This is a yakuza film by a director who is new to us, Masahiro Shinoda though he is known as being as assistant to such famous directors as Yasujirō Ozu. This one is considered a Japanese New Wave film and as such while one can follow the plot readily enough, it’s not so easy to discern what is the point it is driving towards. In the end I think it’s about self-destructive people who to go to extremes in search of a thrill to make themselves feel alive. It’s okay I suppose but not something I am particularly excited about.
A whole slew of articles to close out the year and I’m even excluding some important news items because they have yet to fully play out at the time of writing, such as the launch of the James Webb telescope.
I’m waiting until the Webb telescope is actually used to make any new discoveries before posting anything about it but that doesn’t mean there is isn’t anything else of comparable interest in the field of astronomy. This month NASA also announced that its Parker Solar Probe flew through the corona of the Sun for the first time, gathering valuable data on the switchbacks, disturbances in the solar wind that can move around. This is effectively the weather on the surface of the Sun. To do that the probe has to survive temperatures of up to 1,377 degrees Celsius and move at similarly ridiculous speeds. Please look up the video images of the mission if you can, they’re well worth your while.
One article that particularly intrigued me was this one about the benefits of physical exercise in ways that still quite mysterious to us. Some of the innumerable benefits includes reduced inflammation and increased plasticity within the hippocampus and this experiment shows that exercise changes something in the plasma that induces these effects. The researchers took blood plasma from mice which had engaged in exercise and infused it into mice that had not and found that the benefits were transferable but we still don’t know why.
By now everyone knows about the dangers of plastics, in particular that they are not biodegradable and hence persist in the environment but as a famous, fictional scientist would say, “life finds a way”. This article talks about microbes in oceans and soils around the world are evolving to eat plastics. They found this by noting the emergence of previously unknown enzymes that are capable of breaking down plastic, with particularly high concentrations in areas with more plastics. This is unsurprising of course as plastics are just hydrocarbon chains engineered by humans and therefore did not previously exist. Now they are abundant, it is normal for microbes to evolve to consume them as a food source. While this seems like good news, we should still be wary of unexpected consequences from such developments.
Taking a break from all these articles about biology, we make a foray into sociology. One phenomenon that we all know is slowing population growth in many countries around the world. However this happened in France much earlier than anywhere else and this paper links the change to the secularization process in France, arguing that as religiosity declined in particular départements in France and even particular family lines as traced through the data, so too does family sizes.
A lighter article would be this one about an attempt to survey the average number of words and phrases that dogs with owners know and recognize. Using a methodology similar to that used to assess infant’s understanding of early language ability, they found that the average number about 89, though there is of course wide disparities for individual dogs. The smartest one could recognize over 200 words while the dumbest one only recognized 15.
Finally for a longer read, here is an overview about how one should not underestimate the sophistication of the minds of insects. Growing evidence and scientific consensus suggests that insects are not autonomic beings that react and behave mindlessly to stimuli but do have internal mental states of their own, and this includes feeling their equivalent of primal emotions like pain or being frightened.
Netflix released an updated American series of this name earlier this year but the reviews for it seemed mixed. So I thought it might be more interesting to go back to this original series made for Swedish TV and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Watching this is quite a draining experience as it feels more like a documentary than a television drama and it is so dense and intense, forswearing any kind of light distraction or entertainment to lighten the mood. It is an amazing showcase of writing and acting but I really would not care to go through this ordeal again.
Due to the pandemic, this marks the first MCU film that we failed to catch at the cinemas and we didn’t come back for the subsequent ones either. So this does kind of mark the passing of an era. No need to go into the kerfuffle between Scarlett Johansson and Disney about whether this properly deserved an exclusive cinematic release window, but it actually is a solid MCU film. It’s not exceptional by any means but it acquits itself well and I continue to be amazed by Marvel can get virtually unknown directors, in this case Cate Shortland, with no previous experience in making action movies to turn in respectable work.
Since Tsui Hark’s The Blade was interesting in many ways I thought I’d give more recent film a shot. This was reasonably well received in Asia and boasts of a star-studded cast. Unfortunately this is terrible film in all respects and it is difficult to find even a single saving grace in it. The plot is comprehensible enough even if there are inexplicable jumps here and there but it is just dumb and none of the performers in it acquit themselves well. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves, Tsui himself most of all.
This was a free game on the Epic platform not too long ago and of course it’s only just about now that the sequel dropped. I played this because I really liked Frontier Development’s Planet Coaster and wanted to see what they could do with the Jurassic Park property. Plus of course it was free. Having done so, I have to say that while the game has its merits and it’s rather fun just to watch dinosaurs for a while this is a really shallow game and it leaves me with no desire to play the sequel. In fact, I’ve taken Planet Zoo off of my wishlist because I fear it will be too similar. Ouch!
This is Peter Jackson’s documentary about the experience of British soldiers during the First World War. While it features both archival footage and voice recordings of veterans, it is the voices that dominate this film, so much so that the images largely fade into the background. Used as we are to war films, there is little that is new to be learned here but hearing the first-hand testimony of the survivors of the war recount their experiences still makes this an affecting film.
