I was aware of this documentary’s reputation as a real tearjerker but it still managed to leave me in shock. This is a very personal film made by a single person, Kurt Kuenne, in honor of his friend Andrew Bagby who had been murdered. The horror is that his murderer is his ex-girlfriend who was at the time pregnant with his son and the intent behind this film is to let the son Zachary know what kind of man his father was. The story develops into so much more than that as it touches the lives of so many people and resulted in the law being changed. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen another documentary that is as charged with personal rage and frustration as this one as Kuenne really invests so much of himself into it.
This is one film that I probably wouldn’t have watched if it weren’t for a friend’s recommendation and the fact that it’s easily available on Netflix. It has passable and it did get nominated for an Oscar for cinematography but its premise reads like a gimmicky B-movie. This turned out to be a fair assessment as it’s a beautifully shot comedy horror with a dumb plot, crammed with dark jokes of a political persuasion. I can even see why my friend liked it, as it has something of Wes Anderson’s surrealism except that it’s monochrome and is unrestrained when it comes to sex and gore. But it isn’t really the sort of thing I like.
We’re nearly done with the slate of Studio Ghibli films and here we come to an old one that my wife said she fell asleep watching back in the day. This is admittedly one of Hayao Miyazaki’s lightest and simplest films. It encapsulates nothing but Miyazaki’s love of aircraft and specifically the aircraft of the pre-World War 2 era. There is combat but it’s treated as comedic playacting with no one dying or even getting seriously hurt. This is barely more sophisticated than a children’s cartoon but I found I rather liked the purity of its vision. Miyayaki knew exactly what he wanted to express here and so he did it without caring about what anyone else thought.
I’m such a completionist when it comes to video games that I hate not finishing any games that I start but I have to throw in the towel for this one. I bought this because I thought my flightstick was getting too little use and this is a well known game series that I’ve never dabbled in before. As it turned out, this is so much of an arcade game that the regular gamepad works better so I switched to it. I also very quickly discovered that this is the kind of game that really wants to frustrate the player and force you to make multiple attempts every mission just to find out what you need to do and what to bring. The missions are winnable, no doubt, once you know what to bring and you’re prepared for what’s going to happen, but this game is just too much of a pain for me to deal with.
This is commonly cited as one of the great Australian films even if there is some debate over whether it counts as being Australian at all. Director Nicolas Roeg and the two white actors are English. I’d say it easily counts as this is probably the definitive film about the Outback. I’m not a big fan of this use of the noble savage trope and I found its core message to be similarly outdated and simplistic. Even so I can appreciate how perfectly this film conveys that message with its vivid, almost hallucinogenic vision of the Outback and its boldness in using nudity and sheer physicality for both the male and female characters.
This represents one of the rare occasions during which Hou Hsiao-hsien worked outside of the Chinese languages and indeed should be the only non-Asian film he ever made. It feels like a gimmick that shouldn’t work given that Hou doesn’t speak French and the French actors all don’t speak Chinese. Yet it does and the result is a wonderful view of the daily life of a Parisian family seen from the perspective of an outsider. I’ve never watched the 1956 film that serves as the inspiration but the references are obvious enough. I’m even more impressed that Hou manages to work in connections to Chinese culture that really are enriching and meaningful.
Pretty much all biotech stuff this month as if so often the case.
The most important article is also the most boring one. As part of a massive study that included 10.17 million people who were vaccinated against COVID-19 and 10.39 million unvaccinated people from the UK, Spain and Estonia, the researchers conclude that vaccination reduced the risk of post-COVID-19 cardiac and thromboembolic outcomes. They recorded results up to one year after vaccination and looked only for cases after SARS-CoV-2 infection. It makes for strong evidence that vaccination reduces the risk of cardiovascular complications rather than increases them as per widespread popular belief.
Most people agree that babies smell nice, yet children seem to not smell as nice after they grow up. A new study provides evidence that there is a biological basis to this, attributing the change to the onset of puberty. By collecting samples of body odors from infants, toddlers and teenagers, the researchers found naturally occurring steroids with musklike odors in the teens’ sweat. They stem from bacteria and bodily substances that break down the sebum that helps protect the skin. The glands that produce the sebum are active at birth and then go dormant. They reactivate again around puberty. The first time around, the sebum isn’t broken down because infants haven’t accumulated the bacteria yet and don’t sweat much. The situation is different when they become teenagers.
Most people will already know about the Flynn effect, the phenomenon whereby IQ seems to increase from one generation to the next. Most people also believe that our average attention span has gone down, coinciding with changing media consumption patterns. This paper argues that it may be possible to decompose the Flynn effect into different domains and uses a meta-analysis of previous studies to investigate the possibility that one such subcomponent is attention. They found that there has been indeed a generational improvement in concentration performance in adults but not in children. Since this is a meta-analysis I wouldn’t put too much stock in its results but I like how counter-intuitive their findings are.
Many people will have seen online videos of parrots interacting with touchscreen tablets. You may think these are isolated incidents yet there is plenty of evidence that parrots really do love tablets and games on them in particular. This article talks about how parrots of many difference species and sizes have learned to use tablets and seem to enjoy them. It also talks about how they primarily use their tongues to manipulate the touchscreens and are capable of generating a touch much faster than human fingers can. They conclude that these devices enrich the lives of parrots enough that it may be worth developing new, more robust types of devices specifically for their use.
