After reading the book a month earlier, I wanted to wait a bit for the reviews to come in before deciding if I’m going to watch the movie. As it turned out, most of the Broken Forums members who watched it loved it but I’m not so sure that the response in Malaysia is as good, given how quickly the cinemas over here have switched it out in favor of newer releases. In any case, that kind of recommendation is good enough for me.
It’s that time of the year again so naturally I’m here to once again provide a run-down of the winners of each of the categories because as usual news coverage of this event is almost non-existent.
The physics prize goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald for proving that neutrinos oscillate and therefore change identities while travelling from the Sun to Earth. This means that neutrinos must actually possess mass, even if that mass is extremely small, leading to a revision of the Standard Model of physics that originally required neutrinos to be massless.
The chemistry prize once again goes to a series of discoveries that could also qualify for the medicine prize. It goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for each discovering a different mechanism for repairing damaged DNA. Tomas Lindal was also the first to note that without some way to repair damage, DNA decays at a rate that should make life impossible on Earth.
The physiology prize itself goes to two separate efforts that ended up providing vital medicines against parasitic diseases. William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura discovered Avermectin which is used to treat River Blindness and Lymphatic Filariasis. Youyou Tu found a promising plant from traditional Chinese herbal medicine and extracted the active component to create the medicine now known as Artemisin, used against malaria.
As usual, the economics prize is awarded for a lifetime of work which is more difficult to summarize in a single paragraph. It goes to Angus Deaton who helped answer such questions as how consumers distribute spending among different goods, how much of a society’s income is spent and how much is saved and how to best measure poverty and the effectiveness of welfare spending.
As previously mentioned, I often pay attention to lists of the best films of every year when deciding what to watch, plus I put special priority to non-English films. This is because I’ve found that non-English language films tend to surprise me more and it’s boring to watch an endless succession of movies that all conform to the Hollywood mold. Of course, this does mean that I occasionally get a film that is so exotic, so experimental and so niche that I really don’t know what to make of it. Jauja, by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, is a case in point.
Selma is another one of the most prominent releases of the last year though it kind of got snubbed at the Oscars, winning only for its song Glory and otherwise nominated only for the Best Picture category. I suspect that after 12 Years a Slave won big the year before, the Academy didn’t feel up to showcasing another film about black history in the US. It’s a sign of how far behind we are that though we’re now nearing the end of 2015, we’re still slowly working through the lists of the best movies of last year.
I’m actually a Kickstarter backer for this so the reason why I’m slow to play newly released games isn’t always because I’m a cheapskate who buys games only when they’re on sale. Of course, the good thing about this is that I only play them after they’d been more or less fully patched and Pillars of Eternity is a game that had more than its fair share of bugs when it first launched. It’s worth noting however that even now it still has more bugs than I’d expect though they are minor ones that don’t really affect gameplay such as error messages in the textbox and getting exploration XP over and over again at a specific location. The most annoying bug I had is how the dialog buttons disappear from the save game menu after you’ve been playing for a while.
This one is a mostly Spanish language animated film that is credited to a trio of directors who are probably little known outside of Spain. As usual for animated films, my wife picked this one and she must be glad for it since music figures heavily in it, especially the music of Cuba and the way it came to influence the world of jazz. It’s also an animated film that is definitely not kid-friendly since it is unashamedly erotic. Together, these elements make this a rather unique and interesting film.
As a film that pops up often near the top of lists of the best movies ever made, Apocalypse Now surely needs no introduction. Together with the Godfather trilogy, this established Francis Ford Coppola’s reputation as one of greatest American directors of all time. The version we watched is the much longer Redux edition that was released in 2001. It’s actually getting rather difficult now to find the original theatrical version.