I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a proper Japanese Godzilla film before this and I consider the American version one of the worst films I’ve written about. Given the critical reactions to this latest reboot, I had high hopes for this one and largely wasn’t disappointed. Hollywood is agog that it managed to look so good while spending so little on special effects but it’s still obvious that this isn’t a state of the art film. The story is kind of simple as expected but at least it isn’t too stupid and wrapping a life affirming theme around it is a laudable twist on post-World War 2 Japan.
As usual, I’m way late to the party on this one, so late that I bought this a while back on Steam and still hadn’t played it when Epic offered it for free. I did read up on opinions about it when it was first released and now that I’ve finished it, my thoughts are largely the same. It’s a fantastically original take on the turn-based tactics type of game that are now sometimes called the XCOM alike. But it has a staggering amount of out-of-combat story and exploration content that is way out of whack compared to the tactical gameplay. This ended up being a commercial failure which is why it was offered for free on Epic so quickly and that’s a real shame because the gameplay is really good and this is an excellent use of the Marvel license.
A while back, I mentioned how Martin Scorsese always seems to make the same type of mobster film. Well, he certainly proves me wrong on that count with this epic about a conspiracy to kill practically an entire American Indian tribe. Three and a half hours is long even by Scorsese standards, yet he makes good use of every second of it and just barely manages to tell the whole story. Telling it through the perspectives of Ernest and Mollie made all the difference as it creates this creeping sense of dread as Ernest is one of the conspirators killing her people all along. It’s the perfect material to be adapted to film really as you really want more people to remember this heinous crime.
We’ve worked our way through a fair number of the films of Satyajit Ray and while this one wasn’t made that late in his career, it feels more modern to me than many others. It takes place almost entirely on a train and while there are several supporting characters, the sole purpose is to shine light into the psyche of its main character. Between the flashbacks and the dream sequences that are rife with symbolism, it even has something of a postmodern feel to me. I had a little difficulty getting into it at first because I thought the stories of the other characters would matter more. Once I realized what it was going for, I was impressed by the richness of the characterization and how full of nuances it is.
For once I have a decent mix of interesting science-related news announcements that are not all centered around biology.
The one medical paper in this lot is rather sobering one about the long-term risk of regularly using marijuana. The study uses insurance data and claims that those who use the substance daily for years, and especially those with cannabis use disorder, meaning that they overuse it, have a much higher risk of developing head and neck cancers. As they note, they didn’t differentiate between methods of using the substance and it could be that the increased risk comes mainly from smoking it rather than the substance itself. Still with marijuana use becoming more socially and legally acceptable, usage rates are shooting up and the long-term effects do call for greater scrutiny.
Then there’s this paper that has major implications for all of life on Earth so I supposed it counts as being biology-related. It concerns the discovery of so-called dark oxygen, referring to oxygen made by metallic nodules deep under the surface of the ocean. This presents a challenge to the conventional assumption that all oxygen on Earth is produced by living organisms through processes like photosynthesis using sunlight. The nodules however seem to be able to create oxygen using a sort of seawater electrolysis process, effectively acting like natural batteries. The discovery opens new possibilities for the ongoing search into how life began on our planet as aerobic life might well have begun deep under the ocean where there is no sunlight.
Next is another finding that is planetary in scale but it’s about Mars. By analyzing data from a seismometer carried on Nasa’s Mars Insight Lander, the team claims that they have found liquid water in reservoirs deep in the rocky crust of the planet. Though we already know that there is water frozen at the poles of Mars, this is the first time that liquid water has been found there. At around 10 km to 20km beneath the surface, the reservoir is still far too deep to be of practical use but it does help answer the question of where all of the water that was known to be Mars go.
Finally here’s a paper that hit news headlines around the world. By analyzing the composition of the central Altar Stone that is part of Stonehenge, the team claims that it must have come from Scotland at least 750 km away. As the stone is thought to have arrived at Stonehenge around 2620 to 2480 BC, this represents a considerable feat of transportation and logistics. More interesting to me is what it tells us about the importance of the site as the builders deemed it necessary to transport a stone so far and what that implies for the level of societal organization that existed even so long ago.
I was going to pass on this since it’s a three hour long film with only middling reviews. Our cinephile friend recommended it though, so I thought we should watch it in order to have something interesting to talk about. Even looking at the premise, I was apprehensive about Joaquin Phoenix taking on yet another role as a mentally ill character and the first sequence set in what looks like a dystopian city even reminded me of the Joker. Fortunately that turned out to only the first of many such sequences, each weirder and more surprising than the last. I concede that it’s enthralling just to see what happens next but there’s no point to any of it at all and so my conclusion is that this is just a plain bad film.
We’ve only watched one other film by Douglas Sirk and it was the very surprising romance All That Heaven Allows. This one, Sirk’s last film, similarly has the superficial trappings of a Hollywood soap opera but is shockingly rich with issues of racial identity and gender roles. It gets seriously dark at times and I wondered if it were only because Sirk is German that he is able to dissect American society in this way. Its main failing is that it’s a little too long and even so its ending is a bit of cop out, meandering to a stop without a satisfactory resolution. Still it’s one of the most fascinating films of the era and is so bold that it should raise eyebrows even now.
