Not many scientific announcements that seem worth including this month either but these two do have major implications if they pan out.
This first one is likely the only one that has practical implications however. It pertains to the development of a probabilistic weather forecasting model that uses machine learning. Existing weather forecasts are deterministic physics-based simulations while previous attempts to create models that use machine-learning, or AI basically, have yielded less reliable and accurate forecasts. The authors of this paper claim that their new model beats traditional ones in both accuracy and speed. Named GenCast, it is able to generate 15-day global forecasts in 8 minutes. If true, this is obviously both amazing and immediately useful and only the tip of the iceberg of practical applications in the field of AI.
Things are going on in the field of cosmology as the nature and existence of Dark Energy keeps running into problems. Now we have a new paper that threatens to completely upend this view of the universe. The new conception which the authors call the Timescape claim that since the distribution of matter throughout the universe is not homogenous, contrary to previous assumptions, that the passage of time is not homogenous as well. Specifically time passes faster in the voids where no matter is present and this may be enough to explain the phenomena of distant supernovae redshift without having to invoke Dark Energy as an explanation. I don’t have the qualifications to judge how seriously to take this paper but I’m sure all the cosmologists are talking about it right now.
That black American films is its own genre gives me mixed feelings and I have to confess that I’ve not always a big fan of them even when it comes to critically acclaimed ones. Which might be why this one is right up my alley as it points fingers at how the artistic works of Black culture are pigeonholed into particular stereotypes. I found this to be wickedly funny with even the smallest word choices so carefully considered and loaded with meaning. I just loved Jeffrey Wright weighing the words on his tongue. The ending is a tad unsatisfying but the director all but directly explains why he ended things that way. I think this might be my favorite American film this year.
A good horror film must be both suitably terrifying and have some sort of coherent theme holding it together. This Argentine film supplies both and in its ninety minutes running time delivers a powerful jolt of fear. Admittedly it does cheat by stretching its central explanation broadly to cover a wide swathe of otherwise disparate paranormal phenomena and there are too many jump scares. I can probably even guess where it got its inspiration from. But I like how its characters take a serious, grown-up approach to the weirdness they encounter and have their heads screwed on right, for the most part at least.
We’ve previously seen the work of Mikhail Kalatozov in The Cranes are Flying. This is his follow-up to that celebrated film and once again it stars Tatiana Samoilova as the female lead. I expected to be another war era film but instead it’s a survival adventure that feels surprisingly modern. It pits the four explorers against the unrelenting power of nature and it’s the more terrifying because you know for a fact that it must be real. I don’t know how much of the forest they had to set on fire to film that scene. It does however have a jingoistic vibe that feels jarring to our sensibilities.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched anything by M. Night Shyamalan even as he keeps churning films out. I’ve heard that this one is a cut above the rest and indeed the scenario it describes is exactly the type of moral dilemma I like to read about. Unfortunately this is mediocre on pretty much all counts and is disappointingly small in scope to boot. It’s the sort of thing I’d expect for an episode of the Twilight Zone maybe. The most interesting part of it for me may be that Shyamalan might have been playing off of his reputation as a director famous for his twists somewhat.
This isn’t one of Yasujirō Ozu’s better known works, nor does it star Setsuko Hara. It is however one of his funnier films and it does have a character named Setsuko though she is deceptively not the main character. Instead this is about a middle-aged married couple with a dysfunctional relationship and their failure to communicate with one another. The antics of the spoiled and willful wife are what makes this so funny. Unfortunately it does somewhat revert to an old-fashioned morality lesson and even lectures the audience about how a proper wife should behave at the end but it’s great while it lasts.
Seeing as the recent crop of genre fiction novels have not been terribly interesting to me, I’ve been venturing out to read a more diverse selection of books, especially non-fictional ones. This one is a memoir by a woman who was living in Berlin during the time it fell and was captured by the advancing Red Army in 1945. It’s a short book and covers a relatively short period of time from April to June 1945. But it’s packed full of detail as witnessed by a woman who is both exceptionally erudite and brutally honest in recording her experiences. The author was anonymous when the memoir was originally published but after her death, her identity has since been revealed to be Marta Hillers, a German journalist.
