I can’t remember why I added this to my list and I’m pretty sure I’ve never watched anything by director Kim Ki-duk before but this is listed among some polls as one of the best films ever made so I suppose that’s reason enough. The title is very long and feels rather generic given how common this metaphor is but it does turn out to be very fitting.
This Italian film can be considered a classic but I don’t think it is that well known and I only knew about it from a post on Broken Forum. As it cost so much to make they needed American money to fund it and so, unusually, it stars an American actor, Burt Lancaster, in the titular role. All of Lancaster’s lines are therefore dubbed. As the choice of male lead was forced on director Luchino Visconti, the result should have been a disaster, yet all seems to have turned out well.
I’ve had this game on my to play list for the longest time, having it recommended to me by multiple parties and having heard about it all the way back to its Kickstarter campaign. As usual partly due to being a bit tired of epic RPGs, I’ve kept putting it off until now. Even while playing, I’ve made liberal use of online guides because I couldn’t be too bothered about learning the whole system.
This film seems to be the result of a deliberate attempt to rekindle the magic behind Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid by reassembling the creative team of Paul Newman, Robert Redford and director George Roy Hill. Since we liked the earlier film so much, putting it on the list was a no brainer. It does evoke the same tone and look very strongly beginning with the opening scene featuring the familiar ragtime melody “The Entertainer”.
A huge haul this month, so much so that I’ve had to be a bit more selective than usual. Most of it is once again in biology.
Most of us know that epigenetic inheritance isn’t a thing and that genes are passed down to the next generation. This article talks about how this isn’t necessarily the case and how fathers may pass down information that isn’t encoded in DNA to offspring through a mechanism that makes use of small RNA. The small DNAs appear to influenced by the state of the father’s health and has the ability to conceal genetic information from the cellular machinery, effectively cancelling out some genes.
Next we have one about how what we see is distorted by what we expect. This isn’t exactly news these days but it’s a pretty cool experiment that demonstrates how people naturally expect goal-directed, efficient actions and interpret what they see based on those assumptions even when that this is not what they actually saw.
A lighter bit of news is this paper about measuring how much cows value access to a grooming brush. The brush in question was an automatically rotating brush and the researchers mounted it in an area that required the cows to push against an obstacle to access the area. By altering the energy needed for the push, they found that the cows were willing to work about as hard to get to brush as to a supply of feed. But they were not willing to push to get to an empty enclosure.
Probably one of the more important papers this month is about how personality affects salaries. This particular study is based on school data from California and covers only the smartest students. Using the standard Big Five measure of personality, it found that high conscientiousness and extraversion are correlated with much higher lifetime earnings while high agreeableness are negatively correlated with earnings.
I like this simple story about an NGO working on providing reading glasses to people in poor countries. It’s absolutely trivial, basic stuff but it’s a good example of how much of a difference such work on the ground makes.
Studies about the benefits or harm of different types of foods always seem to swing back and forth so this is likely just another data point to add to the pile. This one is about alcohol and it posits that there is no health level of alcohol consumption. The study found that although there are some benefits from low levels of consumption particularly in protecting against heart disease, these are still more than outweighed by health risks such as its role in causing cancers.
Finally just to have a bit of variety, here’s a bit of news on the materials science front. The claim is that they’ve made the most wear-resistant metal in the world made out of a platinum-gold alloy which sounds incredibly expensive to make. To me, the interesting bit is how it works. When being worn down, the material generated a black film on its surface that has the effect of acting as a lubricant, protecting it from further erosion. The engineers identified it as a diamond-like carbon, so in a sense this metal generates diamonds when you rub it hard enough.
So this definitely isn’t the sort of film that we usually go to the cinema for, what with it being a crassly commercial romantic comedy with no artistic aspirations and a bog standard plot. But I still got caught up in the cultural buzz surrounding it and I have to admit that the cultural representation thing has me excited as well, especially as there are so many Malaysians involved in it.
This was added to our list on the strength of the two other films we watched so far by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. This is the earliest yet being his first feature film that was made on a very small budget. It effectively only has the three male actors playing the father and the two brothers with the mother having only a very limited supporting role.
