This film made the lists of some critics’ most notable films a couple of years ago but I had a very difficult time tracking it down. I think this is at least partially because while it was certainly notable, it wasn’t particularly successful. It’s a Portuguese film by Pedro Costa and one of the main reasons it was notable that it is almost completely indecipherable, being close to an experimental film with hardly any plot.
I remember watching the trailer for this in the cinemas and coming away with the impression that this was fairly generic Disney fare transposed on top of Polynesian mythology. It didn’t help that Dwayne Johnson appeared to be playing a character identical to his real-life persona and I find him annoying. But then months after its release, I noticed a stream of posts on Broken Forum praising it. As it turned out, Johnson does indeed sort of play himself, but the film is smart enough to mock his persona, which makes all the difference.
I’ve tried visual novels before. Needless to say I’m not a big fan of them. I do dig how they sometimes incorporate substantial game mechanics, as in Long Live the Queen, but they mainly seem like a poor man’s adventure game to me, especially since almost all of them are about developing a romantic relationship. This one intrigued me because it has a detective game element build around the visual novel and as far as I know detective games are rather rare.
If you’re anything like me, this film’s title is a subject of some confusion. After all, today when we think of the word ‘network’, we think in terms of computer and communications networks. The last thing that would come to mind is a television network. Yet this is indeed what it’s about and it turns out to be an impressively prescient film by Sidney Lumet who once again blows me away with his acute sense of insightful social commentary.
The only feature film director Fede Álvarez made before this was the reboot of Evil Dead. I noticed that as I’m a big fan of the original one by Sam Raimi but ultimately passed over watching it due to its atrocious ratings. This recent release however gained plenty of attention from critics and has a more than respectable Rotten Tomatoes rating. It even rated a mention in the Crash Course Film History series of videos I’ve been following on YouTube. That’s more than enough to be worth a shot I think.
Asghar Farhadi remains, in my opinion, one of the best currently active directors when it comes to the pure drama of everyday life, and I was immensely pleased that The Salesman duly won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. I had not of course watched it yet but regarded the award as an American acknowledgement of his career to date so when I learned that it would be shown in cinemas here in Malaysia made sure to watch it there as a show of support.
A bit late this month but the delay was useful as I didn’t see many interesting stuff until the last several days. It’s a fairly mixed bag this time.
I remember posting something similar a while back so consider this further confirmation. This article talks about parabiosis in which a younger animals shares its blood with an older specimen, providing health benefits to the latter. The research so far suggests that it does work but the precise mechanisms remain unknown and it certainly isn’t a treatment approved by the authorities. Naturally this hasn’t stopped some enterprising businesses from offering such treatments. We should expect better quality data on this as more people opt for these procedures despite the cost.
Despite the clickbait headline, this looks like an article based on e legitimate study. It claims that statistical analysis of a survey of more than 500,000 Britons found that driving daily for more than two hours a day is associated with lower IQ. If you look closer however, it’s clear that this is similar to other forms of so-called sedentary behavior such as watching TV. Strangely the opposite is true for those who use computers as that was found to be an activity that stimulates the brain, leading to increased brain function instead.
This next one also has a clickbait title and it’s best thought of as yet another milestone in our improving ability to directly read brain signals and interpret it into meaningful information. In this case, it’s a device called the encephalophone which can read electrical signals in the brain, convert the information into musical notes and play them on a synthesizer. Effectively this allows you to think about music and have the computer produce it for you though the range of possible sounds seems limited for now.
The prevalence of fake news today makes this article especially relevant. It’s about the difficulty, or lack thereof, of generating artificial sound and video. As it notes, fake audio is now well within the realm of possibility and the technology now exists to feed samples of a particular person’s voice into an algorithm and then using it to generate what you want that person to say. Generated video is far from that point but there are certainly plenty of people working on it.
The last article is the most speculative and may not be anything more than a rumor. It reports that a research group at Facebook has shut down an internal project when they discovered that the AIs had developed what amounts to a new language to communicate among themselves. The project apparently began as chatbots meant to explore negotiation strategies which communicate in English. As time passed however, the bots began using the English words in new ways that are unintelligible to humans but which are meaningful for other bots. They also note that similar bots developed at other labs also employed shorthand languages in a similar fashion that became more involved over time.
