This Finnish film had the bad luck of extremely poor timing. It’s a film about an unlikely friendship with a Russian man and how Russians in general aren’t so bad underneath their gruff exteriors. Then in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine, kicking off the largest war in Europe since World War 2 and with it went any hopes of this film being a success. It’s a solid art house film, not an especially outstanding one but certainly good enough to win more acclaim under more favorable circumstances. It’s especially poignant to us given that my wife once had a somewhat similar encounter on a train ride in China in her youth.
After quite a spate of Malaysian films, here’s a Singaporean one that has won critical acclaim on the international level. I went into this blind as usual without knowing anything about it and it really makes a difference. The film starts slow and gives little insight as to what the protagonist is really thinking. It took a while for it to sink in for me that this is a somber examination of the death penalty as it is carried out in Singapore. The sparse narrative and plain presentation make sense in order to treat the subject matter respectfully. It doesn’t fully commit to its ending which is a shame but it left me with an uneasy feeling about how capital punishment and the effects it leaves on the executioner and that is a sure sign of a successful film.
I keep adding films to my watch list due to their reputation but that doesn’t always mean that I’ll end up liking them. This epic Western film is considered one of the greatest American films of all time but I struggled for a long time to understand why. It has decent gunfight scenes and a complicated story and that seemed to be it. Later I realized that it has a very cynical take on the genre and that are really no good people in it on any side. I had to read up on it to understand that it’s a response to the Vietnam War and director Sam Peckinpah wanted to show audiences what he felt was the grim reality of real violence. As he later discovered, he failed because it turns out that there is no violence, no matter how horrific or graphic, that we humans won’t glorify and get excited over.
I sung the praises of the first game so how could I not play the sequel especially after Larian followed it up with the highly acclaimed Baldur’s Gate 3? This time around I soon felt that I had bitten off more than I could chew. This sequel is huge, especially with all of added content that is part the Definitive Edition, so there’s so much more of everything. Many of the elements that I liked the first time around were less appealing this time and the annoying things are much worse. It eventually got to the point where it felt like a slog that I had to power through. I still finished the game because I’m stubborn that way and I can understand why it appeals to some power gamers but this wasn’t a game I enjoyed very much at all.
German cinema is underrepresented in the films we’ve watched so far and this marks the first work we’ve seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Not being used to his style or German cinema, it’s difficult at times to parse if it’s meant to be humorous. Its story of an African immigrant in Germany is a powerful one yet it makes its point so bluntly and the scenario is such a patently unrealistic one that I keep thinking it’s some kind of satire. It’s a very stylized film and an effective one but I think I need more exposure to German cinema to better appreciate it.
Here’s one Studio Ghibli film my wife said she had difficulty getting into back in the day. And no wonder because rather than focusing on particular characters, it’s a larger story about the civilization of raccoon dogs having trouble adapting to the urban buildup of Japan. It actually goes so deeply into their culture and their magical abilities that I wondered how they are relevant, since after all this is all made up. It doesn’t hold back though, delighting in crude references to their balls, and explicitly shows both raccoon and human lives being lost as part of the conflict. Of course, this can’t be a story that has a happy ending but it strikes a heartfelt bittersweet note and that’s good enough.
A bit of a slow month for science news but we do have some very interesting announcements.
Most people should know that memories in our brains are stored n the way that our neurons connect with each other via synapses. However this is usually how short-term memories are formed. A team has reported a mechanism which forms long-term memories that involves our DNA. In an experiment with mice, they found that breakage of DNA in the hippocampus helps store memories. When they deleted a gene encoding a protein known as TLR9 which has a role in detecting DNA breakage, they found that the mice remembering a chamber that they had previously learned is dangerous. As TLR9 is also involved in the body’s immune response to DNA fragments from invading bacteria, this means that untangling how exactly our memories is much harder than previously thought.
One theory about development holds that paddy rice farming leads to more collectivist societies while wheat farming leads to more individualism. A new paper uses China’s Cultural Revolution to test this theory as the government then randomly assigned people including decommissioned soldiers and urban youths to either rice or wheat farms. The team tested psychological traits of farmers at two such farms that are only 56 kilometers from one another. They indeed found that the rice farmers were less individualistic, engaging in self-inflation less and being more loyal to the community than wheat farmers.
Next is a technological development that is billed as brain-like computers but that’s really getting ahead of ourselves. What they actually made is an artificial synapse that works based on a solution of salt and water. The creators named their device an iontronic memristor that is in effect a microchannel filled with the solution. When it receives electrical impulses, ions within the solution migrate through the channel, mimicking how a biological synapse works. This is still a very long way from any kind of biological computer but it is a necessary first step.
This last bit isn’t quite science news but it’s adjacent. Time standards are of course arbitrary yet they’re necessary and this article talks about why the moon needs its own Coordinated Lunar Time. As Einstein taught us, there is no absolute measure of time and so time passes differently on the moon compared to the Earth. The difference is miniscule in the case of the moon, amounting to about 1 second across 5 years. Yet as human activity on the moon becomes more intensive and the precision of coordinating these activities becomes more important, the need to have a standard time on the moon becomes more evident. This is something that can be achieved only through international agreement and cooperation.
