Embarrassingly, I’ve never read the novel despite having studied in France. In my defense, I simply never felt much of a need for it since I’d already absorbed so much of it through cultural osmosis. It is pretty odd that despite it being one of the bestselling books ever in history, this is the first feature film adaptation of the material. Though it was made with the support of French studios, this also feels very much like an American production as an English-language film with familiar Hollywood names providing most of the voices.
This is a rare example of a film which was independently added to our joint watch list both by myself and by my wife from different sources. It took a while for me to realize this as its English title sometimes appears as Keeper of Promises and sometimes as The Given Word. You could take this as a sign that it’s an exceptionally good film and you wouldn’t be wrong even though I’ve never heard of its director Anselmo Duarte before this.
Broken Age is easily the most high profile adventure game in years due to its massive KickStarter game and Tim Schafer’s name. I don’t consider myself a fan of the genre and I’ve never even played the famous Grim Fandango, but I have to admit that getting people like Elijah Wood and Wil Wheaton to do your voicework can still get my attention. Seems to me however that it’s just a way to make your game a lot more expensive than it needs to be.
Brooklyn is a film that was added to my watch list as one of the notable releases of last year but I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from it. One Broken Forum poster called it pleasant but somewhat pointless. Director John Crowley appears to be known more for theater work than for his films and though Saoirse Ronan has been in a few high profile releases, she’s not an acting heavyweight. In the event, my initial impressions were largely proven correct and my biggest surprise is how much my wife liked it.
Guru came to my attention when it was mentioned in The Economist and it was featured in a Marginal Revolutionpost by Alex Tabarrok, who called it the most important free market movie ever. The thing about this film that must be understood is that although it uses invented names throughout, including fictional names for the companies involved, it is really a very loose biography of Dhirubhai Ambani, one of India’s most famous tycoons, who founded the Reliance group of companies. This helps explain why this film is so fascinating to economists.
Another good mix of articles for this month, and for the first time, one is a video instead of an article.
Two of these articles about antibiotics and one of them is from a home-grown source. This article discusses how a Malaysian PhD student in Australia is a key contributor to the development of a nano-engineered protein molecule that is meant to rip apart bacteria. The molecule is made of peptide polymers is supposed to be able to destroy the cell walls of bacteria without harming healthy tissue, which would make it a valuable tool against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
This video from Harvard Medical School nicely lets you visualize exactly how quickly bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics. Even after they up the dosage of the antibiotics to insane levels, the bacteria still manages to find a way to thrive.
Next up is a study that tries to estimate the health effects of the annual haze in Southeast Asia caused by fires in Indonesia. The study covers only the health effects on adults and limits itself to damage caused fine particulate matter, widely known as PM2.5. Even so its averaged result is there will be approximately a hundred thousand premature deaths due to these fires, of which around ninety percent will be in Indonesia itself. Studies like this are based on statistical analysis of models so they’re always dicey. But they’re still useful as a starting point to quantify the effects and therefore the economic damage caused by the fires, giving governments better ammunition to counter the positive economic effects of allowing these land clearing fires in the first place.
Finally, because I can never get enough of cool findings about dog cognition, here is an article that talks about how dogs can capable of understanding both vocabulary and intonation in human speech. The researchers used an fMRI to observe the brains of dogs as they listened to human speech and they found that similar areas of their brains light up as in humans, showing that they are capable of recognizing individual words. They are also similar to humans that a separate part of their brains process the intonation of the speech, allowing them to gain an understanding that encompasses both the meaning of the spoken words and the intonation with which they were spoken.
Assault on Precinct 13 is a film that pops up from time to time in discussions of influential action movies in places like Broken Forum. This was only the second film made by John Carpenter and helped cement his reputation in Hollywood for being a director capable of making decent films on a very tight budget. I think it’s also remarkable that it stars a black man as the hero while being very much not a blaxploitation flick. Played by Austin Stoker, the character is a police officer who happens to be black, but his blackness isn’t emphasized by the film.
