So this was the media phenomenon of last year when even our niece came up to us to rave about how great this film is. Due to pandemic conditions it was even the highest grossing film of the year globally. But watching this necessitates actually sitting through the television show itself first which took a while. Overall I have not impressed as this is very much a standard shōnen show made for a younger audience. It may be well be the best shōnen around at the moment but it never aspires to anything more than that and I see nothing outstanding in it at all.
Still focusing on lighter games, here’s one that I bought a while back that really appealed to me on multiple levels. It’s set in what its makers call the Golden Age of American whaling, being inspired by the novel Moby Dick. It has a boardgame-like look and the mechanics to match. Plus it rocks some pretty great thematically appropriate sea shanties by a Bristol-based group called the Roaring Trowmen. It’s such an original work so different from anything on the market that I just had to get it.
Following up on the amazing First Cow which we both absolutely loved, here is an older film by the same director Kelly Reichardt and also set in Oregon. This is an even more minimalist film with basically just the two characters, plus a dog to liven things up a little. Not much happens here and really not that much dialogue either. Yet there is so much understated meaning in between these lines that you can sense how much effort has been put in crafting. Reichardt really is my favorite cinematic discovery this year and I sure as heck am putting more of her work on my list
I honestly can’t remember why I even added this to my to watch list and indeed this isn’t that well known a film. For a long while as I was watching it, I kept thinking, yes, this is all very nice but what is this film actually about? Yet just as the town grows on the main characters without them really realizing it, this film grows on the audience. It’s a very subtle film and even the humor is low-key but by the end, I am convinced that this is a truly delightful gem.
The premise of this film by Henri-Georges Clouzot sounded promising to me as the story about a town being torn apart by malicious rumors and misinformation seemed especially apt for the Internet era. Unfortunately the film is only shallowly committed to this theme and is more interested in the hunt for the writer of the poison pen letters, making it feel more like a murder mystery film. Ironically the backstory of the film itself parallels the story in a way as this was made by a German production company while French was under German occupation during the Second World War. Both Clouzot and the lead actor Pierre Fresnay got into a great deal for trouble for making it as rumors were spread about this film attacking the French people as a whole.
Decent mix of stuff though all in the life sciences.
Easily the most exciting of the lot is the discovery of a new class of programmable DNA modifying systems. In this blog, I have talked many times about CRISPR and how it is a game-changer in enabling easy DNA editing but it is always better to have more than one tool in your toolbox. The acronym for this one is OMEGA, standing for Obligate Mobile Element Guided Activity. This is an RNA-guided DNA-cutting enzyme that originated in bacteria is only about one third the size of the Cas9 protein, which should help make it even more useful. Needless to say this is early days yet and we have no way of knowing if this will eventually be deployed but it is exciting news.
One bit of news that has been all over the net this month is this paper about how quickly some elephants in Mozambique have evolved to lose their tusks as a response to poaching. The elephant population declined by 90% at the height of poaching activity but as the population recovered, more elephants are born tuskless. All of them however are female as the gene responsible for the change is lethal when expressed in male elephants but females can survive the mutation if they receive a non-mutated version of the gene in one of their two X chromosomes. Of interest is how quickly tusklessness increased during the Civil War that enabled widespread poaching and also now that the situation has stabilized female elephants are regaining their tusks as they are after all a useful tool.
The next bit of news shouldn’t be much of a surprise but I think it makes for an interesting wake up call. It’s about a survey of wildlife, specifically wild boars and rat snakes, in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone which found no significant adverse health effects in the wildlife despite the exposure of varying levels of relatively low-dose radiation exposure. The team suggests that perhaps people shouldn’t be too fearful of moving back into the area but it goes without saying that health standards for humans and wildlife are very different, and rightly so. To me, this shows as in Chernobyl, that the wildlife is able to bounce back quite well following environmental disasters as the benefits from the simple absence of humans outweigh the adverse effects of the pollution.
Finally, and I think this bit will resonate with quite a few people as we have all had to sit through the sales pitch at opticians’ shops, we have a paper about a randomized controlled trial that aims to determine how helpful blue-blocking lenses really are. This is a straightforward and simple experiment involving participants wearing glasses who were all led to believe that they were using such lenses and assigned to various computer tasks. Afterwards they tried to measure the eye strain experienced by the participants and found no significant difference between those actually using the blue-blocking lenses and those who weren’t. One possible objection is that the period of time under study, two hours of computer use, is relatively short but this isn’t the first time that objections have been raised that these lenses are an expensive add-on of doubtful benefit.
I’ve watched so many films in so many languages from so many countries but rarely has one felt as alien as this one during its opening scenes with its sputtering outbursts of “War starts at midnight!” It’s the combination of the familiar with the utterly absurd of course and this is only one of many reasons why this is such a brilliant film. This has been called the greatest British film of all time and you can tell why because the central theme of the film is really Englishness itself. I understand that the character of Colonel Blimp originated in comic strips as an object of mockery but this version is actually very sympathetic and lovable.
