "[Alan] Parker wrote an excellent script and went on to make a memorable film. Casting Robert De Niro as Cyphre was a brilliant touch." Although initially supportive of Bonet's decision to appear in the film, Bill Cosby dismissed "Angel Heart" as "a movie made by white America that cast a black girl, gave her voodoo things to do and have sex".


title: Angel Heart

text: Initial reactions among film critics were mixed; "The Hollywood Reporter" indicated that reviewers generally praised Rourke's performance, as well as the score, cinematography, and production design, while criticism was aimed at Parker's screenwriting for being convoluted and exposition-heavy. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" praised the cinematography and production design, but criticized Rourke's performance as being "suitably intense, but to such little effect". Rita Kempley of "The Washington Post" wrote that "Angel Heart" "is over-stylized, and we're over-stimulated when the soundtrack goes berserk, from a few thumpity-thumps to a visceral, ventricles a-pumping score". Pauline Kael of "The New Yorker" criticized Parker's direction: "There's no way to separate the occult from the incomprehensible... Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher." Kael also criticized De Niro's cameo appearance, writing, "It’s the sort of guest appearance that lazy big actors delight in—they can show up the local talent."


title: Angel Heart

text: On the syndicated television program "Siskel & Ebert & the Movies", Gene Siskel gave "Angel Heart" a "thumbs down", while his colleague Roger Ebert praised the film and gave it a "thumbs up". In his review for the "Chicago Tribune", Siskel wrote that "Parker seems more concerned with style and with hiding the film`s big mystery than with pacing." Siskel also criticized the film's controversial sex scene for not being "as shocking as the rating board would have you believe."


title: Angel Heart

text: Ebert, writing for the "Chicago Sun-Times", gave the film three and a half stars out of four, writing that ""Angel Heart" is a thriller and a horror movie, but most of all it's an exuberant exercise in style, in which Parker and his actors have fun taking it to the limit". Ian Nathan of "Empire" called the film "A diabolical treat with Rourke and De Niro in top form." Almar Haflidason of the BBC wrote, "The movie maintains intrigue at every turn and Rourke is spellbinding. Robert De Niro, Charlotte Rampling, and the assembled cast are all excellent. But this is Mickey Rourke's movie, and he puts in a mesmerising performance." Richard Luck, writing for Film4, concluded in his review, "The book's so good it deserves a better movie, but Rourke's performance is such that "Angel Heart" stands out from the necromancy movie crowd."


title: Angel Heart

text: Filmmaker Christopher Nolan stated the film was a major influence on his 2000 film "Memento": "In terms of "Memento", Alan Parker films such as "Angel Heart" and "The Wall", which use very interesting editing techniques such as a fractured narrative, were a big influence."


title: Angel Heart

text: In 2010, "Wired" magazine ranked the film at number 22 on their list of "The 25 Best Horror Films of All Time", and in 2012, Mark Hughes, writing for "Forbes", ranked "Angel Heart" at number nine on his list of the "Top 10 Best Cult Classic Horror Movies of All Time". "Den of Geek" writer Ryan Lambie ranked the film at number six on his list of "The Top 20 Underappreciated Films of 1987", writing that "Parker brings a wonderfully shadowy quality to his noir thriller, which takes in New York and New Orleans. Some viewers may be able to predict where this twisty, murky thriller's going to take them, but the ride remains one worth taking thanks to the quality of the acting and direction." Film critic Tim Dirks of the film-review website Filmsite.org added the film to his list of films featuring the "Greatest Film Plot Twists, Film Spoilers and Surprise Endings", based on two of the film's major plot twists—Harry Angel being revealed as Johnny Favorite, and Louis Cyphre revealing himself as Lucifer. "Screen Rant" writer Tim Butters rated Robert De Niro's performance "One of the 10 Best Movie Depictions of the Devil".


title: Angel Heart

text: "Angel Heart" received several awards and nominations following its release. At the 10th Jupiter Awards, Mickey Rourke won a Jupiter Award for Best International Actor for his performances in both "Angel Heart" and "A Prayer for the Dying" (1987). At the 9th Youth in Film Awards, Lisa Bonet won the Young Artist Award for Best Young Female Superstar in Motion Pictures. At the 15th Saturn Awards, "Angel Heart" received three Saturn Award nominations, though it failed to win any.


title: Angel Heart

text: "Angel Heart" was released on VHS on September 24, 1987, by International Video Entertainment (IVE). The releases included the R-rated theatrical cut and an uncut version which restored the ten seconds of sexual content that was removed to satisfy the MPAA. Ralph King, senior vice president of IVE, said, "The scene cut from "Angel Heart" is both provocative and shocking, but it is by no means pornographic. We're pleased to give the public the opportunity to see the film as Alan Parker originally meant the film to be viewed."


title: Angel Heart

text: The film was first released on DVD on June 23, 1998, by Artisan Entertainment. Special features on the DVD included a theatrical trailer, production notes, a making-of featurette, and information on the cast and crew. The DVD release received criticism for its poor video transfer and shortage of special features. Artisan later released the film on laserdisc on August 18, 1998. Lionsgate Home Entertainment re-released "Angel Heart" with a "Special Edition" DVD on May 18, 2004. The Special Edition features additional material, including an introduction and audio commentary by Parker, a scene-specific commentary by Rourke, a video interview with the actor, and the theatrical trailer. Lionsgate released the film on Blu-ray on November 24, 2009. The Blu-ray presents the film in 1080p high definition and contains all the additional materials found on the Special Edition DVD.


title: Angel Heart

text: On July 12, 2022, Lionsgate released the film on 4K Ultra HD for the first time in the United States.


title: Angel Heart

text: An edited TV version was produced which removed the more graphic elements of the sex scenes. In particular the sex scene between Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet was completely re-edited and featured additional footage that was not included in either the R or Unrated versions. The additional footage features flashbacks of a drunken party with several scantily clad women at the barracks where Johnny Favorite was stationed just prior to it being hit by a series of explosions. The sequence ends with a brief shot of Epiphany Proudfoot's (presumably dead) body burning amongst a pile of charred rubble.


title: Angel Heart

text: In 2008, it was announced that producers Michael De Luca, Alison Rosenzweig and Michael Gaeta were developing a planned remake of "Angel Heart" that would be produced by De Luca's production banner, Michael De Luca Productions. The producers had optioned the rights to both the film and the novel "Falling Angel". De Luca expressed that he was a fan of the novel, stating, "It’s a great blend of genres with a great Faustian bargain, compelling, universal themes and a rare combination of literary and commercial appeal." However, nothing has been heard of this project since a brief Filmstalker article in May 2009.


title: The Beach Boys discography

text: The Beach Boys are an American rock band formed in Hawthorne, California, in 1961. Their discography from 1961 to 1984 was originally released on the vinyl format, with the 1985 album "The Beach Boys" being the group's first CD release. The Beach Boys' catalogue has been released on reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette, CD, MiniDisc, digital downloads, and various streaming services.


title: The Beach Boys discography

text: The group has released 29 studio albums, eleven live albums, 61 compilation albums, 1 remix album, and 75 singles. The release dates and sequence of the Beach Boys' albums in the UK up to "Pet Sounds" differ significantly from the original US releases.


title: The Beach Boys discography

text: Listed below are Beach Boys A and B sides issued in the US. For Beach Boys singles not issued under the group name, EP tracks, featured tracks, and non-American A-sides, see other songs. In total the Beach Boys have had 10 number one singles accross the world and across all charts.


title: Connie Chung

text: Constance Yu-Hwa Chung (born August 20, 1946) is an American journalist. She has been an anchor and reporter for the U.S. television news networks NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. Some of her more famous interview subjects include Claus von Bülow and U.S. Representative Gary Condit, whom Chung interviewed first after the Chandra Levy disappearance, and basketball legend Magic Johnson after he went public about being HIV-positive. In 1993, she became the second woman to co-anchor a network newscast as part of "CBS Evening News".


title: Connie Chung

text: The youngest of ten children, Chung was born in Washington, D.C., less than a year after her family emigrated from China and was raised in D.C. Her father, William Ling Chung, was an intelligence officer in the Chinese Nationalist Government and five of her siblings died during wartime.


title: Connie Chung

text: She graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, and went on to receive a degree in journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1969.


title: Connie Chung

text: Chung was a Washington-based correspondent for the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" in the early 1970s, during the Watergate political scandal. Later, Chung left to anchor evening newscasts for KNXT (now KCBS-TV), the network's owned and operated station in Los Angeles. Chung also anchored the network's primetime news updates ("CBS Newsbreak") for West Coast stations from the KNXT studios at Columbia Square during her tenure there.


title: Connie Chung

text: In early 2018, Chung was asked if she was sexually harassed in her career. She replied "Oh, yeah! Oh, sure. Yeah. Every day. I mean, a lot. Especially when I started out." Later that year, following Christine Blasey Ford's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee of being sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh, Chung wrote an open letter to Blasey-Ford saying that she too was sexually assaulted when she was in college, and the person who assaulted her was the doctor who delivered her.


title: Connie Chung

text: In 1983, Chung returned to network news as anchor of NBC's new early program, "NBC News at Sunrise", which was scheduled as the lead-in to the "Today" program. She was also anchor of the Saturday edition of "NBC Nightly News" and filled in for Tom Brokaw on weeknights. NBC also created two newsmagazines, "American Almanac" and "1986", which she co-hosted with Roger Mudd.


title: Connie Chung

text: In 1989, Chung left NBC for CBS, where she hosted "Saturday Night with Connie Chung" (later renamed "Face to Face with Connie Chung") (1989–90), and anchored the "CBS Sunday Evening News" (1989–93). On June 1, 1993, she became the second woman (after Barbara Walters with ABC in 1976) to co-anchor a major network's national weekday news broadcast. While hosting the "CBS Evening News", Chung also hosted a side project on CBS, "Eye to Eye with Connie Chung". After her co-anchoring duties with Dan Rather ended in 1995, Chung left CBS. She eventually jumped to ABC News where she co-hosted the Monday edition of "20/20" with Charles Gibson and began independent interviews, a field which would soon become her trademark.


title: Connie Chung

text: In a January 5, 1995, interview with Kathleen Gingrich, mother of Republican politician Newt Gingrich, on "Eye to Eye", Mrs. Gingrich said she could not say what her son thought about First Lady Hillary Clinton on the air. Chung asked Mrs. Gingrich to "just whisper it to me, just between you and me," and Mrs. Gingrich's microphone volume was turned up as she replied "He thinks she's a bitch." Many people interpreted Chung's suggestion that if Mrs. Gingrich would whisper this statement it would be promised that the statement would be off the record. Bill Carter for "The New York Times" reported, "Ms. Chung had become the object of some of the most ferocious criticism, justified or not, ever directed at any network anchor as a result of her now infamous interview with Speaker Newt Gingrich's mother, Kathleen." The interview was also parodied on "Saturday Night Live".


title: Connie Chung

text: A few months later, in the wake of the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Chung was widely criticized for sarcasm as she asked an Oklahoma City Fire Department spokesman, "Can the Oklahoma City Fire Department handle "this?"" Many Oklahomans felt the question was insensitive to the situation. For instance, a few women created "Bite Me, Connie Chung" shirts in response to the interview. Thousands of viewers in Oklahoma and elsewhere called and wrote letters of protest over the tone of the questions. Moreover, co-anchor Dan Rather was irate that Chung was sent from New York to the assignment while he was already in nearby Texas. Consequently, after public outcry, and Rather's complaints, Chung was given a choice to resign or move to weekend anchor or morning anchor. Chung left the network after being removed as co-anchor of "CBS Evening News".


title: Connie Chung

text: In 1997, Chung moved to ABC News as a reporter on "20/20", and co-host of the Monday edition of the program alongside Charles Gibson. In 2001, she conducted an interview with Gary Condit on "Primetime Thursday", focusing on his relationship with murdered Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy.


title: Connie Chung

text: She was a guest host of the morning program "Good Morning America". After short-lived host Lisa McRee left the program, Chung declined to take over on a permanent basis, saying she did not want to broadcast 10 hours a week in the early morning. She also was on "ABC 2000 Today" in Las Vegas.


title: Connie Chung

text: Chung, for a short time, hosted her own show on CNN titled "Connie Chung Tonight", for which she was paid $2 million per year. Though her arrival at CNN was heavily hyped by the network, her show was panned by critics. CNN changed her show from live to tape-delay to improve its continuity. Although it performed moderately well in the ratings (a 500,000 increase in viewers), her show was suspended once the 2003 Iraq War began. During the war, she was reduced to reading hourly headlines. Once CNN resumed regular programming, Chung requested that CNN resume broadcasting her show as soon as possible. The network responded by cancelling it, even though her contract had not yet expired. In an interview, CNN founder Ted Turner called the show "just awful."


title: Connie Chung

text: In July 2002, Chung interviewed tennis player Martina Navratilova, who at that time had been a naturalized U.S. citizen for more than 20 years, about her recent criticisms of the U.S. political system. Chung labeled these criticisms "un-American" and "unpatriotic" and suggested Navratilova should "go back to Czechoslovakia" (which had ceased to be a united nation nine years earlier) rather than use her celebrity status to gain a platform for her complaints. When Navratilova asked why it was unpatriotic to speak out, Chung replied, "Well, you know the old line, love it or leave it."


title: Connie Chung

text: In January 2006, Chung and Maury Povich began hosting a show titled "Weekends with Maury and Connie" on MSNBC. It was Chung's first appearance as a television host since 2003. The show was later canceled and aired its final episode on June 17, 2006. In this episode, Chung, dressed in a white evening gown and dancing on top of a black piano, sang a parody to the tune of "Thanks for the Memory." Video clips of the off-key farewell performance circulated on internet video sites. Chung commented, "All I want to be sure of is that viewers understood it was a giant self-parody. If anyone took it seriously, they really need to get a life." On the June 27, 2006 episode of "The Tonight Show", Jay Leno interviewed Chung about her "Thanks for the Memory" parody. During the interview, Chung poked fun at her show's low ratings, referring to the musical number as a "private joke for our two viewers."


title: Connie Chung

text: Chung's interviews were largely gentle, but often they were punctuated by a rapid-fire barrage of sharp questions. Despite this, her interviews were still widely recognized as being softer than those of other interviewers, such as Barbara Walters or Mike Wallace. Consequently, her interviews were often used as a public relations move by those looking to overcome scandal or controversy. Some of her more famous interview subjects include Claus von Bülow and U.S. Representative Gary Condit, whom Chung interviewed first after the Chandra Levy disappearance. Chung was the first journalist to interview basketball player Earvin "Magic" Johnson after he announced he was HIV-positive.


title: Connie Chung

text: Chung accepted a teaching fellowship at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. While at Harvard, she wrote a discussion paper titled "The Business of Getting "The Get": Nailing an Exclusive Interview in Prime Time".


title: Connie Chung

text: Chung has been married to talk show host Maury Povich since 1984 and they have one adopted son, Matthew Jay Povich, who they adopted on June 20, 1995. Chung converted to Judaism at the time of her marriage to Povich. According to Maury Povich, "She knows more Yiddish than you." Chung has since become devoted to the faith, and she attends synagogue with her family. Chung has noted publicly that she and Povich maintain a kosher lifestyle year-round.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Bernard Cornwell (born 23 February 1944) is an English-American author of historical novels and a history of the Waterloo Campaign. He is best known for his novels about Napoleonic Wars rifleman Richard Sharpe. He has also written "The Saxon Stories", a series of 13 novels about King Alfred and the making of England.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: He has written historical novels primarily based on English history, in five series, and one series of contemporary thriller novels. A feature of his historical novels is an end note on how they match or differ from history, and what one might see at the modern sites of the events described. He wrote a nonfiction book on the battle of Waterloo, in addition to the fictional story of the famous battle in the Sharpe series. Two of the historical novel series have been adapted for television: the "Sharpe" television series by ITV and "The Last Kingdom" by BBC. He lives in the US with his wife, alternating between Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and Charleston, South Carolina.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell was born in London in 1944. His father was Canadian airman William Oughtred and his mother was Englishwoman Dorothy Cornwell, a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. He was adopted and brought up in Thundersley, Essex by the Wiggins family; they were members of the Peculiar People, a strict sect of pacifists who banned frivolity of all kinds, and even medicine up to 1930. Reacting to being raised by Christian Fundamentalists, he grew up rejecting all religions and became an atheist.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: After his adoptive father died, he changed his last name by deed poll from Wiggins to Cornwell, his birth mother's maiden name. Prior to that, he used Bernard Cornwell as a pen name. He met his father for the first time when he was 58, after telling a journalist on a book tour, "what I wanted to see in Vancouver was my real father." There he met his half-siblings, with whom he shares many traits, and learned his genealogy.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell was sent to Monkton Combe School in Somerset. He read history at University College London between 1963 and 1966 and worked as a teacher after graduating. He attempted to enlist in the British armed services at least three times but was rejected on the grounds of myopia.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Following his work as a teacher, Cornwell joined the BBC's Nationwide and was later promoted to head of current affairs at BBC Northern Ireland. He then joined Thames Television as editor of "Thames News". His first marriage ended in divorce in the 1970s. He met his second wife, Judy, in 1978 in Edinburgh while he worked for BBC Northern Ireland; she was a travel agent from the US and the mother of three children from a previous marriage. He relocated to the United States in 1979 after marrying her. He was unable to get a United States Permanent Resident Card (green card), so he started writing novels, as this did not require a work permit. He later became a United States citizen.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: As a child, Cornwell loved the novels of C. S. Forester which chronicled the adventures of fictional British naval officer Horatio Hornblower during the Napoleonic Wars. He was surprised to find that there were no such novels concerning Lord Wellington's campaign on land, so he wrote such a series himself—further motivated by the need to support himself through writing. As his chief protagonist he created a rifleman involved in most of the major battles of the Peninsular War, taking the character's name from rugby player Richard Sharp.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell originally planned to start the series with the Siege of Badajoz but decided instead to begin with a couple of "warm-up" novels. These were "Sharpe's Eagle" and "Sharpe's Gold", both published in 1981. He went on to tell the story of Badajoz in "Sharpe's Company" published in 1982. He had a seven-book deal with his publisher.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell and wife Judy co-wrote a series of novels published under the pseudonym "Susannah Kells": "A Crowning Mercy" published in 1983, "Fallen Angels" in 1984, and "Coat of Arms" (aka "The Aristocrats") in 1986. Cornwell's strict Protestant upbringing forms the background of "A Crowning Mercy", which takes place during the English Civil War. He also published "Redcoat" in 1987, an American Revolutionary War novel set in Philadelphia during its 1777 occupation by the British.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell was approached by a production company interested in making television adaptations of the first eight books of his Sharpe series. They asked him to write a background novel to give them a starting point to the series and also requested that the story featured a substantial role for Spanish characters, in order to secure co-funding from Spain. The result was "Sharpe's Rifles", published in 1987 and set in the period of the English retreat at A Coruña, before Wellesley's arrival in Spain. It also resulted in a series of Sharpe television films starring Sean Bean.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: This was followed by a series of modern thrillers with sailing as a background and common themes: "Wildtrack" published in 1988, "Sea Lord" (or "Killer's Wake") in 1989, "Crackdown" in 1990, "Stormchild" in 1991, and the political thriller "Scoundrel" in 1992.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell wrote two books a year for a long time, slowing to one book per year in his sixties. His idea of historical fiction is of presenting a "big story" in historical events and a "little story" in fictional plot. Patrick O'Brian, who wrote the Aubrey-Maturin series of historical adventures set in the Napoleonic era, said that there was "too much plot, not enough lifestyle" in the novels of Cornwell and C. S. Forester. Cornwell took that as a compliment and an accurate appraisal of the difference between the style of O'Brian and his own, while appreciating the association with Forester.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: With the success of the Sharpe series, Cornwell began to write about other periods and historical events in English and American history, both in series and in single novels. "Agincourt" was released in the UK in October 2008. The protagonist is an archer who participates in the Battle of Agincourt, a devastating defeat suffered by the French during the Hundred Years' War. In 2004, he released "The Last Kingdom", beginning the Saxon Stories centered on protagonist Uhtred of Bebbanburg and telling how the nation of England began under King Alfred the Great. The twelfth novel in the series was published in 2019 as "Sword of Kings". He realized that few in England knew how England began, unlike Americans who have a clear date for their nation's beginning—so this became his "big story". His own ancestral roots gave him the "little story" in the protagonist Uhtred.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: "The Fort", published in 2010, is another of Cornwell's stand-alone novels. It tells of the Penobscot Expedition of 1779 during the American Revolutionary War. He has been extremely successful in his writing career, selling 30 million books by 2015 throughout the various series and individual novels and he continues to write new novels.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours for services to literature and television production.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell's first series of historical novels features the adventures of Richard Sharpe, an English soldier during the Napoleonic Wars, in particular the Peninsular Wars once Arthur Wellesley was sent to lead the campaign against Napoleon's forces on the Iberian Peninsula. The first 11 books of the Sharpe series began with "Sharpe's Rifles" and ended with "Sharpe's Waterloo", published in the US as "Waterloo". These detail Sharpe's adventures in various Peninsular War campaigns over the course of seven years. Subsequently, Cornwell wrote "Sharpe's Tiger", "Sharpe's Triumph", "Sharpe's Fortress", "Sharpe's Trafalgar", and "Sharpe's Prey", depicting Sharpe's earlier adventures under Wellington's command in India, including his hard-won promotion to the officer corps, his return to Britain, and his arrival in the 95th Rifles; he also wrote the sequel "Sharpe's Devil", set six years after the end of the wars. "Sharpe's Battle" takes place during the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro. Since 2003, he has written further "missing adventures" set during the Peninsular War era, based on major battles of that long campaign, for a total of 22 novels in this series. The Sharpe Appreciation Society has also published three short stories by Cornwell: "Sharpe's Skirmish", "Sharpe's Christmas" and "Sharpe's Ransom".


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell mentions in notes at the end of the Sharpe series that he was initially dubious about the casting of Sean Bean for the television adaptations, but that the doubts did not last and he was subsequently so delighted that he dedicated "Sharpe's Battle" to him. He has admitted that he subtly changed the writing of the character to align with Bean's portrayal as now he "could not imagine Sharpe as anyone else". One of Cornwell's initial misgivings about Bean was that he did not physically resemble the black-haired Sharpe whom he described in the early books, but he thought that Bean understood and acted the part perfectly, and he subsequently refrained from mentioning Sharpe's hair color.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: A trilogy depicting Cornwell's historical re-creation of Arthurian Britain. The series posits that post-Roman Britain was a difficult time for the native Britons, being threatened by invasion from the Anglo-Saxons in the East and raids from the Irish in the West. At the same time, they suffered internal power struggles between their petty kingdoms and friction between the old Druidic religion and newly arrived Christianity. The author has often said that these are his own favourite stories, "I have to confess that of all the books I have written these three are my favourites."


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: This series deals with a mid-14th century search for the Holy Grail during the Hundred Years' War. English archer Thomas of Hookton becomes drawn into the quest by the actions of a mercenary soldier called "The Harlequin" who murders Thomas' family in his obsessive search for the Grail. Cornwell was planning at one point to write more books about Thomas of Hookton and said that, shortly after finishing "Heretic", he had "started another Thomas of Hookton book, then stopped it—mainly because I felt that his story ended in "Heretic" and I was just trying to get too much from him. Which doesn't mean I won't pick the idea up again sometime in the future." He returned to the character in "1356" published in 2012.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell's latest series focuses on the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, England during the 9th-century reign of Alfred the Great, his fierce opposition to the Danes and his determination to unite England as one country. The series idea took shape in his mind after meeting his real father in Canada in his fifties, learning his own ancestry back to that era, to Uhtred of Bebbanburg who became Uhtred, the protagonist of the series. Cornwell realised that most English people are unaware of how England came to be, rather than say, Dane-land, in that era of multiple peoples on the island of Great Britain. The first novel was published in 2004. The series continues after the death of Alfred, as his heirs consolidate the nation. The 13th book is titled "War Lord", and it is the final novel in the series.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: "The Last Kingdom" and "The Pale Horseman" were the basis for the first series of the television series, "The Last Kingdom", while "The Lords of the North" and "Sword Song" were the basis for the second series. A third series, based on "The Burning Land" and "Death of Kings", was released in November 2018, and a fourth series was released in April 2020. A fifth series was confirmed on 7 July 2020.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Four novels set during the American Civil War follow the adventures of Boston-born Nathaniel Starbuck during his service in the Confederate Army. The series is notable for an appearance by Richard Sharpe's son as a supporting character.


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: Cornwell's thriller series are modern mysteries, all with sailing themes. He is a traditional sailor and enjoys sailing his Cornish Crabber christened "Royalist". According to Cornwell's website, there may be no additions to the series: "I enjoyed writing the thrillers, but suspect I am happier writing historical novels. I'm always delighted when people want more of the sailing books, but I'm not planning on writing any more, at least not now – but who knows? Perhaps when I retire".


title: Bernard Cornwell

text: In addition to his many novels, including a fictional account ("Sharpe's Waterloo") of the battle of Waterloo, Cornwell published a nonfiction book, "", released in September 2014, in time for the 200th anniversary of that battle.


title: Irony

text: Irony (), in its broadest sense, is the juxtaposition of what on the surface appears to be the case and what is actually the case or to be expected; it is an important rhetorical device and literary technique.


title: Irony

text: Irony can be categorized into different types, including "verbal irony", "dramatic irony", and "situational irony". Verbal, dramatic, and situational irony are often used for emphasis in the assertion of a truth. The ironic form of simile, used in sarcasm, and some forms of litotes can emphasize one's meaning by the deliberate use of language which states the opposite of the truth, denies the contrary of the truth, or drastically and obviously understates a factual connection.


title: Irony

text: Henry Watson Fowler, in "The King's English", says, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same." Also, Eric Partridge, in "Usage and Abusage", writes that "Irony consists in stating the contrary of what is meant."


title: Irony

text: The use of irony may require the concept of a "double audience". Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" says:


title: Irony

text: Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear & shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders' incomprehension.


title: Irony

text: The term is sometimes used as a synonym for "incongruous" and applied to "every trivial oddity" in situations where there is no double audience. An example of such usage is:


title: Irony

text: Sullivan, whose real interest was, ironically, serious music, which he composed with varying degrees of success, achieved fame for his comic opera scores rather than for his more earnest efforts.


title: Irony

text: The "American Heritage Dictionary" secondary meaning for "irony": "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs". This sense, however, is not synonymous with "incongruous" but merely a definition of dramatic or situational irony. It is often included in definitions of irony "not only" that incongruity is present "but also" that the incongruity must reveal some aspect of human vanity or folly. Thus the majority of "American Heritage Dictionary"'s usage panel found it unacceptable to use the word "ironic" to describe mere unfortunate coincidences or surprising disappointments that "suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly."


title: Irony

text: Douglas C. Muecke identifies three basic features of all irony. First, irony depends on a double-layered or two-story phenomenon for success. "At the lower level is the situation either as it appears to the victim of irony (where there is a victim) or as it is deceptively presented by the ironist." The upper level is the situation as it appears to the reader or the ironist. Second, the ironist exploits a contradiction, incongruity, or incompatibility between the two levels. Third, irony plays upon the innocence of a character or victim. "Either a victim is confidently unaware of the very possibility of there being an upper level or point of view that invalidates his own, or an ironist pretends not to be aware of it."


title: Irony

text: The word came into English as a figure of speech in the 16th century as similar to the French "ironie". It derives from the Latin "ironia" and ultimately from the Greek "εἰρωνεία" eirōneía, meaning 'dissimulation, ignorance purposely affected'.


title: Irony

text: "The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics" distinguishes between the following types of irony:


title: Irony

text: According to "A glossary of literary terms" by Abrams and Harpham,"Verbal irony" is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed. An ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with indications in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation.


title: Irony

text: Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced "intentionally" by speakers. For instance, if a man exclaims, "I'm not upset!" but reveals an upset emotional state through his voice while truly trying to claim he's not upset, it would not be verbal irony by virtue of its verbal manifestation (it would, however, be situational irony). But if the same speaker said the same words and intended to communicate that he was upset by claiming he was not, the utterance would be verbal irony. This distinction illustrates an important aspect of verbal irony—speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves. There are, however, examples of verbal irony that do not rely on saying the opposite of what one means, and there are cases where all the traditional criteria of irony exist and the utterance is not ironic.


title: Irony

text: In a clear example from literature, in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", Mark Antony's speech after the assassination of Caesar appears to praise the assassins, particularly Brutus ("But Brutus says he was ambitious; / And Brutus is an honourable man"), while actually condemning them. "We're left in no doubt as to who's ambitious and who's honourable. The literal truth of what's written clashes with the perceived truth of what's meant to revealing effect, which is irony in a nutshell".


title: Irony

text: Ironic similes are a form of verbal irony where a speaker intends to communicate the opposite of what they mean.


title: Irony

text: A fair amount of confusion has surrounded the issue of the relationship between verbal irony and sarcasm.


title: Irony

text: Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (1926; reprinted to at least 2015) states: Sarcasm does not necessarily involve irony and irony has often no touch of sarcasm. This suggests that the two concepts are linked but may be considered separately. "The Oxford English Dictionary"'s entry for sarcasm does not mention irony, but the irony entry includes:


title: Irony

text: The "Encyclopædia Britannica" has "Non-literary irony is often called sarcasm"; while the "Webster's Dictionary" entry is:


title: Irony

text: Irony must not be confused with sarcasm, which is direct: sarcasm means precisely what it says, but in a sharp, caustic, ... manner.


title: Irony

text: The psychologist Rod A. Martin, in "The Psychology of Humour" (2007), is quite clear that irony is where "the literal meaning is opposite to the intended" and sarcasm is "aggressive humor that pokes fun". He has the following examples: for irony he uses the statement "What a nice day" when it is raining. For sarcasm, he cites Winston Churchill, who is supposed to have said, when told by Bessie Braddock that he was drunk, "But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly", as being sarcastic, while not saying the opposite of what is intended.


title: Irony

text: Psychology researchers Lee and Katz have addressed the issue directly. They found that ridicule is an important aspect of sarcasm, but not of verbal irony in general. By this account, sarcasm is a particular kind of personal criticism levelled against a person or group of persons that incorporates verbal irony. For example, a woman reports to her friend that rather than going to a medical doctor to treat her cancer, she has decided to see a spiritual healer instead. In response her friend says sarcastically, "Oh, brilliant, what an ingenious idea, that's really going to cure you." The friend could have also replied with any number of ironic expressions that should not be labeled as sarcasm exactly, but still have many shared elements with sarcasm.


title: Irony

text: Most instances of verbal irony are labeled by research subjects as sarcastic, suggesting that the term "sarcasm" is more widely used than its technical definition suggests it should be. Some psycholinguistic theorists suggest that sarcasm, hyperbole, understatement, rhetorical questions, double entendre and jocularity should all be considered forms of verbal irony. The differences between these rhetorical devices (tropes) can be quite subtle and relate to typical emotional reactions of listeners, and the goals of the speakers. Regardless of the various ways theorists categorize figurative language types, people in conversation who are attempting to interpret speaker intentions and discourse goals do not generally identify the kinds of tropes used.


title: Irony

text: Echoic allusion is the main component involved in conveying verbally ironic meaning. It is best described as a speech act by which the speaker simultaneously represents a thought, belief or idea, and implicitly attributes this idea to someone else who is wrong or deluded. In this way, the speaker intentionally dissociates themselves from the idea and conveys their tacit dissent, thereby providing a different meaning to their utterance. In some cases, the speaker can provide stronger dissociation from the represented thought by also implying derision toward the idea or outwardly making fun of the person or people they attribute it to.


title: Irony

text: Echoic allusion, like other forms of verbal irony, relies on semantically disambiguating cues to be interpreted correctly. These cues often come in the form of paralinguistic markers such as prosody, tone, or pitch, as well as nonverbal cues like hand gesture, facial expression and eye gaze.


title: Irony

text: Dramatic irony exploits the device of giving the spectator an item of information that at least one of the characters in the narrative is unaware of (at least consciously), thus placing the spectator a step ahead of at least one of the characters. Connop Thirlwall in his 1833 article "On the Irony of Sophocles" originally highlighted the role of irony in drama. "The Oxford English Dictionary" defines dramatic irony as:


title: Irony

text: According to Stanton, dramatic irony has three stages—installation, exploitation, and resolution (often also called preparation, suspension, and resolution)


title: Irony

text: —producing dramatic conflict in what one character relies or appears to rely upon, the "contrary" of which is known by observers (especially the audience; sometimes to other characters within the drama) to be true. In summary, it means that the reader/watcher/listener knows something that one or more of the characters in the piece is not aware of.


title: Irony

text: Tragic irony is a special category of dramatic irony. In tragic irony, the words and actions of the characters contradict the real situation, which the spectators fully realize. "The Oxford English Dictionary" defines this as:


title: Irony

text: Ancient Greek drama was especially characterized by tragic irony because the audiences were so familiar with the legends that most of the plays dramatized. Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" provides a classic example of tragic irony at its fullest. Claire Colebrook writes:


title: Irony

text: Further, Oedipus vows to find the murderer and curses him for the plague that he has caused, not knowing that the murderer he has cursed and vowed to find is himself. The audience knows that Oedipus himself is the murderer that he is seeking; Oedipus, Creon, and Jocasta do not.


title: Irony

text: Irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker's perception of paradox that arises from insoluble problems. For example, in the William Shakespeare play "Romeo and Juliet", when Romeo finds Juliet in a drugged, deathlike sleep, he assumes her to be dead. The audience knows that Juliet has faked her death, yet Romeo believes she is truly dead, and commits suicide. Upon awakening to find her dead lover beside her, Juliet stabs herself with a dagger thus killing herself, too.


title: Irony

text: Situational irony is a relatively modern use of the term, and describes a sharp discrepancy between the expected result and actual results in a certain situation.


title: Irony

text: Lars Elleström writes:"Situational irony" ... is most broadly defined as a situation where the outcome is incongruous with what was expected, but it is also more generally understood as a situation that includes contradictions or sharp contrasts.


title: Irony

text: The expression cosmic irony or "irony of fate" stems from the notion that the gods (or the Fates) are amusing themselves by toying with the minds of mortals with deliberate ironic intent. Closely connected with situational irony, it arises from sharp contrasts between reality and human ideals, or between human intentions and actual results. The resulting situation is poignantly contrary to what was expected or intended.


title: Irony

text: According to Sudhir Dixit, "Cosmic irony is a term that is usually associated with [Thomas] Hardy. ... There is a strong feeling of a hostile deus ex machina in Hardy's novels." In "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" "there are several instances of this type of irony." One example follows:


title: Irony

text: When history is seen through modern eyes, there often appear sharp contrasts between the way historical figures see their world's future and what actually transpires. For example, during the 1920s "The New York Times" repeatedly scorned crossword puzzles. In 1924, it lamented "the sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern." In 1925 it said "the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. The craze evidently is dying out fast." Today, no U.S. newspaper is more closely identified with the crossword than "The New York Times."


title: Irony

text: In a more tragic example of historical irony, what people now refer to as the "First World War" was called by H. G. Wells "the war that will end war", which soon became "the war to end war" and "the war to end all wars", and this became a widespread truism, almost a cliché. Historical irony is therefore a subset of cosmic irony, but one in which the element of time is bound to play a role. Another example could be that of the Vietnam War, where in the 1960s the US attempted to stop the Viet Cong (Viet Minh) taking over South Vietnam. However, it is an often ignored fact that, in 1941, the US originally supported the Viet Minh in its fight against Japanese occupation.


title: Irony

text: Gunpowder was, according to prevailing academic consensus, discovered in the 9th century by Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality. Today it is associated with acts of violence, homicide and war.


title: Irony

text: Historical irony also includes inventors killed by their own creations, such as William Bullock – unless, due to the nature of the invention, the risk of death was always known and accepted, as in the case of Otto Lilienthal, who was killed by flying a glider of his own devising.


title: Irony

text: Irony is often used in literature to produce a comic effect. This may also be combined with satire. For instance, an author may facetiously state something as a well-known fact and then demonstrate through the narrative that the fact is untrue.


title: Irony

text: Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" begins with the proposition "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." In fact, it soon becomes clear that Austen means the opposite: women (or their mothers) are always in search of, and desperately on the lookout for, a rich single man to make a husband. The irony deepens as the story promotes this romance and ends in a double marriage proposal. "Austen's comic irony emerges out of the disjunction between Elizabeth's overconfidence (or pride) in her perceptions of Darcy and the narrator's indications that her views are in fact partial and prejudicial."


title: Irony

text: "The Third Man" is a film that features any number of eccentricities, each of which contributes to the film's perspective of comic irony as well as its overall cinematic self-consciousness."


title: Irony

text: Writing about performances of Shakespeare's "Othello" in apartheid South Africa, Robert Gordon suggests: "Could it be that black people in the audience ... may have viewed as a comic irony his audacity and naïvety in thinking he could pass for white."


title: Irony

text: Romantic irony is "an attitude of detached scepticism adopted by an author towards his or her work, typically manifesting in literary self-consciousness and self-reflection". This conception of irony originated with the German Romantic writer and critic Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel.


title: Irony

text: Joseph Dane writes "From a twentieth-century perspective, the most crucial area in the history of irony is that described by the term romantic irony." He discusses the difficulty of defining romantic irony: "But what is romantic irony? A universal type of irony? The irony used by romantics? or an irony envisioned by the romantics and romanticists?" He also describes the arguments for and against its use.


title: Irony

text: Referring to earlier self-conscious works such as "Don Quixote" and "Tristram Shandy", Douglas Muecke points particularly to Peter Weiss's 1964 play, "Marat/Sade". This work is a play within a play set in a lunatic asylum, in which it is difficult to tell whether the players are speaking only to other players or also directly to the audience. When The Herald says, "The regrettable incident you've just seen was unavoidable indeed foreseen by our playwright", there is confusion as to who is being addressed, the "audience" on the stage or the audience in the theatre. Also, since the play within the play is performed by the inmates of a lunatic asylum, the theatre audience cannot tell whether the paranoia displayed before them is that of the players, or the people they are portraying. Muecke notes that, "in America, Romantic irony has had a bad press", while "in England […] [it] is almost unknown."


title: Irony

text: However, in a book entitled "English Romantic Irony", Anne Mellor writes, referring to Byron, Keats, Carlyle, Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll:


title: Irony

text: Similarly, metafiction is: "Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and narrative techniques." It is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, thereby exposing the fictional illusion.


title: Irony

text: Gesa Giesing writes that "the most common form of metafiction is particularly frequent in Romantic literature. The phenomenon is then referred to as Romantic Irony." Giesing notes that "There has obviously been an increased interest in metafiction again after World War II."


title: Irony

text: For example, Patricia Waugh quotes from several works at the top of her chapter headed "What is metafiction?". These include:


title: Irony

text: Additionally, "The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction" refers to John Fowles's "The French Lieutenant's Woman":


title: Irony

text: Socratic irony is "the dissimulation of ignorance practised by Socrates as a means of confuting an adversary". Socrates would pretend to be ignorant of the topic under discussion, to draw out the inherent nonsense in the arguments of his interlocutors. "The Chambers Dictionary" defines it as "a means by which a questioner pretends to know less than a respondent, when actually he knows more".


title: Irony

text: Zoe Williams of "The Guardian" wrote: "The technique [of Socratic irony], demonstrated in the Platonic dialogues, was to pretend ignorance and, more sneakily, to feign credence in your opponent's power of thought, in order to tie him in knots."


title: Irony

text: A more modern example of Socratic irony can be seen on the American crime fiction television series, "Columbo". The character Lt. Columbo is seemingly naïve and incompetent. His untidy appearance adds to this fumbling illusion. As a result, he is underestimated by the suspects in murder cases he is investigating. With their guard down and their false sense of confidence, Lt. Columbo is able to solve the cases, leaving the murderers feeling duped and outwitted. Like Socrates, Columbo routinely encourages the suspect to explain the situation, follows their logic aloud for himself, then arrives at a contradiction. He then insists he is confused and asks the suspect to help him understand, with the suspect's subsequent attempt to amend the contradiction revealing further evidence or contradictions.


title: Irony

text: Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and others, saw irony, such as that used by Socrates, as a disruptive force with the power to undo texts and readers alike. The phrase itself is taken from Hegel's "Lectures on Aesthetics", and is applied by Kierkegaard to the irony of Socrates. This tradition includes 19th-century German critic and novelist Friedrich Schlegel ("On Incomprehensibility"), Charles Baudelaire, Stendhal, and the 20th century deconstructionist Paul de Man ("The Concept of Irony"). In Kierkegaard's words, from On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates:


title: Irony

text: [Socratic] irony [is] the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity, because it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a higher something that still is not. The irony established nothing, because that which is to be established lies behind it...


title: Irony

text: Where much of philosophy attempts to reconcile opposites into a larger positive project, Kierkegaard and others insist that irony—whether expressed in complex games of authorship or simple litotes—must, in Kierkegaard's words, "swallow its own stomach". Irony entails endless reflection and violent reversals, and ensures incomprehensibility at the moment it compels speech. Similarly, among other literary critics, writer David Foster Wallace viewed the pervasiveness of ironic and other postmodern tropes as the cause of "great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fictionists [ironies] pose terrifically vexing problems".


title: Irony

text: The 1990s saw a cultural expansion of the definition of irony from "saying what one doesn't mean" into a "general stance of detachment from life in general", this detachment serving as a shield against the awkwardness of everyday life.


title: Irony

text: The generation of people in the United States who grew up in the 1990s, Millennials, are seen as having this same sort of detachment from serious or awkward situations in life, as well. Hipsters are thought to use irony as a shield against those same serious or genuine confrontations.


title: Irony

text: Schopenhauer, in "The World as Will and Representation", Volume 2, Chapter 8, claimed that the complete and total opposition between what is thought and what is seen constitutes irony. He wrote: "... if with deliberate intention something real and perceptible is brought directly under the concept of its opposite, the result is plain, common irony. For example, if during heavy rain we say: 'It is pleasant weather today'; or, of an ugly bride it is said: 'He has found himself a lovely treasure'; or of a rogue: 'This man of honor,' and so on. Only children and people without any education will laugh at anything of this kind; for here the incongruity between the conceived and the perceived is total."


title: Irony

text: Some speakers of English complain that the words "irony" and "ironic" are often misused, though the more general casual usage of a contradiction between circumstance and expectation originated in the 1640s.


title: Irony

text: We were always kidding about the use of irony. I maintained that it was best never to use the word because it was too often substituted for coincidence. (Alanis Morissette's song "Ironic" cites multiple examples of things that are patently not ironic.)


title: Irony

text: "Philip Howard assembled a list of seven implied meanings for the word "ironically", as it opens a sentence:


title: Irony

text: No agreed-upon method for indicating irony in written text exists, though many ideas have been suggested. For instance, an irony punctuation mark was proposed in the 1580s, when Henry Denham introduced a rhetorical question mark or percontation point, which resembles a reversed question mark. This mark was also advocated by the French poet Marcel Bernhardt at the end of the 19th century, to indicate irony or sarcasm. French writer Hervé Bazin suggested another "pointe d'ironie": the Greek letter "psi" with a dot below it, while Tom Driberg recommended that ironic statements should be printed in italics that lean the other way from conventional italics.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow was developed by the Google Brain team for internal Google use in research and production. The initial version was released under the Apache License 2.0 in 2015. Google released the updated version of TensorFlow, named TensorFlow 2.0, in September 2019.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow can be used in a wide variety of programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, C++, and Java. This flexibility lends itself to a range of applications in many different sectors.


title: TensorFlow

text: Starting in 2011, Google Brain built DistBelief as a proprietary machine learning system based on deep learning neural networks. Its use grew rapidly across diverse Alphabet companies in both research and commercial applications. Google assigned multiple computer scientists, including Jeff Dean, to simplify and refactor the codebase of DistBelief into a faster, more robust application-grade library, which became TensorFlow. In 2009, the team, led by Geoffrey Hinton, had implemented generalized backpropagation and other improvements which allowed generation of neural networks with substantially higher accuracy, for instance a 25% reduction in errors in speech recognition.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow is Google Brain's second-generation system. Version 1.0.0 was released on February 11, 2017. While the reference implementation runs on single devices, TensorFlow can run on multiple CPUs and GPUs (with optional CUDA and SYCL extensions for general-purpose computing on graphics processing units). TensorFlow is available on 64-bit Linux, macOS, Windows, and mobile computing platforms including Android and iOS.


title: TensorFlow

text: Its flexible architecture allows for the easy deployment of computation across a variety of platforms (CPUs, GPUs, TPUs), and from desktops to clusters of servers to mobile and edge devices.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow computations are expressed as stateful dataflow graphs. The name TensorFlow derives from the operations that such neural networks perform on multidimensional data arrays, which are referred to as "tensors". During the Google I/O Conference in June 2016, Jeff Dean stated that 1,500 repositories on GitHub mentioned TensorFlow, of which only 5 were from Google.


title: TensorFlow

text: In December 2017, developers from Google, Cisco, RedHat, CoreOS, and CaiCloud introduced Kubeflow at a conference. Kubeflow allows operation and deployment of TensorFlow on Kubernetes.


title: TensorFlow

text: In May 2016, Google announced its Tensor processing unit (TPU), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC, a hardware chip) built specifically for machine learning and tailored for TensorFlow. A TPU is a programmable AI accelerator designed to provide high throughput of low-precision arithmetic (e.g., 8-bit), and oriented toward using or running models rather than training them. Google announced they had been running TPUs inside their data centers for more than a year, and had found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning.


title: TensorFlow

text: In May 2017, Google announced the second-generation, as well as the availability of the TPUs in Google Compute Engine. The second-generation TPUs deliver up to 180 teraflops of performance, and when organized into clusters of 64 TPUs, provide up to 11.5 petaflops.


title: TensorFlow

text: In May 2018, Google announced the third-generation TPUs delivering up to 420 teraflops of performance and 128 GB high bandwidth memory (HBM). Cloud TPU v3 Pods offer 100+ petaflops of performance and 32 TB HBM.


title: TensorFlow

text: In February 2018, Google announced that they were making TPUs available in beta on the Google Cloud Platform.


title: TensorFlow

text: In July 2018, the Edge TPU was announced. Edge TPU is Google's purpose-built ASIC chip designed to run TensorFlow Lite machine learning (ML) models on small client computing devices such as smartphones known as edge computing.


title: TensorFlow

text: In May 2017, Google announced a software stack specifically for mobile development, TensorFlow Lite. In January 2019, TensorFlow team released a developer preview of the mobile GPU inference engine with OpenGL ES 3.1 Compute Shaders on Android devices and Metal Compute Shaders on iOS devices. In May 2019, Google announced that their TensorFlow Lite Micro (also known as TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers) and ARM's uTensor would be merging.


title: TensorFlow

text: In October 2017, Google released the Google Pixel 2 which featured their Pixel Visual Core (PVC), a fully programmable image, vision and AI processor for mobile devices. The PVC supports TensorFlow for machine learning (and Halide for image processing).


title: TensorFlow

text: As TensorFlow's market share among research papers was declining to the advantage of PyTorch, the TensorFlow Team announced a release of a new major version of the library in September 2019. TensorFlow 2.0 introduced many changes, the most significant being TensorFlow eager, which changed the automatic differentiation scheme from the static computational graph, to the "Define-by-Run" scheme originally made popular by Chainer and later PyTorch. Other major changes included removal of old libraries, cross-compatibility between trained models on different versions of TensorFlow, and significant improvements to the performance on GPU.


title: TensorFlow

text: AutoDifferentiation is the process of automatically calculating the gradient vector of a model with respect to each of its parameters. With this feature, TensorFlow can automatically compute the gradients for the parameters in a model, which is useful to algorithms such as backpropagation which require gradients to optimize performance. To do so, the framework must keep track of the order of operations done to the input Tensors in a model, and then compute the gradients with respect to the appropriate parameters.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow includes an “eager execution” mode, which means that operations are evaluated immediately as opposed to being added to a computational graph which is executed later. Code executed eagerly can be examined step-by step-through a debugger, since data is augmented at each line of code rather than later in a computational graph. This execution paradigm is considered to be easier to debug because of its step by step transparency.


title: TensorFlow

text: In both eager and graph executions, TensorFlow provides an API for distributing computation across multiple devices with various distribution strategies. This distributed computing can often speed up the execution of training and evaluating of TensorFlow models and is a common practice in the field of AI.


title: TensorFlow

text: To train and assess models, TensorFlow provides a set of loss functions (also known as cost functions). Some popular examples include mean squared error (MSE) and binary cross entropy (BCE). These loss functions compute the “error” or “difference” between a model's output and the expected output (more broadly, the difference between two tensors). For different datasets and models, different losses are used to prioritize certain aspects of performance.


title: TensorFlow

text: In order to assess the performance of machine learning models, TensorFlow gives API access to commonly used metrics. Examples include various accuracy metrics (binary, categorical, sparse categorical) along with other metrics such as Precision, Recall, and Intersection-over-Union (IoU).


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow.nn is a module for executing primitive neural network operations on models. Some of these operations include variations of convolutions (1/2/3D, Atrous, depthwise), activation functions (Softmax, RELU, GELU, Sigmoid, etc.) and their variations, and other Tensor operations (max-pooling, bias-add, etc.).


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow offers a set of optimizers for training neural networks, including ADAM, ADAGRAD, and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). When training a model, different optimizers offer different modes of parameter tuning, often affecting a model's convergence and performance.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow serves as the core platform and library for machine learning. TensorFlow's APIs use Keras to allow users to make their own machine learning models. In addition to building and training their model, TensorFlow can also help load the data to train the model, and deploy it using TensorFlow Serving.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow provides a stable Python API, as well as APIs without backwards compatibility guarantee for Javascript, C++, and Java. Third-party language binding packages are also available for C#, Haskell, Julia, MATLAB, R, Scala, Rust, OCaml, and Crystal. Bindings that are now archived and unsupported include Go and Swift.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow also has a library for machine learning in JavaScript. Using the provided JavaScript APIs, TensorFlow.js allows users to use either Tensorflow.js models or converted models from TensorFlow or TFLite, retrain the given models, and run on the web.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow Lite has APIs for mobile apps or embedded devices to generate and deploy TensorFlow models. These models are compressed and optimized in order to be more efficient and have a higher performance on smaller capacity devices.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow Lite uses FlatBuffers as the data serialization format for network models, eschewing the Protocol Buffers format used by standard TensorFlow models.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow Extended (abbrev. TFX) provides numerous components to perform all the operations needed for end-to-end production. Components include loading, validating, and transforming data, tuning, training, and evaluating the machine learning model, and pushing the model itself into production.


title: TensorFlow

text: Numpy is one of the most popular Python data libraries, and TensorFlow offers integration and compatibility with its data structures. Numpy NDarrays, the library's native datatype, are automatically converted to TensorFlow Tensors in TF operations; the same is also true vice versa. This allows for the two libraries to work in unison without requiring the user to write explicit data conversions. Moreover, the integration extends to memory optimization by having TF Tensors share the underlying memory representations of Numpy NDarrays whenever possible.


title: TensorFlow

text: TensorFlow also offers a variety of libraries and extensions to advance and extend the models and methods used. For example, TensorFlow Recommenders and TensorFlow Graphics are libraries for their respective functionalities in recommendation systems and graphics, TensorFlow Federated provides a framework for decentralized data, and TensorFlow Cloud allows users to directly interact with Google Cloud to integrate their local code to Google Cloud. Other add-ons, libraries, and frameworks include TensorFlow Model Optimization, TensorFlow Probability, TensorFlow Quantum, and TensorFlow Decision Forests.


title: TensorFlow

text: Google also released Colaboratory, a TensorFlow Jupyter notebook environment that does not require any setup. It runs on Google Cloud and allows users free access to GPUs and the ability to store and share notebooks on Google Drive.


title: TensorFlow

text: Google JAX is a machine learning framework for transforming numerical functions. It is described as bringing together a modified version of autograd (automatic obtaining of the gradient function through differentiation of a function) and TensorFlow's XLA (Accelerated Linear Algebra). It is designed to follow the structure and workflow of NumPy as closely as possible and works with TensorFlow as well as other frameworks such as PyTorch. The primary functions of JAX are:


title: TensorFlow

text: GE Healthcare used TensorFlow to increase the speed and accuracy of MRIs in identifying specific body parts. Google used TensorFlow to create DermAssist, a free mobile application that allows users to take pictures of their skin and identify potential health complications. Sinovation Ventures used TensorFlow to identify and classify eye diseases from optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans.


title: TensorFlow

text: Twitter implemented TensorFlow to rank tweets by importance for a given user, and changed their platform to show tweets in order of this ranking. Previously, tweets were simply shown in reverse chronological order. The photo sharing app VSCO used TensorFlow to help suggest custom filters for photos.


title: TensorFlow

text: InSpace, a virtual learning platform, used TensorFlow to filter out toxic chat messages in classrooms. Liulishuo, an online English learning platform, utilized TensorFlow to create an adaptive curriculum for each student. TensorFlow was used to accurately assess a student's current abilities, and also helped decide the best future content to show based on those capabilities.


title: TensorFlow

text: The e-commerce platform Carousell used TensorFlow to provide personalized recommendations for customers. The cosmetics company ModiFace used TensorFlow to create an augmented reality experience for customers to test various shades of make-up on their face.


title: Panipat (film)

text: Panipat is a 2019 Indian Hindi-language epic war drama film directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar. Starring Arjun Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt and Kriti Sanon, it depicts the events that took place during the Third Battle of Panipat. The film was theatrically released in India on 6 December 2019. The film was a box office failure.