Having visited and loved the city of Istanbul, I naturally drawn to this documentary about Ara Güler, the celebrated photographer. He was nicknamed the Eye of Istanbul for his photographs that captured the city across decades beginning from the 1950s and much other work besides. Unfortunately while the man and his work are worthy subjects, this documentary itself is unremarkable, amounting to being little more than a straightforward hagiography that feels almost like a commercial for his legacy orchestrated by Güler himself.
This first came to my attention when it was featured in an episode of The Americans but of course we’ve already Night and the City before this. This one is now known as one of the greatest heist films of all time, featuring a heist scene so detailed and realistic that it was copied by real criminals to perform real crimes. I also didn’t realize until afterwards that director Jules Dassin was in this as the Italian safecracker. Unfortunately while the heist scene is indeed amazing, the extended denouement afterwards is nothing special.
Light on anything noteworthy that I’ve seen this month. Perhaps I’ve just missed things.
One thing that did grab my attention is this paper is this one that tries to test what is well known as Bergman’s rule: the hypothesis that animals in colder regions adapt by becoming larger in size while those in warmer place become smaller. This paper examines human fossils to determine if this holds in humans and determines that it is indeed broadly true. They were however unable to find correlations between temperature and brain sizes.
Next is a paper giving us even more reason to care about clean air, as if it weren’t enough that we all need clean air to breathe. It argues that cleaner air has contributed to improved yield gains of maize and soybean in the US. This is based on measurements of four different pollutants, ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
Then we have a paper that combines economics with biology. It’s about the nematode worm which biologists love to study because of how simple it is, with a nervous system of just 302 neurons. Yet that is enough complexity for it to seek out food, and the researchers have found that it does so according to the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference, a classical measure of utility maximization in economics.
Finally the last paper is hardly a surprising result but it doesn’t bode well either. Basically they had groups of people put together to solve some tasks represented by a game and then later interviewed them to ask who they would consider the leaders of the group. The result was those who spent the most time talking were considered the leaders. Even the person designated by the organizers to be the one to operate the user interface of the game were not more likely to be considered the leaders, nor those who have more experience from prior sessions of the game, nor those who scored more highly at cognitive tasks. The factor that matters most of all is simply being eager and willing to speak up the most.
Charlie Kaufman has a well-earned reputation for incredibly hard to understand films. This one is actually not as difficult to understand as I had feared but it still has its surreal and abstract moments. Unfortunately it is largely a retread of Kaufman’s usual themes, which as one Broken Forum poster puts it is about a self-loathing old man with a girl who wishes she were elsewhere. This plays even worse nowadays and comes across essentially as an incel’s lament.
Even without deliberately setting out to do so, I’m slowly making a bit of a dent in director Billy Wilder’s filmography. This one isn’t one of his major works but it’s still brimming with energy and feels topical in its critique of the media creating its own news. I was surprised however to learn that it’s partially based on real rescue events that turned into giant media circuses, one of them dating back to the 1920s. I was inclined to be skeptical of the huge crowds shown in the film but apparently that was all too real too.
Brandon Cronenberg may be following in the footsteps of his father in terms of style but he sure isn’t in a hurry about it as this is his first film since Antiviral in 2012, which we really liked. I found this one less impressive unfortunately. It is of course very visceral in its depiction of a killer of takes control of the bodies of others to commit murders but the theme of her sense of self blurring as a result just isn’t a particularly original one.
Here is another film by Satyajit Ray who is of course the great director of the masterpiece The Music Room. This one is a short film that is much smaller in scope, being in effect an in-depth psychological study of its main character. It is nowhere as impressive being so much less ambitious but it remains a competently made film about a very specific human failing.
