Sometimes it can be truly astonishing how such simple films with so little going on can be so effective. This is the first film we watched by director Kelly Reichardt but it seems that her reputation for such minimalism is already well established so more of her work is definitely going onto the to watch list. I dislike the ending as it feels abrupt and I would like to imagine a happy ending for our two plucky heroes. Nevertheless this is an amazing film that immerses you fully in its setting.
Odd how we’ve never watch a single Romanian film but here we have two in relatively short order. This one actually uses multiple different languages and attempts to be a kind of international thriller. Unfortunately it relies entirely on the central conceit of whistling as a language and is not otherwise a film to be taken very seriously. I do note it evinces a very cynical morality that says interesting things about Romanian society.
Trying something a bit different for this month’s edition of serving up cool science news and a couple of pieces really benefit from a visual presentation of the discoveries.
The first of these is a new paper that for the first time lays out a complete model of the workings of the famous Antikythera Mechanism. This is effectively a mechanical calculator or computer from ancient Greece, the fragments of which were recovered in 1901. A complete understanding of how the device worked was difficult to achieve given that only about a third of the mechanism survives. This paper explains how x-ray CT techniques were used to infer the parts that are missing and uses investigative work to fill in the blanks to prove that the entire device was used to calculate the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the five planets known at the time, according to a geocentric model of the cosmos. This excellent video was made to accompany the paper to explain what the device does and how the team arrived at the conclusions they did.
Here is yet another tiny, indie science-fiction film that has achieved a measure of critical acclaim all out of proportion with its budget. It’s the debut feature of its director Andrew Patterson who basically kept submitting it to many, many film festivals and finally got it to be shown in drive-in cinemas amidst the lockdowns of 2020. There’s is nothing new here to add to the extensive canon of UFO films but it does have an angle all of its own and I can’t help but love a film that knows exactly what it is trying to do as it is the case here.
Years after watching Sonatine, here we finally get around to Hana-bi which is arguably director Takeshi Kitano’s magnum opus. This one has many of the same thematic elements as the earlier film including the director himself playing a jaded, violent character but is far more refined and coherent. Featuring music by Joe Hisaishi and artwork by the director himself, it leans fully into the anime aesthetic to fantastic effect.
After writing about The Wandering Inn earlier, I realized that I’ve never written anything about With This Ring either and I’ve been reading this for a far longer period of time. This is of course not an original work but a piece of fan-fiction based on the Young Justice television series that is set in a version of the DC universe. I’ve massively cut down on my reading of fan-fiction these days and most of them aren’t worth talking about. I make an exception for this not because it is particularly well written but because of its sheer massiveness and the consistency with which the author has been able to churn out updates every day almost without fail.
This is of course the film whose real world inspiration was the Harvey Weinstein affair though none of that is mentioned within the film itself. In fact, the film delicately deals with the controversial subject matter by side-stepping the boss entirely so that he is never seen and the main character here is his assistant. This brilliant move ensures that the film doesn’t feel exploitative in the least and refocuses the issue on the complicity of the industry as a whole in his wrongdoings.
