We’d previously watched a film by Romanian director Radu Jade that was shocking and felt unique but I didn’t like it too much. This one about a female production assistant who also moonlights as a manosphere influencer at first looks to be similar shock cinema. I’m not sure if it’s because I have a better grasp of EU affairs or because I just understood more of the references, but I soon realized what a brilliantly sarcastic film this is. It says so much about the current state of life in Romania and its complicated relationship with the EU, and as such I’d strongly recommend this.
This was another show that I was always going to watch, at least for one season, because of much I’d played the games. It is astonishingly pretty much the best video game adaptation I’d ever seen. It is absolutely crammed full of reference to the games, down to the smallest details, works hard to expand the lore, has enough of a budget to look fantastic and doesn’t hold back on the violence and gore. It’s an amazing ride for fans of the game but it falls short of a truly great series. The characters are well, written for video games, with little real dramatic depth, and the execution of the story is perhaps a little too faithful to the games. I enjoyed this one but I’m going to wait and see what the reviews say about the next season.
So there are two major superhero films being released in July but I’m probably not going to watch both in the cinemas so Superman it is. I’ve watched every one of James Gunn’s superhero work so far and loved them because he understands the characters he is using. It’s very much the case again with a take on Superman that emphasizes not his superhuman abilities but his compassion and heroism. It also updates the story to incorporate modern issues and concerns as all good adaptations must. It does feel somewhat cramped with some characters not getting much of a chance to show off and the denouement at the end feels too neat. But it’s an excellent start for the DCU.
I’d been looking forward to this odd little game, a World War II-era tank combat simulator that uses ASCII graphics. It looks ancient but it’s actually a relatively recent release. Similarly, learning the interface and the ruleset also seems daunting but there’s not actually that much to it. It was a blast to figure how it all works and to experience commanding different types of units. Unfortunately while there are many campaigns to play, they all feel repetitive and similar after a while as the core gameplay loop is really quite simple.
This was a total surprise to me when it popped up on Netflix. The preview looked intriguing but it didn’t seem like our thing. Then I read about its great reviews and its songs became legitimate hits so I knew I had to watch it. And you know what? It really is great. The premise of fighting demons through kpop is totally outlandish of course but is totally self-consistent. Its take on girl power is original, the choreography looks cool and the music is catchy. The art isn’t quite on par with the best in the industry but I’d say that this is overall better than anything put out by any of the other major US animation studios in years.
Aki Kaurismäki is said to be Finland’s best known director but this is the first I’ve seen of his work, proving once again how incomprehensibly vast the world of cinema is. This one is a deceptively basic and straightforward romantic comedy with its minimalistic setup and sparse dialogue. But with its portrayal of the quietly desperate lives of the working class of Finland and the absurdly wrong time period it is set in, it effortlessly draws us into its world. I’m not certain that Finland is as poor a society as this film makes it out to be but I can’t deny the expressive power of this film.
Once again, a good number of biology articles this month but there is one about the Earth’s magnetic field which may be related to the planet bearing life, or it might not.
Starting with that first, the study is about the realization that the strength of Earth’s magnetic field seems correlated with the abundance of oxygen in the atmosphere, roughly rising and falling together over the past billion years or so. The strange thing is that there is no obvious reason why they might be correlated with the best guess being merely that the magnetic field helps to deflect solar wind, thus slowing the loss of oxygen and other gases into space. Another explanation might be that tectonic motions can both affect the geomagnetic field and release nutrients that fuel blooms of oxygen-producing algae.
Next is a development combines both biology and information technology. A private institute has just announced the creation of the first virtual model of a cell. This specific version is designed to predict how stem cells, cancer cells and immune cells respond to drugs, cytokines or genetic perturbations. The obvious benefit is that using a virtual model of the cell is far easier than having to run the experiment using real cells. Everyone will be testing to see how accurate the responses of this particular model will be but this is only the first attempt and future versions are only going to be better.
Then we have this news about an experiment that has dramatically extended the lifespan of mice by giving them monthly injections of an antibody. The antibody in question, X203, works by inhibiting the natural protein interleukin 11. This is a cytokine whose concentration in the body increases with age and is associated with inflammation and cancer. The team claims that interleukin 11 has been observed to work similarly in humans as in mice but of course we still need to what effects this injection has on more subjects beyond mice and what the long-term effects other than extending life would be.
Finally here’s an article that I included because it feels like something right out of the videogame Bioshock to me. It talks about how a specific species of sea slugs are able to gain new abilities by consuming algae with those abilities. For example they are able to gain photosynthesis from the algae when consuming. Instead of digesting the chloroplast cells, they build structures of their own around them, and keep them working. Similarly they are able to store the stinging cells from the sea anemones they consume and deploy them later against their own enemies.
