This marks the fourth film that I’ve watched by director Satoshi Kon though it’s been so long since we watched Millennium Actress that I barely remember any of it. I do recall quite well the ones that we watched more recently, Perfect Blue and Paprika, both of which heavily feature scenes that skirt the boundary between reality and the imagination. Tokyo Godfathers for the most part has no such scenes, making it a much more approachable and straightforward film, albeit also a lighter one.
Each and every one of us has probably watched dozens of films about the Second World War but how many of them were from the Soviet point of view, by a predominantly Soviet cast and crew? Come and See is billed as a propaganda film because it was explicitly made to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Soviet victory and to tell the world of the horrors inflicted in Belarus by German forces, a tragedy that the Soviets thought the world had ignored. Unlike so many such efforts however, under the direction of Elem Klimov, it was not only a commercial success but went on to be acknowledged as one of the best war films ever made.
Though I didn’t really like Star Wars: The Old Republicand felt that the story for the Jedi Knight class was lacklustre, I still went back to it for quite a while. Obviously I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment and there’s something about standard MMO gameplay that makes it low-hanging fruit. It’s just so easy and convenient to boot it up for just one more session of mindless playing. But it’s also because I looked what most people consider to be the best class story in the game and it’s pretty much unanimously the Imperial Agent. I decided that I needed to check it out for myself.
This one must have been added to our watch list after taking the Marriage and the Movies course last year but I can’t recall why exactly I did that. It was mentioned but wasn’t required watching in the course. I am aware that it’s a classic of the romantic comedy genre, being perhaps the grand-daddy of all stories in which the couple meets while travelling together. That alone may be a good reason to seek out this very old film.
Despite my wife’s objections, I continue to occasionally add horror films to our watch list in the hopes of finding something that is decent. Housebound made the cut both because it was extremely well reviewed with many good comments made about it on Broken Forum and because it’s a New Zealand film. Let’s face it, when was the last time anyone has watched anything from that country that wasn’t set in Middle-Earth?
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.
