I’m always open to new and interesting videogaming experiences and I’ve heard good things about this cyberpunk horror game by a Polish developer. They even managed to get Rutger Hauer to star as the protagonist and all but shouts out its Blade Runner influences. Unfortunately while its production values are indeed top notch, it is a very linear game and I’ve come to find that scary scenes have limited effect on me once I realize that whatever I see have no impact in terms of gameplay mechanics.
This is the first film by Joanna Hogg that we’ve watched and she is an up and coming British director whose name often pops up. But it’s also notable as the first significant performance by Honor Swinton Byrne who plays the lead here while her mother Tilda Swinton takes on a supporting role as the main character’s mother. Unfortunately I don’t like it much as it feels so indirect and seems to leave so much unsaid. Then after reading how it’s at least partially autobiographical on Hogg’s part, it’s easier to understand how painful it must have been to confront these issues head on.
This is of course the sequel to L’Auberge Espagnole that I wrote about last year by the same director and writer Cédric Klapisch and starring many of the same performers. The previous film had a very large cast of characters but had a very simple structure about a household full of exchange students from all over Europe. This one however sprawls just about everywhere across time and space as it follows the main character Xavier’s life without seemingly much tying the narratives together but it still has some charm and the same total commitment to his citizen of the world ethos.
A veritable wealth of science articles this month. Once again I stay away from covid-19 topics as there is so much noise there, except for one which is only tangentially related.
An easy one off the bat. Many people harbor suspicions that students who are academically accelerated, that is promoted to a more advanced class at an earlier age, develop psychological problems. This study which took place across 35 years tracking the academic histories and mental states of such students failed to find any such evidence and concluded that their overall psychological well-being was above average.
Here is a paper positing that one of the possible causes of depression is low neural plasticity in the hippocampus, meaning that there is a loss of connectivity in the neural tissue and inability to form new connections. The paper, using data from mice, argues that ketamine acts to reset the system and restore plasticity. Before this, scientists already knew that ketamine has an anti-depressive effect but there was no mechanism to explain how it worked.
Next is a paper showing that fish can spread from isolated bodies of water by having ducks eat their eggs. As expected, the vast majority of the eggs are digested and a small number survive and are viable.
Can philosophical arguments actually change people’s minds? This seems impossible to answer but a small group of philosophers decided to organize a contest to find out. They challenged philosophers, economists and psychologists to write their best arguments that would persuade people to donate more money and then put those to the test. They found that indeed some submissions worked much better than others in getting people to donate more and the winning entry was co-written by famous moral philosopher Peter Singer. Unfortunately that entry basically amounts to an emotional appeal even though the rules explicit forbid that by vividly describing the effects of trachoma and how it can be easily treated at a very low cost.
Finally the one covid-19 related article is actually about some unintended effects of many parts of the world being under an extended lockdown. This article talks about how a quantum computing laboratory kept on producing work during the lockdown with the people involved interacting with the equipment remotely. With no one at all in the lab and no vibrations or other minute disturbances, the lab produced some of the highest quality data they had ever seen. From what I understand, this is most obvious in quantum computing as the equipment is so sensitive, but other fields have also had similar experiences when experiments are run with absolutely no one around.
I did grow up with American comics but it was all the superhero stuff that is derided in this film. This is a part biography, part documentary film about the life and career of Harvey Pekar, the writer of a series of comics about real life in the US. Since his comics are about himself, this means that the film also serves as an adaptation of his work. His is a fascinating life that makes for a story well worth telling but the unique format of this film itself outshines its content for me.
This is the earliest of the films by Nuri Bilge Ceylan we watched so far and unfortunately it’s also the roughest one. This one is set in Istanbul so it’s great to watch scenes of the city, especially in the winter. However while we can just about discern what this film is about, it’s a struggle to make out what he is trying to say and the lack of refinement makes it feel subpar in comparison with his later works.
It’s a little annoying to me how casting Jesse Eisenberg in this is playing exactly to his type as a nervous, socially awkward nerd. But then again, it works so why not? Riley Stearns is a very new director even if this isn’t his debut and there’s no doubt that he has made here a very interesting and thought-provoking work. While ostensibly a martial arts film, this is in reality a critique of the toxic masculinity that we often see in that culture. At the same time, it’s so stylized that I’m not sure that the critique hits all that close to home.
