Sean Wang must be an up-and-coming director to watch since he managed to get Joan Chen to appear in his debut feature. It joins a growing lineup of Chinese American films and appears to be a semi-autobiographical account of the director’s own childhood in Fremont, California in 2008. The main character is a little shit who I don’t find sympathetic in the least but I suppose this attests to how realistic it is as a coming-of-age film. It’s the kind of film that can feel underwhelming as nothing especially earthshattering happens. But I like understated films so this is a winner for me.
Adrian Teh is Malaysian director of Chinese ethnicity who has made a career out of commercially successful Malay language films. They’re not my usual fare so I’ve never watched them. His latest is a science-fiction film that has garnered decent reviews and strong word-of-mouth. Since it’s easily available on Netflix, I thought I should take a look. Since it’s billed as a heartfelt time travel story, I had a few thoughts on how that might play out. Unfortunately my worst fears proved true as it’s the usual ‘can’t change destiny’ and ‘arbitrary constraints on superpowers” tropes. It’s a bold project for a Malaysian but it’s just not that good of a film.
A few interesting announcements for this round and once again, it feels that the really cool developments are going on in the life sciences.
By far the most significant bit of news, and one that I’d hoped would be shouted from the rooftops, is the successful use of the CRISPR gene-editing technique to treat a child’s unique mutation. The patient in question was born with a rare disease known as carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency which usually kills in infancy. In this case, doctors were able to devise a targeted fix to edit DNA in the liver cells, test the treatment in mice, get approval from the FDA and administering the treatment all in a matter of months. They still don’t know if the effect is permanent but for now the patient is well enough to be able to leave the hospital since being born. The key here is the incredible speed of this achievement and the fact that this is a treatment personalized for that specific patient. We should all hope that this is only the first of many such achievements.
Next up is a medical development that feels like something out of science-fiction. An American man, Tim Friede, had for personal reasons exposed him to the venom of a large variety of snakes in escalating doses over the course of 18 years. As a result, he has generated antibodies that are effective against multiple types of neurotoxins. By isolating the antibodies in his blood, researchers have devised a broad spectrum antivenom that should now be almost universally effective against snakebites. If the project comes to fruition, this would be a radical improvement from the current practice of needing to manufacture and stock multiple types of antivenoms in case of emergencies.
The last paper was released a couple of months earlier but I hadn’t noticed it then. It’s about a study conducted on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania whose nomadic lifestyle is thought to have been unchanged for thousands of years. This makes them an ideal subject to interrogate about human nature before the advent of civilization. In this instance, researchers were interested in whether such peoples are inherently disposed to be egalitarian as some anthropologists contend. They gave the Hadza participants food endowments to be shared with others and studied how fairly they carried out the redistribution. They found that like just about everyone else, the Hadza mostly did not seek perfectly equitable distributions. They tolerated inequality when it benefited but complained about it when they thought it was unfair. As usual, it’s unwise to generalize too broadly from such studies but I’d always thought that stories of pre-civilization peoples being inherently more noble to be too fanciful to be true.
Fury Road is an action masterpiece for the ages so I’d originally planned on watching this prequel in the cinema. But then the reviews turned out not so good, I held off and now I see why. This is a decent action movie but it’s no Fury Road and more interestingly, it never even attempts to be. In recounting Furiosa’s backstory, it consistently keeps the action on a smaller personal scale and it’s more episodic, jumping between her key formative moments. Both the effects work and the action choreography are also inferior. The one upside is that it builds up the world of George Miller’s imagination, turning it into a setting that finally feels more real to me.
I’d already seen the original animated series so watching this live-action version might be of dubious value. Still, there’s only going to be more and more of these things so I thought I should watch at least one of them to judge how good they are. The fact is that they threw serious money at it so it looks very good indeed. The sets, the costumes, the bending effects and the scale of the action are all more than satisfactory. The downside is that this is still a kids’ show, with lines of dialogue that is often cringey. The adult actors do alright but the child actors just can’t emote well enough to sell those lines. The show looks so cool that I’m tempted to stay for the next season but I think I’m going to pass.
Most people will never get to eat in a Michelin 3-star restaurant so watching this four hour long documentary may be the next best option. Made by Frederick Wiseman, it conforms to his usual style of not including any narration at all and covers the Troisgros family who have been chefs in the Loire département of France for generations. It focuses on their Michelin-starred Le Bois sans feuilles restaurant, offering an astonishingly complete view of their day-to-day operations. But we also get to see glimpses of their other businesses and follow along as they visit some of their suppliers, all set amidst the beautiful greenery of the region.
This is a sequel to a game that I played a long, long time ago. I really liked it back then but never completed it because it was very difficult and if I remember correctly rather buggy. This time rather than the Ultramarines, you’re put in charge of the mysterious Grey Knights and must contend with the forces of Nurgle. Gameplay-wise it’s pretty much identical to the new version of XCOM, except it’s significantly more difficult, sometimes in ways that don’t feel fair to the player. I had a blast with it but did at times grow very frustrated.
