I wad dubious about this at first. It felt like the age-old formula of young lovers committing crimes and rebelling against the world, except with a lesbian couple. But then it starts ramping up the intensity and never stops even as it enters surreal territory. Right then I was hooked and understood that this was something special. It’s kind of insane that a formula like bodybuilding noir could ever work but it does. It’s fitting then that it was made the same director who made Saint Maud as it shares the same kind of insane intensity.
Not only is this a French animated science-fiction film, it’s a very serious one to boot and relies on the audience being reasonably intelligent and attentive. Most science-fiction stories are built around just one or two cool ideas, but this one just keeps throwing new things at you and expects you to keep. Unfortunately it flubs the ending as the buildup is way better than the payoff but it’s so good as a cyberpunk noir while it lasts.
Here’s another masterpiece from classic Indian cinema and this time it is not by Satyajit Ray. It does cover similar thematic territory however in being what I would call misery porn. It was made by Ritwik Ghatak and is believed to be his best known and most watched film. There’s supposed to be some political backdrop to this but I don’t think it matters much as the Partition of Bengal is not directly mentioned. All we need to know is that this is about a miserably poor family and a self-sacrificing daughter who bear everyone’s burden. It’s such a superbly made film that one instantly recognizes why it is a masterpiece. Yet it also advances a morality that I find execrable.
This is an honest to goodness nunsploitation film that stars probably one of the hottest Hollywood sex symbols of the day. That sounds, well, exploitative but it seems that Sydney Sweeney was the one who pushed for it to be made and it is relatively restrained in terms of sexual titillation. With its title and setup, it’s not hard to guess that this is about immaculate conception. It’s a rather straightforward take on the premise and I’d say it’s effective enough as horror. It’s also not good enough to really stand out but I’ll take what I can get.
Yasujirō Ozu’s films keep being great and so I keep watching them. This one is actually a remake of his own earlier black-and-white silent film and I’m sure that the improved production values make a difference. It features bigger names as stars as well so it’s the preferred version over the original. As usual with Ozu, this is a film about family and human relationships, but it’s noticeably more salacious and lurid than most of his body of work. It’s centered around a travelling theatre troupe which seems glamorous at first but they all turn out to be a bunch of scoundrels, truly the floating weeds of the film’s title.
A bunch of cool science stuff this month, all of which stem from biology but touch upon different topics.
The simplest and most directly beneficial of these announcements is the US approving a twice-a-year shot that will completely prevent HIV. This doesn’t quite count as a vaccine as it does need to be taken twice a year but it is the longest lasting protection against HIV yet. In its original form, it’s probably too expensive for widespread use in developing countries but generic copies will eventually become available and that could well mean the end of AIDS.
Ever since it was first identified in the 1980s, the Flynn effect has invited endless speculation on the cause of the increase in intelligence and whether the trend will continue. This new paper uses data from the Norwegian Armed Forces which has administered a general mental ability test on recruits since 1954. It argues that while some types of skills improved over time, notably non-verbal reasoning ability, word reasoning and numerical reasoning abilities decreased over the same period. This suggests that it might not be accurate to say that intelligence in general has increased over time.
Next we have a paper that claims to advance our understanding on how sperm whales communicate. It argues that their codas, the series of clicks that they use to communicate, not only resemble human vowels acoustically but also appears in patterns similar to human language. These findings are used to construct a case that these codas are intentionally controlled and constitute a type of language that we could one day unlock.
Finally here’s a paper that attempts to do the seemingly impossible, study the phenomenon of qualia itself. The team purports to answer the age-old question of whether your ‘red’ is the same as my ‘red’ by doing the following: collect detailed reports about the relations between sensory experiences of various participants; construct what they call qualia structures from the data, meaning embeddings of qualia that represent the similarity or lack thereof of the participants’ judgment of what they have experienced; compares two individuals’ qualia structures in what they call an unsupervised alignment method which doesn’t assume that there are particular correspondences between the structures. The upshot is that the team could align the structures of color-neurotypical group, meaning those who are not color blind and self-report seeing colors normally. They could also align the structures of the color-atypical group despite differences in the type of color blindness within that group. But they could not align the structures between the color-neurotypical and color-atypical group meaning that those structures are too different. It’s hard to say what we can conclude from these results, perhaps that it might be possible to prove that those who experience colors in the same way do actually share the same qualia. But the ambition behind the project is something I can certainly get behind.
A British miniseries about adolescent male violence that is realistic enough to be shown in schools is a must-watch for us. What’s more, each of the four episodes were shot in a single take, lending it both a powerful sense of urgency and some added authenticity. Unlike other crime shows, there is no question of the perpetrator’s guilt and even details of how the murder itself was carried out aren’t that important. What matters is how the machinery of the state is activated in response to a crime like this and how everyone desperately searches to understand what could have driven a 13-year-old boy to kill.
