Ruben Östlund was the director who made Force Majeure, a film that both of us liked and has remained fresh in our minds. The Square is the first film that he has made since then, suggesting that he takes his time with his projects and it won plenty of accolades and awards. Though this is a Swedish film, it features two recognizable Anglo-Saxon stars, Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West who speak only English in their performances here.
Try as I might, I haven’t really paid attention to new boardgames since I’ve stopped actively playing them. Even so, I managed to hear about this boardgame adaptation of the popular Pathfinder RPG and many posters on Broken Forum had good things to say about it. So I was very pleased when a videogame version of it was released on Steam. I knew that there are multiple DLCs out for this and so I didn’t expect much content in the base game itself but was pleasantly surprised by how long and involved even the main campaign is.
Our only previous experience with films by Jafar Panahi was the impressive but difficult to watch This is Not a Film, notable mainly in how it showcased his determination to continue to make films despite a 20-year ban on such activity imposed by the Iranian authorities.
This is another Taiwanese film that is a recommendation from our cinephile and though it was directed by a new guy, Huang Hsin-yao, it’s visibly from the same team as the ones who made Godspeed. The addition to the plus symbol which forms part of the title seems eccentric but apparently is meant to represent that this film is an expansion of the director’s previous short film bearing the same title that was nominated for a Golden Horse Award.
Since we’ve both watched and loved Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop, seeing this was inevitable and we already know what we’re in for. It’s a little strange to see all those British actors with their accents playing supposedly Russian characters while Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev but it’s easy enough to grasp who’s who especially with the convenient title cards when each character is introduced.
Once again, biology dominates the cool science news this past month.
We start with a report on an attempt to replicate the marshmallow test, a frequently cited study about how a child’s ability to delay gratification is correlated with academic achievement. The new experiment however found that the correlations were smaller than previously reported and were further reduced after controlling for factors like family background and home environment. Their conclusion is that associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcome by the age 15 are statistically insignificant.
Probably the most anatomically distinctive feature of humans is our disproportionately large brains. A couple of studies have zeroed in on the cause of this as being a gene known as NOTCH2NL. The presence of this gene leads the brain to develop more neurons and hence a larger brain and the researchers were able to estimate that it became active roughly three to four million years ago which was when the brains of our ancestors started expanding.
The Flynn Effect is the well known phenomenon of human IQ scores steadily improving throughout the 20th century. This article talks about the effect seems to have ended and perhaps even gone into reverse in more recent years. Looking at results from three decades of Norwegian conscripted into the military, they found IQ scores falling over time, even between members of the same family tree. While there are plenty of offered suggestions as what could be causing this, all of this is speculation for now.
Next is a sad story of how many baobab trees seem to be either dead or are dying. These are some of the oldest trees in the world, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 and are known to be able to live to some 3,000 years, all in southern Africa. It is not known why they are dying but the cause is suspected to be related to climate change.
Finally just for the pleasure of reading, here’s an in-depth overview of the underwater tunnels that connect the various Faroe Islands halfway between Iceland and Denmark. It seems strange given the isolation of the islands and their very low population but the tunnels have been a success, both from an engineering perspective and economically as well. This article talks about the history of these tunnels, how they made it all work and ends with the current proposal to construct a huge underwater tunnel to connect the southernmost island to the mainland.
After watching The Shape of Water, I thought it might be amusing to follow it up with another fantasy film, this one from South Korea. As far as I can tell this is director Um Tae-hwa’s first real feature film and the young actress who plays the female lead is a newcomer as well. This is a piece of mass market entertainment and not an art film, so with my expectations calibrated accordingly, I found it to be perfectly cromulent fantasy film.
