I’ve had in my list for a while now but the huge explosion that took place in Lebanon earlier this year sure added extra impetus to get around to watching it. This is a harrowing film, about a child who is forced to fend for himself on the streets of Beirut, was made by Nadine Labaki, a Lebanese director. That kind of matters because no foreigner could make a film like this with such moral authority. Also, this film was apparently a huge hit in China, of all places.
Our usual monthly feature cannot help but include one of the most hyped up announcements in years. Unfortunately I think they hyped it up too much especially with all of the intrigue behind a press embargo and when the official announcement came out, it didn’t actually make much of a splash with the general public.
This refers of course to the detection of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus. This matters because phosphorus in gas form would be highly reactive and would be expected to exist primarily in oxidized forms. This means that some process on the planet must be continuously producing the gas and yet there are no known production routes that do not involve biological processes. So the upshot is that this is being as a very tentative sign of life on the planet. Still, it’s so speculative that it’s no wonder the general public isn’t very excited and there’s still a decent chance that the gas is produced by some abiotic process that is as yet unknown to us.
Our next article is also in the realm of astrophysics and again, it’s more about the excitement of a huge event than any new science being discovered. This is the detection of a merger between two massive black holes some seven billion years ago using laser interferometer instruments to listen to vibrations in space-time. It’s somewhat interesting to get evidence that such intermediate black holes massing between 65 and 120 solar masses can exist and that fuels the theory that black holes can become bigger by merging with one another. But it’s probably more exciting to think that we can, today, observe an event that occurred so far back in the past.
Moving on the biological sciences, here is a paper studying how mothers who rear their own offspring can confer lasting advantages. To me, it is especially convincing in that the subject of the study are actually Rhesus monkeys which I am guessing would result in cleaner, less controversial data. The result is that monkeys who are reared by their own mothers exclusively compared to those who are reared by humans for the first 40 days of their lives and then assigned to other adult monkeys have significantly better health and social rank outcomes. This might seem like an obvious finding but it’s an important one to make and we can derive lessons from it also for the bringing up of human children.
The last article is about the study of dreams in a scientific manner. The problem with this is that you need to collect a lot of data and the only way to do this is from the dreamer’s own recollection. But then the written reports need to be assessed by someone and that adds another layer of subjectivity. So this project instead uses a language processing algorithm to assess the dreams and from there draw conclusions. The actual results are almost less interesting than the methodology but broadly confirm that the content of dreams do match the quotidien experiences of the dreamers.
Taika Waititi is pretty hot stuff as a director these days and it’s amazing to watch his career grow from strength to strength from the earliest beginnings. This latest project takes on Nazis as an object of humor and it would so easy to misstep here and create all kinds of controversies. Indeed there are critics who assert that one should never make light of Nazis or the Holocaust, no matter how well intentioned. I would argue that enough time has passed that we can and should make jokes out of them if the intent is to mock those worthy of our contempt and derision and this film is a magnificently creative step in that direction.
Apparently this is one of the most iconic romantic films of all films, enough so that my wife was surprised that I haven’t watched it. I have to admit that I certainly recognize the theme song even if I never knew that it came from here. The film itself however is pure sentimental pap that could only have ever worked in that era as it makes absolutely zero effort towards realism or authenticity. Even the film’s famous catchphrase is too shallow as critics of the era recognized.
This German film was highly regarded enough to be placed on the top of multiple critics’ best of lists but I find it to be mostly a missed opportunity. The script, the acting and the themes it invokes are all great but the setting is just all wrong and the visuals don’t at all match what is supposedly happening. It turns out that this was an adaptation of a novel set during the Second World War but the director Christian Petzold transposed it to the present day. I presume that this was due to budgetary reasons because it was dreadfully done and really harms the overall quality of the film.
So I dropped working on Blender stuff a few months back and instead I have been learning the Thai language online. I don’t have any special reasons for doing so. It’s just that I’ve gotten into the habit of learning new things online all the time and I thought it’s time I tried a language next. It is one of the things people keep saying they intend to do and rarely get around to and I haven’t learned a new language since I learned French during my university years. Learning a new language is supposedly one of the best ways to keep your brain sharp and active as you age.
Peter Bogdanovich is another director I’ve never seen anything from before. Associated with Orson Welles, he was heavily featured in They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. The film was also the debut of Cybill Shepherd. It was filmed in black and white, an unusual decision for the time apparently made after discussing it with Welles. Indeed the whole film, set as it is in the 1950s, feels like it belongs in a different era and right off of the pages of a novel.
