I added this to my list purely because of how much we loved Paul Newman’s performances in the previous films that we’ve watched and this is considered one of his notable works. At first glance this seems like a fairly standard story of an up and coming pool player who wants to challenge the most famous pool player in America and as such it ought to follow the familiar trajectory of sports films. Yet it turned out to be much more complex and psychologically deep than that.
So here’s a film that is both in the martial arts genre and is from Hong Kong, ticking off two boxes denoting other films we’ve watched recently. The Ip Man franchise is of course well known and commercially very successful spawning many sequels and spin-offs but we’ve mostly skipped them as they are formulaic and distasteful. I wanted to give this one a chance as foreign critics have praised it and it’s a spin-off about a character who was defeated by Ip Man in a previous film and so might be promising. Unfortunately I shouldn’t have bothered as it’s just more of the same dreck.
I described this to my wife as a cowboy film and indeed though it’s set in the 2010s, it feels like one. This is the first film I’ve seen directed by David Mackenzie and it’s one of those strange twists that he is British and not American. Yet there’s no doubt that this film succeeds brilliantly in revitalizing the Western genre and showing a path to making it work in the modern era.
Last month was incredible in terms of new discoveries. This month less so. Instead we have mostly feature articles rather than new findings.
First we have this cool little paper that talks about how most of the text in international treaties are actually copy-pasted from previous treaties and agreements. Textual analysis of preferential trade agreements indicate up to 95% of the text is copy-pasted. That isn’t truly surprising and it makes sense since they would want consistency across many types of documents. But I like how it gives us a little window into the kind of work that trade negotiators actually do.
One exciting announcement we do have is this one about how scientists in China have edited the DNA of a germ that enables it to harvest free electrons as an energy source. I consider this super speculative and not really credible, especially when it’s published by such grandiose claims as potentially opening the door to granting humans superpowers as various cells are supercharged. Nonetheless it’s not completely implausible and the germ in question that has been engineered is the lowly E coli. I am however not very sure what “70% improved performance” in E coli translates to physically.
Colors, that is pigments and paints of specific physical colors, are such a simple thing that we often don’t appreciate the difficulty that creating them involve. This article talks about how hard it is to create bright, vivid reds that don’t involve toxic metals or require harvesting them from an animal. This search led a team to experiment with crystals and semiconductors to find suitable materials from which to make the desired shade of color. I found it to be a look into an interesting corner of industrial science that most people take for granted.
Finally for gamers, here’s a detailed and refreshingly honest post-mortem by a scientist with a PhD in experimental psychology who was hired to advise on the design of the videogame Halo 2. Specifically he advised that players should be given the maximum amount of control when it came to multiplayer options and he based it on feedback that he received from players themselves. As he now admits, he was wrong as the success of the actual design that was implemented in which a matchmaking algorithm automatically assigns players to game sessions has proven to be so successful that it is now the industry standard. The problem was that the opinions of the players at the time were wrong as they had never experienced automatic matchmaking and so said that they hated it. Once they did try it, it turned out that they liked it.
Being a total philistine with zero knowledge of opera, I had no idea who Maria Callas was. All I saw was that this was considered a notable documentary plus as my wife notes it feels appropriate to watch this after we had just been to see the Phantom of the Opera here in Kuala Lumpur. Unfortunately while this film does convince you that Callas is undoubtedly a legendary singer, it is a terrible documentary as the director Tom Volf is a clearly a devoted fan who absolutely refuses to show her in any kind of a bad light.
I held off on this as I didn’t want to go to cinema again so soon after Toy Story 4, but I was always going to watch this. I’d loved Homecoming and this is by the same director Jon Watts. It also serves as an epilogue of sorts to Endgame. Shockingly, this seems to be the last MCU entry for a while yet as the next one Black Widow is a year away. I’m amused by the parallel between the themes in this film and the fact that the people at Marvel Studios who probably feel that they need a bit of a break.
This title was drawn from my notes and lists, likely because some critics put it among the best films ever made. Its director Haruki Kadokawa is not that well known but he had his own production company and made many commercially successful films for the Japanese market in the 1980s to 1990s. This one was also very successful. Unfortunately it leans heavily on the audience being familiar with the historical events that the film is about and is rather cryptic and dry if you know nothing about them.
