Continuing through the filmography of Jean-Pierre Melville, here’s a film that is known as being one of Quentin Tarantino’s favorites. The intertitles explain that the title is slang referring to a police informant and so the audience is lead to wonder which character is the real informant the whole time. This is a twist movie that is only really good for watching once and I can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. So consider yourself warned if you continue reading. I admit that its gimmick is original and the visuals are beautiful but I wouldn’t consider this a great film.
This is a relatively recent British film but it looks very old because it was shot on a vintage hand-cranked camera. This anachronism nicely matches the film’s subject matter, about a curmudgeonly fisherman upset about the gentrification of his fishing village. I really wanted to like this and I felt that director Mark Jenkin was being remarkably fair even if his sympathies are obviously with the fisherman. Yet between the technical constraints of his chosen form and the amateurishness of the production, it’s too poorly made to be more than an interesting experiment.
Here’s yet another Senegalese film, an even earlier one that is apparently the first sub-Saharan African film to be internationally acclaimed. I didn’t like this very much as it’s just too simple and not very well made at all. None of the actors are very good and it’s infuriating to me that the main character Diouana has all these internal thoughts yet never voices any of them out loud. I get that this is really an allegory about colonialism but it’s so abstract and the ill treatment of Diouana by her employers so minor in the grand scheme of things that I found her reaction a shocking overreaction. I mean I get the point but this is all so removed from any real world situation that I found it impossible to get into it.
I’m playing this partly because I got it for free and partly to give my old joystick, a cheap Logitech Extreme 3D Pro, a workout. It’s been ages since I last pulled it out of storage and I wasn’t sure if it still worked. Plus it’s always fun to relive old memories of playing X-Wing and I was one of the unfortunates who never got around to playing TIE Fighter. Back then I didn’t own a joystick either so being able to fly a Star Wars starfighter with one sounds like fun! This is also really a multiplayer focused game but as usual I will only play the single-player story mode and in any case, I don’t think the multiplayer scene for this title ever really took off.
As with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind I keep being forced to revise my opinion of the works of Hayao Miyazaki. This is another extremely violent title, complete with death on a large scale. The environmentalism theme is familiar but the death and violence gives the conflict real bite and it’s not obvious which side is in the right. Unusually for the genre, this film provides good reasons for both humans and the animals of the forest to have the right to live. The fights look spectacular without glorifying the violence and the art is as amazing as ever. As my wife notes, it stumbles at the end by being unwilling to fully commit to a specific vision for the future but I’d easily rank it among the best of Studio Ghibli’s works and consider it a film that is definitely intended for adults.
I originally had no interest in watching this, thinking that the whole 1MDB saga is over and done with. What changed my mind was Najib Razak’s interview in it and his recent request to have the documentary taken down from Netflix. Hooray Streisand Effect! I’m not sure that this is actually a decent film as some of the editing choices are questionable and the interstitial scenes they made are downright cringey. I’m not sure how much sense it would make to non-Malaysian audiences either. I personally was able to follow along because I already mostly everything. Overall I’d say it was a worthwhile use of my time mainly due to the Najib interview and the perspective it offers from the FBI agent attached to the US embassy in Malaysia.
Not much in the way of science news for the first month of the year and I’ve decided to hold off on the more speculative announcements until they’re better supported.
First up in big picture news is the discovery of a cosmic megastructure, now called the Big Ring with a diameter of about 1.3 billion light years at a distance of more than 9 billion light years from Earth. It’s too faint to be seen with the naked eye of course but astronomers have been able to determine that it has something of a coil shape, aligned face-on with the Earth. This discovery joins a growing list of other megastructures and that poses a problem for our current understanding of the structure of the universe, that it is homogenous above a certain scale and looks identical in every direction. Either the scale must be redefined or we must admit that the universe has an overall structure after all.
Next is a development in particle physics that is applied to medicine. We all know about how radiation can be used to treat cancer as well as the problems of this approach. One obvious alternative is to use particles that dump a great deal of energy onto the targeted cancer cells and nowhere else in the body. This article talks about how protons beams can be used for treating cancer and how positron-emission tomography can be used to visualize and guide the proton beams. The difficulty is that the protons are very short-lived isotopes and so must be produced on-site using a cyclotron.
In Ecuador, archaeologists have discovered a huge ancient city lost underneath the jungles of the Amazon. Using both ground excavations and LiDAR imaging, they claim to have found plazas and houses connected by a network of roads and canals, with a population in the tens of thousands at least. The city was built around 2,500 years ago and people were living there up to about 1,000 years ago. If this pans out, this could mean the discovery of a completely unknown ancient civilization completely separate from the better known Mayan civilizations of Mexico and Central America.
Finally here a preprint paper detailing some observed trends in head size among humans and brain health. Using data from people born between 1902 and 1985 and controlling for many factors, they found that head sizes have been growing and memory performance has been improving over time. The authors believe that this is caused by early life environmental factors, better nutrition, better health and so on but there’s no telling really. It would be interesting to observe how long this trend can hold.
