I currently seem to have a disproportionately large number of Chinese-language films sitting in my watch-list. Part of this is due to just making up for lost time but I like to think that it’s also due to China’s growing prominence in the international arena and its greater ability to score successes in the global culture wars. In any case I think Dearest is an example of a film that a is a near ideal confluence of being topical as it’s about modern China, being good enough that it deserves to be taken seriously and yet remains accessible enough to achieve commercial success.
So it’s been a while since we last watched a horror movie. This one was added to our usual list because it got some decent comments on Broken Forum and a quick check confirmed that it has a rating of over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I’d never watched anything by director Adam Wingard but he appears to have a decent body of work. So it can’t be that bad, right?
Adieu au Langage is the latest film by renowned French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. Even the fact that he’s still making films at the age of 85 is impressive. We’d watched his first and most famous film, Breathless, a while back and liked it but nothing else. This one however is a whole other level of obscurity and it’s hard to say what we got out of it.
Yeah, this is a weird pick, given my usual gaming preferences. Thing is, multiple people whose opinions I generally respect listed this as their best game of 2014. Plus I haven’t played a straight shooter for a while now, so here we are. This one plays it so straight that it’s downright anachronistic, without even a multiplayer component. That’s unheard of in this day and age!
The filmography for the Marriage and the Movies course that we took earlier this year included a couple of movies by George Cukor and I remember Jeanine Basinger remarking that she would have chosen more movies by this director if she could. So it’s a pity that this one wasn’t even mentioned and I had to learn on Wikipedia that this is considered a prime example of the “remarriage” sub-genre of marriage movies: in which the couple divorces, flirts with other people and then possibly get back together again. Apparently this trick was contrived to avoid tripping the Hays Code which disapproved of extramarital affairs being depicted on film.
Considering how much of the Coen brothers’ output we’ve watched over the years, it’s a bit odd that we’ve never watched Fargo, a film that was critical in establishing their reputation. Given that this has recently been in the news again due to the success of the television series based on it, this feels like a good time to watch it. As with many of the brothers’ films, it stars many of the usual cast they like to work with including Joel Coen’s wife Frances McDormand in the lead role as the local police chief Marge Gunderson.
A slower month and more emphasis on the softer sciences this time around:
The one research paper that has gotten the most attention over the past month is the one that shows a startling increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white Americans. Certainly one factor in its fame is that one of its co-authors Angus Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics this year. But the main factor must be the sheer surprise of its findings, exacerbated by the fact that this spike in deaths isn’t mirrored in the statistics of other high-income countries. Obviously any explanation of this anomaly will be politically charged. Personally I like this article on Vox which discusses some theories with the gist being that a certain group of white Americans can no longer look forward to the kind of prosperity and social status that they’d been led to expect and this despondency has led to a marked increase in substance abuse.
In more hopeful news, here’s a bit about how gene editing may have been used to save a person’s life for the first time. The patient is a one-year-old girl suffering from leukemia and conventional chemotherapy had already failed. The doctors therefore pioneered a new technique using T-cells from a donor to attack the cancerous cells. However since the patient’s own immune system would ordinarily also attack the foreign T-cells, these cells had to be edited first to remove the markers that would make them targets. This isn’t quite bespoke medicine yet as it’s a pretty general technique but it’s a clear example of the way forward.
I confess that I included this next article because of its extremely disturbing title. It covers an experiment in which scientists have been able to induce a species of flatworm to grow the heads and brains of another species of flatworm only by manipulating the electrical synapses within their bodies. In particular as they did not touch the worms’ genome at all, it makes for a fascinating demonstration of how much morphology can be manipulated through means other than genetic engineering.
Finally here’s a longer-form piece on multi-model sensory experiences. In particular, it focuses on the work of Charles Spence who discovered among other things that the noise made by a Pringles chip when you bite into it affects your perception of how fresh it is, how the color of a cup influences the intensity of the taste of coffee and how merely listening to different types of music alters the perceived taste of an alcoholic beverage. Naturally this has hugely influenced the design of the packaging for many products. This seems especially pertinent after learning about the McGurk effect in the Philosophy and the Sciences course recently.
