Everyone should know this as the landmark Chinese propaganda film from last year and amazingly it was also the highest grossing film worldwide of the year due to US cinemas being mostly shut down during the pandemic. This made it a much watch for me, patriotic bombast notwithstanding. Overall I found it to be an effective action film with fantastic production values. It is however highly exaggerated and from what I can tell somewhat ahistorical, though probably not out of malice.
Here’s yet another small game by some of the same people behind Failbetter Games and naturally since it’s a narrative-based game with cards, how could I resist? Unfortunately this is one game I did not like at all, mainly due to how tediously grindy it is. You’re supposed to have fun by exploring the gameplay mechanics by yourself and learning what cards interactions are possible but I find that as achieving victory takes quite some time and a little bit of luck even when you fully understand how everything works. As such, you’re just prolonging the pain unnecessarily by repeating the same actions over and over again if you refrain from looking things up.
This one is apparently known as Hollywood’s most notable screwball comedies of the era though I don’t believe we’ve watched anything from this director Preston Sturges before. However I found that the plot to be so outrageous and the male lead character so stupid that it’s unbelievable. Still there is a certain charm in this kind of lowbrow humor that we haven’t seen in a long time and I suppose it must have been quite novel at the time to have the female lead character be so dominant throughout the entire film.
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.
