This is a film noir that is remarkable on multiple measures for something from the 1950s. The lead is a black man, played by superstar Harry Belafonte. It’s nominally a film about a bank robbery, but the robbery itself is the least important part. It’s instead an in-depth portrait of two very different men and why they were driven to commit this crime. Finally, even though it’s a noir, most of the scenes actually take place in the day time. It’s all the better for it too as we then get all these outdoor shots of the New York of the period. The anti-racism message is too on the nose for us now but the film as a whole is solid and well worth watching even today.
If the last couple of films by Luis Buñuel have been less surreal than usual, this one more than makes up for it. It’s less a film than a series of vignettes about a group of friends who keep trying to sit down for a meal yet fail for increasingly ridiculous reasons. This counts as black humor but instead of laughing, you’d probably be wincing instead. The critique against the bourgeoisie is well observed and I love how Buñuel was seemingly inspired by a simple story of friends showing up unexpectedly. It’s a little too silly for me to care much about however and I’m not sure I even want to spend the brainpower to figure out what some of the weirder stories even mean.
I haven’t skipped a single one of Zachtronics’ puzzle games so far but now I’m thinking that I should probably have skipped this one. To me this feels like a rehash of SpaceChem but with hexes instead of squares. In reality, it goes back to an even earlier game by Zach Barth before he even founded the company but that was before my time. I loved SpaceChem but it was so difficult that I could never do some of the later puzzles. This title however is in line with their more recent games with drastically reduced difficulty. The main game posed no challenge to me at all and the accompanying story is so shallow I wondered why there needed to be a story at all.
I expected this Macedonian language film about witches in the 19th century to be squarely in the horror genre but as my wife notes, it really isn’t horror at all. It’s actually a sort of fantasy drama with very strong humanistic themes. The core premise is sound and fits the setting well. Unfortunately it is let down by lackluster production values including a weak eye for cinematography and cheap visual effects. It’s solid work but it’s perhaps more ambitious than what director Goran Stolevski could actually pull off.
I’ve skipped all of the Star Wars shows after the second season of The Mandalorian. No point in sticking with shows after they’ve jumped the shark. This one however caught my attention due to its rave reviews and best of all, it’s a prequel that builds up to perhaps the best Star Wars film of all time, Rogue One. I can say without exaggeration that this show is amazing and adroitly captures what it means to build a resistance movement from the ground up. It’s also one of the darkest interpretations of the franchise I’ve yet seen, as the rebels can and do make moral sacrifices in the name of the greater good.
The last Steven Spielberg film I watched was Ready Player One and that was only because it was on a flight. The last one that I’d actually sought out to watch was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and we hated it. I was doubtful that I’d ever watch a Spielberg film again but then he made what is effectively his autobiography and of course it instantly becomes essential watching. At first, I was annoyed by how this film telegraphs every single thing that it wants to say so very obviously. Yet I found myself immersed all the same in the world of Spielberg’s childhood and its insights about the power of cinema. By the end, it’s impossible to deny the conclusion that this is a triumph both artistically and personally for Spielberg himself.
Lots of cool stuff this month and I’m even cutting off breaking news that I’ll try to include next month.
I like to start off these posts with the news item that manages to hit the mainstream every month. This time it’s the news of a possible human population bottleneck about 900,000 years ago. This was achieved by projecting current human genetic variation backward in time to estimate past population sizes. This is understandably not a very reliable or precise technique but their estimate that the human population was reduced to around 1,300 breeding individuals at one point has enough shock value to made headlines around the world. Probably the more interesting discovery that the period coincides with a severe cooling phase in the planet’s climate, making it a salutary lesson on how critical it is for us to intelligently manage climate change today.
Using drugs to control obesity is the next big thing in medicine and there’s no doubting the impact that it could have on human health. This paper adds to the knowledge in that area, demonstrating how a specific group of neurons, GABRA5-positive neurons, in the lateral hypothalamic area of the brain help regulate food intake and thereby weight gain. By activating or suppressing these neurons, the researchers were able to control weight gain in model mice without affecting food intake. There’s understandably still a lot of reluctance against relying on drugs to control the obesity epidemic but I have no doubt that this will be mainstream soon.
We’re all familiar with the adage about opposites attracting and those mature enough should already know how untrue it is. This paper is a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies of male-female partners and their traits. The data shows that partners generally have high correlations in their personal traits whether in terms of political and religious attitudes, educational attainments and others, suggesting that such partnerships are more common and more stable.
Next here is a paper about intuition, specifically intuitive responses to problems that are wrong and yet are prove to be extremely difficult to correct. It discusses the bat and ball problem which involves calculating the costs of the two objects. The problem has an obvious, intuitive answer which is wrong and the correct answer must be arrived at through reflection. Despite increasingly severe warnings and even an explicit instruction that the obvious answer is wrong, many people still end up inputting the wrong answer.
Finally this paper discusses correlations between being patient and educational success. This by itself isn’t that revelatory but the technique the team used to determine patience seems novel. What they did was to mine data from social media to determine which types of interests are popular in different places and made their findings based on which interests are associated with the virtue of patience.
