In a way this counts as an entry in the wronged woman exacts her revenge genre except that it takes place in the real world where a crazy spree of unbridled violence would never work and the protagonist is intelligent enough not to even attempt such a thing. This is the debut feature of its director Emerald Fennell and I’m very impressed with how far the film takes its central conceit. This is a little too straightforward in its direction as it pretty much lacks any subtlety whatsoever but it really doesn’t dumb anything down and avoids making any mistakes with regards to plausibility. That makes it a solid win in my book.
Director Krzysztof Kieślowski is well known for his Three Colours trilogy which I’ve already talked about here. This one is an earlier work that he made while still based in Poland and some have noted that it can be seen as a sort of dry run of Blue, the two being similar in that they are about wives dealing with the grief of their husbands’ deaths. However this one takes place during the martial law period in Poland and so political events tend to overshadow one woman’s grief.
This is the first Saudi Arabian film to be featured here and the very first Saudi Arabian film to be made by a female director, Haifaa al-Mansour. Though as the director herself notes, there’s not much competition as the country had no movie theatres until 2018 and consequently not much of a film industry. Nevertheless this film is as good as the best from elsewhere in the world and successfully highlights how the kingdom is one of the worst places in the world to be born as a woman yet takes a balanced enough approach that the women are able to survive and find their happiness in all manner of small ways, and that in turn, makes this a highly entertaining film.
Another light month in terms of new discoveries, so how about a long, review-type feature article for your reading pleasure and edification. We’ll start off with a couple of articles about the ongoing pandemic and the technologies that have emerged around it however.
First we have this one about an antibody treatment for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Far less attention has been paid to them than vaccines, but such treatments are another important tool to manage the pandemic. This one seems particularly important it seems capable of neutralizing not only all known strains of SARS-CoV-2 but also all known serbecoviruses, which means it covers all viruses of the same genus. It achieves this by binding to a particular site on the coronavirus spike protein that is thought to be unlikely to vary by much from mutation.
Meanwhile the same technology that enabled mRNA vaccines is making its way to cancer therapies with human trials starting in Europe. BioNTech actually has several different mRNA cancer therapies in the works, targeting different types of cancers but all work on the same principle of programming the immune system to target tumor cells. Needless to say if the human trials work out, this would make a huge difference in the health outcomes of cancer patients.
Next here’s an announcement about a team succeeding at synthesizing starch out of carbon dioxide. They claim that their process is more efficient than conventional agriculture but I’m not sure what that means as it applies to energy-use or economics. Nevertheless this is clearly a major discovery especially as carbon dioxide is now seen as a major pollutant. Converting it to food seems incredible. Incidentally I’ve read recently that companies trying to grow meat without animals aren’t having much success at making it economical and it may well be impossible to achieve at scale.
Finally here’s a broad review of the current state of physics. Essentially the field is in upheaval because the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find so-called sparticles, the heavier supersymmetric partners of the known fundamental particles. This throws the entire principle of supersymmetry into doubt and along with it string theory as the leading theory of everything. This is a real problem for physics as theoreticians have bet on it being true and have done a lot of theoretical work ahead of finding empirical evidence. Now the doors are thrown wide open again to alternative theories of everything with one favorite, among many others, being entropic gravity.
This is the third of three films by Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon and directed by Tomm Moore based on Irish folklore and mythology. I wasn’t a big fan of the first two so I was surprised to find myself liking this quite a bit more. It has better unity in its theme and purpose and you get a real sense of peril to its characters. But I think it also works better because I walked into this with fewer expectations of how it would work as a werewolf story. It’s still a children’s show in that it holds back on having anything truly awful happen but the higher stakes do make an appreciable difference.
This remarkable film was originally made for television and essentially dramatizes the only surviving transcript of the 1942 Wannsee Conference. This was of course the famous conference in which Nazi officials settled on the implementation of the so-called final solution to the Jewish question. This film reenacts the meeting in almost real time, down to the smallest detail. You might think that a film that consists only of discussions in a meeting to be dreadfully boring, but it is amazing how much psychological depth can be discerned in here and the total commitment that the Nazi had to eradicating Jews never ceases to shock.
By its very premise, this at first seems to be the latest entry in the genre about artists who physically and mentally sacrifice for their art. Fortunately this film actually outgrows the initial premise and is a much better film for it. I was also very pleased to note that its very nuanced portrayal of the deaf community in that I don’t think it always shows them in the best light. I don’t think the heavy metal community is happy about the film however and in truth despite the title this has nothing to do with heavy metal at all.
