I pretty much love every film I’ve watched by Sidney Lumet so it was only a matter of time before I got around to this one, especially as it is about a case I’ve actually heard about. Real-life stories like this are hard to portray on film as they involve so many characters and take place over an extended period of time. So it’s very impressive how Lumet was able to distil a basic biography of the man, detail his relationships with women and fellow police officers, and cover his futile attempts to report police corruption over several years in little more than two hours. I don’t much care for films about police as a rule, nor do I have much sympathy for Frank Serpico, but this is an exceptional film on every level.
Still not that much in the way of science news. I expect scientists along with many others are still reeling and adapting to changes being instituted by the new Trump administration.
I’ve posted news about the GLP-1 weight loss drugs several times already but this one is about how they are already changing household consumption patterns. This study shows that households with at least one GLP-1 user are spending 6% less on groceries within six months of starting the drug. Furthermore the reductions are focused on lower purchases of calorie-dense, processed foods. Similar reductions are seen at fast-food chains and coffee shops. It’s no wonder that consumer goods companies are revamping their product lines and it would be fascinating to observe how far the changes go.
Next we have a paper that discusses the use of the transformer architecture which powers the LLMs popular today to predict human brain states. Specifically they mean scans of the brain using fMRI. Their claim is that using 21.6 seconds of data, they can use transformers to predict the next 5.04 seconds. It’s unclear what this can be used for but philosophically it’s eerie to consider that a simple algorithm can predict the future state of your brain, and hence your thoughts and actions, based purely on past data.
Finally here’s a paper that attempts to measure the rarity of truly exceptional people, or geniuses if you will. They focus on measuring three specific qualities, intelligence, conscientiousness and emotional stability with the intent of finding out how rare individuals who score high in all three measures are compared to the general population. It’s no surprise that these people truly are rare and even people who score above average on more than one of the variables are quite scarce. The suggestion is that organizations should place a higher priority on recruiting such exceptional talent.
I enjoyed the first Inside Out way back when it was released and it took a surprisingly long time for them to come out with this sequel. Arguably too long as we’ve long since lost any emotional connection to the characters and 2024 feels like a different era than 2015. The premise of Riley’s puberty ramping up all of her emotions and introducing a whole host new ones is a promising one. But it mostly feels like a reprise of the first film with the trite lesson that every part of Riley has a role to play. Even more disappointing is that it refuses to show any meanness whatsoever so it’s unconvincing and boringly low stakes throughout.
This is a film about a donkey and given that this is a tragedy and it is supposed to have been inspired by a passage by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it’s a given that the donkey dies in the end. It also suffers horribly but then so do many of the people around it. This is considered one of the greatest films of all time and of course it’s not really about a donkey in particular but life in general. I think its messaging is a little too simple by modern standards but it is very effective at engaging your emotions.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan has earned huge amounts of goodwill as he has made some of the most memorable and beautiful films we’ve seen. It took a while for me to get around to his latest one as they’re always so long but I was expecting good things from it. Unfortunately while it has some gorgeous cinematography and is crammed full of the kind of wordy dialogue the director likes, I’m not quite sure he knows what he’s doing here. The whole time I thought the film was working towards a condemnation against the extremely petty main character but then the monologue at the end appears to be sympathetic towards him. I must conclude that either the film is a failure and there is some mixed messaging going on here or else the director has some strange views.
Knowing nothing about Greek politics, I was apprehensive being able to understand a political film based on real-life events there. It turned out though that this is a fast-moving, readily watchable thriller that shows the assassination of an opposition leader and then more importantly covers the investigation that follows. The details shown here of a conspiracy and cover-up at the highest levels of government comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with modern politics but it’s immensely satisfying to watch them play out step by step here. What shocked me was that the investigating magistrate was allowed to get as far as he did even though the entire government is obviously in on it.
So I both love and hate this latest film by Brandon Cronenberg. I have to admit that it got me good by purporting to be about Western tourists taking a risk on the wild side of a lawless, undeveloped country, but of course it’s the tourists who are the predators all along, joke’s on me. On the other hand, I really hate films in which the main character is sort of high and in an altered mental state the whole time as is the case here. He is never able to articulate why he does the things he does and just sort of goes along with the flow. It’s got some neat ideas, but that’s all there is and it has no interest in world building at all.
