Digging through the annals of older films to find directors and performers who enjoyed some renown in their day but aren’t so well remembered now, can be a hit and miss affair. This one is definitely a hit twice over. Stefania Sandrelli is achingly beautiful as the lead actress in a film that seems to equate that beauty with shallowness. Antonio Pietrangeli is outstanding as a director whose images are as exquisite as the other great directors of his day and delivers a film whose sole purpose is paint a complete portrait of that character.
So here we have a garbageman character with underdeveloped social skills who turns out to have a tremendous talent for writing poetry, yet he isn’t even the film’s main character! Hal Hartley makes a series of odd creative decisions here and devises a titular character who should be seen as disgusting and irredeemable. Yet he makes it work, showing that even a man like him can have friends and inspire others. His mentor-mentee relationship with Simon feels unique and there is humor underneath that dark, dark material.
This is the kind of story that sounds so pat that I doubt a human writer would dare write it. It’s a documentary about a man in Norway who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, dooming him to a short, wheelchair-bound life. He died at the age of 25 and his parents mourned him. Yet they also discovered that unbeknownst to them he had been part of a sizable online community, primarily from playing World of Warcraft, and so had touched many lives. And so we have a remarkable film that recreates scenes of his time within the virtual world from chat logs and animated sequences using art assets from the game.
More science stuff this month and there’s been a lot of buzz about humanity getting close to the Singularity. I’m going to maintain a more skeptical attitude and curate only the more plausible news announcements.
Let’s start with an announcement that is very exciting and has made headlines around the world as Microsoft no doubt intended, but has also left many physicists being skeptical. They claim that they now have a path towards viable quantum computers that work based on topological qubits. The qubits are built out of superconducting nanowire with each end being able to host a different topological state called a Majorana quasiparticle. They’ve also shown off a chip that they claim has eight such qubits. Other experts however say that there’s no proof in their paper that it works as claimed especially since the company has made similar claims before that were retracted later.
Developments in the LLM space are too numerous to cover in detail so I’ll only focus on the big picture stuff. If you understand how the technology works, it’s always been a little strange why LLMs can do math at all. Through experiments on mid-sized LLMs, the writers of this paper claim that they do so using algorithms that no human would naturally use. Specifically they argue that numbers are stored in the LLMs as a generalized helix that is then manipulated to produce an answer. They show that even for simple arithmetic operations, the LLMs perform trigonometry to arrive at the answer. As LLMs grow increasingly big and sophisticated in capability, how they actually reason internally becomes ever more obscure as well, making this type of research critical.
Next we have two papers on genetics. The first one suggests that severe depression and suicide ideation can be detected from blood markers. The tests are not identical for men and women as different metabolites are involved but the common thread is that they test for mitochondrial dysfunction. The researchers hypothesize that stress at the cellular level could overwhelm the body and trigger suicidal thoughts. The utility of using a blood test to detect severe depression are massive and so too would be the implication that treatments aimed at repairing metabolic function, including the use of supplements like folate and carnitine, could reduce the risk of suicide.
Finally the last paper covers the increasingly powerful predictive power of genetic data when applied to health outcomes. It notes that in many countries, insurers are banned from using genetic information to price their insurance products. Yet nothing prevents individuals themselves from making insurance-purchasing decisions based on their own genetic profiles. If such practices were scaled up enough, it would effectively break the entire health insurance market.
Ingmar Bergman’s complete filmography so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever watch everything. This one is an out and out horror film and I have to say that it’s one of rare ones that I found truly scary. Like Bergman’s other films, it’s full of symbolism and I struggled to make sense of everything. The great thing about this one however is that it’s possible to view it simply as a film about literal demons and monsters and it’s still effective. That the main character in it is an alter ego of Bergman himself and that at the time he left his own wife and son for the lead actress here Liv Ullman makes it especially disturbing. I’m not a fan of the tortured artist trope but this is one instance of it that is exceptional.
I had such a tough time deciding if I liked this film or not. At first I was all over it, enthused at the prospect of a critical dissection of sexual relationships. But then the character of Susan disappeared and I realized that it really only cares about the male side of the equation and that’s a bummer. Even so, it’s so bold in its treatment of sex, so modern in its analysis, and features so much understated star power that it’s undeniably a film of substance. It’s no masterpiece as it feels abbreviated and incomplete but it is still a film well worth watching.
I suspect that like many others, I first took notice of this show from short clips shared on social media showing the titular presenter saying outrageous things. That she is so blatantly copying the style of BBC documentaries makes it hilarious. This parody series has an actress play a clueless presenter who takes us on a tour of human history, making a horrible mess of it. As full of errors as her deadpan delivery is, this mockumentary surprisingly does have some educational value. I wouldn’t care for too much of this so I don’t think I’ll be watching the second season, but this was good for some laughs for me.
