Given that pretty much every film Charlie Kaufman has been involved in gets on my list of favorites, I was always going to watch this. Plus, since this is a stop-motion animated film, it got on my wife’s list of interesting animated features to watch as well, which makes it a double-win. She did comment afterwards that it feels so small in scale and so modest in ambition, especially compared with a sprawling epic like Synecdoche, New York. That’s because it was adapted from a play by Kaufman himself and it stars the same three, and only three, performers who did the play: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan.
Not many articles this month and most of them are about medicine. I didn’t realize that until I sat down to write this post.
Starting with the non-medical science article first, this is piece about how each distinct community of sperm whales may have their own unique culture. The researchers studied groups of the whales in the Carribean, using microphones to record the sounds they make and track their interactions. They found that each clan has their own dialect that family members explicitly teach to new calves but there are also codas, or words, that they share in common with sperm whales of other clans.
This next article talks about the medical mystery of how incidences of major diseases in many wealthy countries seem to be dramatically dropping for no discernible reason. These include colon cancer, heart disease, dementia, hip fractures and so forth, each seemingly unconnected with another. One obvious cause is that better technology and practices should result in better diagnosis and treatment but the researchers found that the rates are still down after controlling for these factors. No one knows what other explanation there could be but I guess people are just in general living more healthily now in rich countries, contrary to the popular impression that humans are becoming ever more unhealthy.
Readers of this blog should probably already know that mitochondrial DNA, which comes only from the mother, is different from nuclear DNA, which comes from both parents. Nevertheless it is thought that they have co-evolved together through generations and therefore DNA from the same lineage should work better together. Current cloning technology however mixes mitochondrial DNA with nuclear DNA of two different and presumably distantly related donors. The surprise is, as this article explains, that the resulting organisms seem to live longer rather than shorter as you might expect. The current guess is that some small amount of adversity, in this case caused by the two types of DNA being not completely compatible, is sometimes beneficial to the organism, and how true this is remains yet unknown.
Usually when we see advertisements or click-bait headlines like oil companies don’t want you to know this energy-saving secret it’s either a scam or crazy conspiracy bullshit. So this bit of news about how mainstream dentists are hindering the widespread adoption of a treatment for cavities that doesn’t require any drilling looks suspect. Except that this comes from a reputable source and the treatment, an antimicrobial fluid called silver diamine fluoride, has already been cleared as being safe by the FDA in the US and has been used for decades in Japan. The fluid can’t save teeth that has already been too damaged but it can prevent cavities from becoming worse and prevent new ones from occurring. The only downside is that it may blacken portions of teeth that have already been damaged by cavities. The upside however is that its cheap, quick to apply and requires no surgery.
Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been slowly working our way through a good number of old Stephen Chow films. The main reason is that my wife feels like writing something that draws inspiration from his films and so needed to do the research but it’s also interesting to revisit them after having gained more experience with what the best of cinema all around the world has to offer. I’ve refrained from writing about them so far because while some of them are good and some are merely decent, they’re all solidly commercial films rooted in the mores of the era and there’s not much to say about them.
So we’ve watched quite a few of Hitchcock’s films now over the past couple of years. This one is not one that I would have chosen to watch on my own as I don’t believe it is particularly notable. My cinephile friend however suggested this as a film that somewhat different from the usual Hitchcock formula. In fact while it does star Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, who make for a very standard Hitchcock couple, it’s not much of a thriller at all.
As with so many of my picks, this relatively recent Russian film made to the top of many lists of most remarkable works and it’s even considered to be science-fiction. I did note that whenever it’s mentioned critics always took care to state that it’s an incredibly dense and almost incomprehensible film that runs to more than three hours long. Even my cinephile friend said that he loved the cinematography but had a hard time finishing it. Considering the kind of films that he liked, this is a seriously intimidating statement.
I’m actually mostly playing Kerbal Space Program at the moment but that’s such a complex and time consuming game that I felt like mixing it up with something lighter. I got this as part of the Humble Narrative bundle recently, though I only very rarely buy those. This game got some good mentions on Broken Forum when it came out and I know that it’s very short so it seems like a great fit.
Courtroom dramas seem to be a dead genre these days, especially in the United States. My guess is that the really interesting and precedent-setting cases are just too complex to be put on film while simpler cases about street crime has to contend with the cynicism of modern audiences that the justice system actually works. In any case, 12 Angry Men is widely considered one of the best exemplars of this genre and so it was put on my list.
