This animated film was made by the same production team behind The Secret of Kells, headed by director Tomm Moore. This shows both in its art style and the way that it showcases Irish folklore. As with the previous film, it’s traditionally animated, not CGI, which is always a novelty and once again it’s a story with children as protagonists.
As I noted earlier when writing about Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel is remembered more for his surrealist works and this pick, The Exterminating Angel, is a fine example of that. The strangeness of the situation here doesn’t take long to show up either. The setting is a lavish dinner party in a huge mansion, one so luxuriously appointed that it looks impressive even today. Yet even before the dinner party starts getting underway, the servants beg permission to go off one by one, each for unrelated and trivial reasons until only the majordomo is left. We also see that there is inexplicably a herd of sheep and a small bear inside the house. What’s even stranger is that some scenes seem to be repeat themselves, at least to us as the audience but the characters in the film never seem to notice anything.
I pretty much only bought this game because I saw screenshots of it on a forum and was totally entranced. Later, I regretted this a bit when its Polish developers came out as being pro-GamerGate. This is a bit weird since it actually most resembles games like Gone Home and Dear Esther which gators love to deride as being not real games. But they don’t seem to have similar problems with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Note that I played the original version and not the Redux version because I didn’t realize that it was available as a separate download for free.
Since I generally try to watch movies that are actually good, I must admit that this is an odd pick. After watching through the entirety of Deep Space Nine a couple of years back, a series I’d never watched when it first aired, we slogged through The Next Generation last year though instead of watching everything, I tried to pick and choose the best episodes. Both my wife and myself agreed that TNG is substantially better. I told my wife that she should probably watch one of the TNG movies but we’d never done that, until now.
I’m pretty sure that I got this from the exact same list as Jauja and both films were winners at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. That’s where the similarities end though since both my wife and myself found this to be fantastic. This one is a Turkish film directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and is the first Turkish-language movie that I’ve ever written about in this blog.
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.