This is one of director Edward Yang’s lesser known films and as such I probably would never have ever watched it. My wife requested it however as apparently it is going to be a topic of discussion for a writing class that she is taking. A few minutes in and we understand why the class’ teacher picked it. One of the characters is an aspiring writer who is worried that her monotonous daily routine as a housewife is undermining her ability to come up with new and interesting material.
Another month, another one of these posts. Somewhat embarrassingly, two of these are from The Economist, the only publication I have a regular subscription to.
The most important finding of the month, though it can hardly be called news, is just how hot the month of February 2016 had been. This article from The Guardian talks about how NASA data shows that the average global surface temperature for the month was 1.35C warmer than the average for 1951 to 1980. The result was shocking enough that some scientists have wondered whether or not average temperatures might have already broken past the maximum limit of a 2C increase that is generally agreed to be catastrophic. If it hasn’t breached the limit yet, my opinion is that it’s probably inevitable at this point.
The next article is probably an exercise in self-indulgence for myself. It’s from The Washington Post and covers how happiness is correlated with a variety of factors. There are some unsurprising results, for example that people who live in very high density areas report less happiness, but the newsworthy bit is that people with higher intelligence report a negative correlation between happiness and frequency of social interaction. In other words, most people report that social contact increases their happiness, but people with higher intelligence scores report that more social contact instead makes them unhappy.
Moving onto health-related discoveries, we’ll start with this article from The Economist that discusses the link between exercise and cancer. The research takes quite a few twists and turns and I won’t go into that but the upshot is that physical exertion seems to be associated with an increase in the levels of the hormone epinephrine and the molecule interleukin-6, both of which help the immune system to target tumor cells. In fact, they found that by directly exposing mice to these two substances, the mice developed resistance to cancer just as if they exercised.
Mice are also the test subjects in this next article which is intriguingly about the retrieval of lost memories. The experiment involved using a virus to introduce a light sensitive protein into the brains of mice engineered to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Normal ice are able to remember areas where they receive an electric shock but mice with the disease do not. But such mice do seem to remember once blue light is used to stimulate a part of their brains called the dentate gyrus after they have been treated with the protein. This suggests that perhaps Alzheimer’s disease does not remove memories but instead damages the ability of the brain to retrieve them, meaning that a technique may one day be developed to repair the memory retrieval mechanism.
Finally on a lighter note here’s a Bloombergarticle weighing in on the issue of whether or not having a habit of regularly consuming alcohol is good for your health. The conventional wisdom in this regard is that moderate consumption of alcohol seems to do some good but this analysis of 87 studies done on the subject concludes that no significant health benefits can be found for even moderate drinkers compared to lifetime abstainers.
One of the most memorable comments I’ve ever read about 8½ was by Broken Forum’s resident film geek. He noted that every great director eventually tries to make his or her own version of this film. The Wikipedia entry for it cites some examples, with even Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York being considered one such attempt. It’s Federico Fellini’s best known film and easily qualifies as one of the key films every fan of cinema must watch.
The Taking of Pelham 123 doesn’t quite qualify as one of the best films ever made and doesn’t even boast a director or any actors who would be household names today, though if you’re around my age you might recognize some faces from minor roles in a wide variety of films and television shows. But when Hollywood decides it’s worth remaking and it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, you know it’s something special.
If you’ve never heard of Edward Snowden before this you probably live under a rock or something. This documentary is obviously about him and was made by Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who was one of the first people to be anonymously contacted by Snowden offering his leaked information. It went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary last year though I don’t believe it was ever widely shown in cinemas in the US.
We’re back to working through the lists of the best films of all time and this time it’s The Third Man, a film that is often acknowledged as one of best noirs ever made. Noir is a genre that is usually seen as American so this film already differentiates itself by being a British film, albeit one with an American protagonist. It was directed by Carol Reed (who despite the first name is a man) but most critics note that it should really be seen as a close collaboration between Reed and the writer of the screenplay, novelist Graham Greene.
I hesitated a long time over whether or not to watch American Sniper. On the one hand, its cultural significance in the US cannot be overstated. On the other, I knew even without watching it that I would hate it. I only made up my mind when Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution called it the most important American film of 2014 though I still can’t decide if he was trolling when he called it one of the best anti-war films he’d ever seen.
