Earlier I talked about the wave of Asian-American cinema we’re seeing and here’s one about the Korean-American experience and it’s even set in the 1980s. This one seems at least partly autobiographical on the part of its director Lee Isaac Chung who indeed was born of a South Korean immigrant family and grew up on a farm in Arkansas. It’s so specific in its detail that it feels authentic. At the same time it’s the kind of slice-of-life that doesn’t really lead anywhere and so didn’t leave a particularly deep impression on me. It’s still a strong film that deserves its many award nominations and wins.
This is a tremendously successful and well known documentary, having won an Oscar for its category last year. I held off on watching this for a while however as its title seems incredibly presumptuous and having read a little of its premise, it seems likely to be a just-so story made up in the editing. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m pleased to say that it doesn’t go so far as to say that the main character tamed an octopus while the images they captured are absolutely amazing. I could have done with less dramatizing but this is a truly impressive documentary.
I think most people on the Internet would have by now seen the art by Polish artist Jakub Różalski that inserts giant mechs into late 19th-century or early 20-century settings. This art inspired a board game set in its own fictional universe and it was apparently successful enough to make this RTS game viable. Unfortunately I don’t think this game did too well. I bought for pretty cheap a while ago as I too was intrigued by the art of Różalski and wanted to know more about the world it inspired. Plus I have fond memories of playing Company of Heroes and thought that this might be somewhat similar.
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.
