If you read through accounts of the career of Woody Allen, you don’t often see mentions of Zelig. That’s why it took a recommendation from our cinephile friend for me to take note of it. Partially because this is a mockumentary, this is one of the most unusual films I’ve ever watched. It’s also a film that is very much unlike anything else Allen was made, which might explain why it doesn’t get talked about much.
Grandma is one of those tiny, indie films that popped to the top of the lists of best films of 2015. I knew next to nothing about it except that it’s women-centric and is relatively short, meaning that it would be good to slot it in between longer films. It had a budget of less than a million dollars, a pittance by today’s standards, though it managed to gather some fairly respectable star power.
So I’m done with Dark Souls 2, or at least I am with the main character I started with. I have no intention of going to NG+ but I’ve already rolled a brand new character that I’m using to experiment sorcery with since I never messed with magic much in the first run. With the main character, I’ve now killed every boss except for the Darklurker and the inoffensive Ancient Dragon. I couldn’t find Darkdiver Grandahl again after meeting him three times and turning down his offer to join his covenant. To keep things nice and organized here are my thoughts on each of the three DLC in order:
Crown of the Sunken King
The vast, open world of this DLC consisting of Aztec-style pyramids connected to each other by walkways made a great first impression on me. I even loved the dim lighting. What cinched the deal for me were the movable columns scattered throughout the level and the way you’re encouraged to hit them from afar with arrows or something similar to open new pathways for explorations or just change the topology of the battlefield in your favor.
Barring the Marvel franchise films, we don’t often see sequels being posted about here. A good sequel needs to be something other than just more of the same yet it also needs to capture the spirit of the original. That’s a tough balance to pull off, especially since so many sequels, heady off the success of the first film blow their greatly increased budget off in dumb ways. This is one reason why seeing the success of this sequel to Elite Squad is so gratifying. Commercially it did better than the first wildly popular film, but what is really surprising is that it may, from a critical point of view, be an even better film than its predecessor.
Most years, it feels like a big, important film arrives to sweep the field of the Academy Awards. This was not true this year, for films released in 2015 as the Oscars were mostly parceled out between The Revenant, Mad Max: Fury and Spotlight. Spotlight in particular won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay but unusually did not win Best Director. This is probably because Spotlight is important mainly because of the historical events it covers rather than for its merits a vehicle for artistic expression.
Another month, another one of these entries. They’re pretty good ones too, though almost all are about human psychology.
Let’s start with the bit of news that isn’t about people. This article covers a research team who wants to establish that trees definitively do sleep at night. They did this by using laser scanning techniques to track the movement of the trees and noted that the trees slowly drooped their branches after sunset and returned to their original position a few hours after sunrise. I’m not sure how useful this study is since they don’t offer a mechanism beyond stating that all tree movement is connected with the water balance in the trees but I guess for one definition of the word sleep, it does prove that trees sleep after all.
Next we have an interesting finding that humans tend to be pretty bad at knowing who our friends are. The study works very simply: gather up a group of test subjects and ask them who their friends are. Then ask the ones they name if they also consider the first group to be their friends. It turned out that only about 50 percent of the friendships were bidirectional. They went on to build an algorithm that would collect data on the relationship, number of friends in common and total number of friends for example, that predicts whether or not a friendship is bidirectional and if not the uni-direction of the friendship.
This next one is fairly predictable but it’s good to establish it for sure nonetheless. It’s a series of studies, involving a total of over 2,000 participants, that found that people have unethical amnesia. That is people tend to remember the times that they have acted ethically but forget the times that they acted unethically. Note that this isn’t about lying or something like that. People really do just forget the occasions that they acted in a dishonorable manner, perhaps as a defensive measure.
We already know that physically beautiful people have it better in life in all sorts of ways, perhaps the most easily measurable metric being that they earn more money. This is generally identical for both men and women, that is both men and women earn more in a similar manner according to how attractive they are. This study however adds a measure of how much time and effort people put into grooming themselves into the mix and tried to work out how this changes the dynamics. Surprisingly, they found that grooming explained almost all of the attractiveness gradient in women, that is the link between physical attractiveness and earning power, but only half of it in men.
Finally, I’m not sure how serious this study is, but it’s perfect for the silly season that is the American presidential elections. The researchers created something they call the Bullshit Receptivity Scale, a measure of how people perceive bullshit statements are being profound. They tend searched for correlations between this BRS and favorability ratings for U.S. presidential candidates. Positive correlations were found for all three Republican candidates (Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz) though surprisingly the correlation with Trump was the weakest of the three. Positive correlations were also found for the two Democratic candidates (Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton) but they were deemed to be too low to be statistically significant.
This one was added to our list on the strength of PK, a film that both of us liked immensely. It was made by the same production team, meaning it was directed by Rajkumar Hirani and stars Aamir Khan. Khan’s character here is even similar to the one he would later play in PK and 3 Idiots was also a huge commercial success. It broke box office record in its day though I’m not sure that this means much since it seems that a new record is set every year. Probably this is attributable to the fact that India’s economy is growing so quickly now and so films get bigger and bigger every year. Unfortunately while 3 Idiots is entertaining enough, it’s nowhere as good or even as polished as PK.
