Here is Elizabeth Moss again in another film which can be characterized as being about the kind of shit women have to put up with. In keeping with the source material by H.G. Wells. all good treatments of the story have focused on the inherently horrifying aspect of the premise. What this adaptation brings is that it is from the perspective of the victim and is perhaps the most extreme form of gaslighting anyone has ever imagined. Unfortunately the plot tries to be just a little too clever and the film could probably benefit from being shorter.
This is an eccentric tragicomic film from Iceland that delivers exactly what its title says and what it shows on the poster. This delightful gem of a film is very short and has very minimal dialogue but is nevertheless packed full of surprises and shocks. I suspect that its depiction of rural life in Iceland is more mythological than real and its insouciance towards grievous injury and death highly affected. However, authentic or not, it is wonderfully entertaining and original.
Some very important discoveries this month including a big one that may well be the most important finding for decades, if it doesn’t turn out to be a fluke.
The big news is that an experiment conducted at Fermilab observed muons behaving in a manner not consistent with the Standard Model of physics. After checking the math, the conclusion is that the model is wrong and there well may be a fifth, heretofore unknown, fundamental force in nature that would be needed to account for the behavior. For now, even though it is statistically unlikely to be a fluke, the Standard Model is so well established that no one is going to throw it out based on just this one result and certainly no one knows what is going to come next. But we can be sure that theoretical physicists are up all night trying to make sense of this.
Another important announcement, if it eventually proves to work on humans, is the discovery of a method of regrowing lost teeth. It uses an antibody to suppress one particular gene, USAG-1, and that was enough to stimulate tooth growth in mice and ferrets. There’s a long way to go before it would be even considered for testing on humans but if it works this certainly counts as a discovery that would make a big impact on everyone’s lives.
Next is a review of collected research to suggest that a strategy of promoting bilingualism, even if that means teaching a second language to the elderly or strengthening long unused language skills, is useful to delay the onset of dementia. It seems that even Cantonese and Mandarin spoken bilingualism is sufficient to have measurable effects on the onset of dementia. Since has no effect on Malaysians as we speak multiple languages already but it is interesting to see language learning being promoted as a healthcare measure.
Everyone knows how amazing it is that the world has been able to develop multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines in so short a time to address the ongoing pandemic. This paper argues that this has been possible partly because of the many lessons learned about vaccines across the decades spent trying to develop one for HIV. That effort was met with failure after failure but the argument is that it built up the necessary vaccine expertise to quickly develop one for COVID-19 and so research funds for vaccine development are never wasted.
Finally here’s some fascinating reading material about a particular species of ant known as the Indian jumping ant. As we all know, each ant colony only has a single queen. So what happens when the queen dies? In the case of this type of ant in particular, the surviving females compete to become the new queen and to do this their bodies transform into an intermediate form known as a gamergate to fight each one another with shrunken brains. Eventually a winner will emerge to become the queen but then the losers who survive the fight will transform back into normal ants, which involves their brains growing back again. And yes, queen ants don’t need big brains because all they do is pump out babies.
So we’re just now done with the four seasons of this show that has been out so far and this has been amazing every step of the way. It has also grown to become a particular favorite of my wife, combining as it does the lavish spectacle of the British monarchy, the sweeping sense of watching history in the making, the soap opera nature of its characters interacting with one another and you even feel less guilty about liking it too as it successfully convinces you that it is educational. Most of all, it’s fun to talk about each episode after you’ve watched it especially when you happen to recall a bit of your memories of the real events it is based on.
As the title states, here is yet another zombie film even as we are working through the South Korean series Kingdom. Happily this one hearkens back to the original meaning of the word before it was commercialized by American films. Though framed as a fictional story set both in Haiti in the past and present day France, I feel that it is works better like a documentary that is meant to introduce to us voodoo and that entire aspect of Haitian culture.
This film as well as the book it is based on are both frequent subjects of study with the book in particular being banned in many places. Incredibly while countries in the Soviet block were upset at its depiction of anti-Semitism in Poland, Western countries were upset as well, seeing in it an attempt to absolve Catholics of some of the guilt of the Holocaust. In any case, while I was somewhat puzzled at first about how this film is actually composed of two entirely separate stories, I eventually came to appreciate how each part complements the other and it certainly lives up to its reputation as one of the world’s great film.
We’ve watched almost every Wes Anderson film by now, but not this one. This was his second film and the one that received enough critical attention to establish his career. It was also his first collaboration with Bill Murray and of course we know how that went. Anderson was only 29 years old when he made this so it is remarkable that the essentials of his signature style are all already present here. His newer films can boast of bigger budgets and more polish, but I find that I really enjoyed the restraint and lower stakes in this one.
