Despite a long and prolific directing career, Hou Hsiao-Hsien had never made a wuxia film before this one, which explains why its release was so highly anticipated in the Chinese-speaking world. Its English title makes it sound boringly generic but its more informative Chinese title indicates that it was adapted from an ancient story that is a classic of the genre.
Foxcatcher is one those films that I added to our to-watch list out of a sense of duty since it earned multiple Academy Award nominations and showed up on several critics’ lists of the best films of 2014. I’d heard that it was based on a true story and had some vague idea that it was about wrestling but since I don’t much care for sports I didn’t really think much about it and simply thought that it was just another sports biopic. Boy, was I wrong.
Even my wife, non-gamer that she is, knows enough to remark, “Hey, this looks a lot like Portal!” It’s a puzzle game that takes obvious design cues from Portal and even overtly references it in a number of ways. There’s no portal gun in here and Elohim is no GLaDOS but this turned out to very worthy successor to what is one of the most famous puzzle games ever made, a state of affair that I still have some trouble wrapping my head around given that this was made by the same studio responsible for the thoroughly silly Serious Sam series.
If one didn’t already know that this film was directed by the same director, Jacques Demy, who made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, you surely will within five minutes of it starting. Like the previous film, this is a musical though it is a more traditional one with musical set-pieces in between normal scenes with dialogue. There’s plenty of dancing too as it features Gene Kelly as a sort of special guest star.
A Passage to India was David Lean’s final film and he made it only after a pause of some 14 years. I’d previously written about Brief Encounter as being one of the best romantic films I’d ever watched and before that we were very glad to have spent the nearly four hours required for Lawrence of Arabia. It stands to reason that we were expecting similar greatness out of this film.
It’s been a while since I wrote one of these as I don’t travel all that much. South Korea is also a very common destination for Malaysians, so I won’t waste time talking about the itinerary and will restrict myself to personal observations.
Their tourism infrastructure is excellent, amazingly so. Since my wife organized the whole trip, this is more her talking point than mine but it’s hard not to notice how seriously they take the industry and how well run their promotions are. We found their tourism promotion office in KL to be extremely helpful, both in providing the usual set of useful and updated information and by offering free T-money chips to start off with.
Running very late this month as I was on holiday in South Korea, but I haven’t forgotten about this. In fact, I’ve collated more than the usual number of articles over the past month.
I usually start with the biggest piece of science news for the month. It’s a bit hard to judge that this time around but probably the news that the most people have seen is the announcement of the World Health Organization’s finding that red meat and processed meat is carcinogenic after all. The risks involved for processed meat is clearly much more significant but it’s still fairly low. I’d file this in the good to know but mostly just confirming what we all already suspected category. If you already have a balanced diet and a fairly healthy lifestyle, this doesn’t seem to call for any changes.
The next most significant news is what is supposedly the final nail in the coffin of the hidden variables explanation of quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance. This article covers what is described as the most comprehensive and loophole-free iteration of the famous Bell test experiments yet performed, proving once and for all that quantum entanglement effects are real and do violate locality. However so many enthusiasts have equated this with faster than light communications that I feel compelled to point out that this isn’t true at all and as the article states, the most we can look forward to in the way of practical uses is improved cryptography.
Continuing in the vein of important news, here’s this analysis that continuing climate change will eventually make some portions of the Earth uninhabitable to humans. The prediction is that extreme heat waves will make population centers like Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha among others impossible to live in by 2070 as temperatures rise so high that the human body is unable to get rid of excess heat through sweating. This isn’t exactly a surprising prediction, but it’s important to note this as just another reason why carbon emissions is a big deal and urgent action is required.
One common assumption about modern life is that humans sleep less than they did before the advent of electric lights and easily available entertainment. This article tests for that by examining the sleep patterns of pre-industrial groups of people who continue to live largely as hunter-gatherers. Surprisingly they were found to actually sleep slightly less than people who lived in modern societies, staying awake for an average of over three hours after nightfall. The biggest difference is that their sleeping patterns vary more across seasons compared to urban populations.
On lighter news, I’m amused by this announcement that a comet, named Lovejoy, has been found to be releasing large amounts of alcohol into space. It doesn’t do this constantly of course since its chemical activity ticks up only when its sufficiently heated by proximity to the Sun but at its peak it apparently releases the equivalent of 500 bottles of wine per second. More seriously, since alcohol counts as organic molecules, it adds to the evidence that the early development of life on planets may have been kickstarted by passing comets.
Finally the most exciting discovery is the strange variations in the brightness of a star, designated KIC 8462852, that’s about 1,500 light years away from our Sun. Small dips in a star’s brightness is normal and is indicative of a planet passing between the star and us but the changes in brightness for this star in particular is far too large to be explained by a planet in transit. The changes also don’t seem to be periodic. This means that a plausible explanation for this weird behavior is that an extraterrestrial civilization is messing with that star, perhaps by building some large structure. It’s still a pretty unlikely conclusion as the changes are probably due to some natural process that is still unknown to us, but it is a possibility that is very exciting to think about.
