We needed multiple days to get through this epic and I shudder to think that Sergio Leone originally wanted something even longer. This would have been more bearable if it were actually good yet while it has the bones of a decent film, on the whole it’s so clunky. Robert De Niro is as great as ever and outacts everyone by a fair margin. But Leone is not American, has no ear for good American English dialogue and the film has no real psychological depth. It’s realistic in the sense that the characters are street hoods who never grew up but it also means that it’s really all just about sex and violence. It’s not a bad mobster flick but I certainly wouldn’t consider it among the greatest films of all time.
We’ve seen interesting work by Lou Ye before and here we have one with Gong Li as the lead. It’s a spy thriller that takes place when Shanghai was an international settlement nominally outside of Japanese control, a setting that I will note is popular for Chinese serials. Naturally Lou Ye adds his own artistic touch and plays around with what the protagonist is really up to. Unfortunately while it sets things up nicely and hints at a complex political situation with multiple factions in play, in the end it all amounts to nothing. All of the prior artistry feels almost superfluous when as it all but devolves into a conventional action movie.
I ordinarily wouldn’t pay any attention to these nondescript action show made especially for Netflix but this one has decent reviews and strong word-of-mouth recommendations. I’ve long thought that more grounded action movies would work well and ‘lo and behold here one is. This film intelligently uses corrupt police in a podunk rural town as the antagonists because there’s really no scarier villain in modern day America and even weaves in a vaguely plausible plot about civil forfeiture. Unfortunately the production is competent at best and mostly uninspiring. It’s not bad as an action movie but it’s not going to win any awards.
With its ostentatious displays of wealth and portrayal of the high life, this is another film that loudly announces itself as escapism amidst the Great Depression. The twist here is that it’s no rags to riches story but about thieves who pretend to be rich in order to rob them. It was made by Ernst Lubitsch who truly does have an artful touch in directing these things so it’s great fun for a little while. Still, the only question towards the end is which of the two female leads the male hero will choose and that’s the full extent of how sophisticated the film is.
Europeans make so many films about the Holocaust that watching yet another one isn’t particularly interesting to me. Jonathan Glazer’s newest one however takes a completely different tack by not showing a single Jewish victim at all. Instead it focuses on the home life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss whose family has established a mundane and pleasant existence just outside the camp’s walls. There is effectively no plot as it merely shows their everyday routines. Glazer claims that he aimed to demystify the perpetrators of the Holocaust to show that they are not evil in the mythological sense. Yet they most certainly are evil at least in the ordinary sense for being able to enjoy life under such horrendous circumstances.
Again not that much in the way of science news. The online discourse is being completely dominated by the fallout from the elections in the US.
The most controversial story making the rounds this months is the one about a scientist who treated her own breast cancer by injecting lab-grown viruses into the tumor. The case itself isn’t particularly novel as the treatment known as oncolytic virotherapy is already being tested elsewhere. It involves using viruses to attack cancerous cells and provoke the immune system to fight them. In this case, the scientist in question, Beata Halassy, used two viruses, a measles virus and a vesicular stomatitis virus. What provoked controversy is that this treatment has obviously not been approved by any government regulator and so Halassy took matters into her own hands. As far as my concerned, it’s her body and her choice to make so there’s no question about this being ethical or not. In any case, it’s been working so far as this happened four years ago and the results are only being published now.
There’s an ever growing body of evidence that the new class of weight-loss drugs, GLP-1 receptor agonists, offer an entire host of health benefits beyond just weight loss. I’m not arguing to the contrary of course but it’s also worth paying attention to the possible side effects and other consequences of long-term use. This new paper claims the use of these drugs also lead to substantial loss of muscle tissue. It hasn’t established that the loss is greater than what would be expected from the weight loss itself but it’s still a matter of some concern.
Finally things are moving in the world of physics with regards to what dark energy actually is. I won’t go into the whole mess of why the concept of dark energy is needed to explain why the universe looks as it does as that is a whole other story. What’s new here is that we now have new data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). The instrument found that the density of dark energy seems to increase over time. This increase is consistent with formation of new black holes as massive stars die and is being interpretated as evidence in favor of the view that there is a fundamental coupling between dark energy and black holes. All this is far above my level of comprehension and as far as I can tell, this is only one of several other possible changes to how dark energy is being viewed. Still, it does seem that we must brace ourselves for some major revisions on what the current consensus in cosmology is.
Given its subject matter, it’s particularly poignant to watch this now as Donald Trump has just won the election to once again become the president of the United States. This short film effectively consists of just one extended scene in which FBI agents arrive at the home of Reality Winner, a US Air Force veteran and translator for the NSA, and interrogate her. All dialogue is taken from the recording made by the FBI itself, with portions redacted as per the transcript. It’s remarkable how much tension director Tina Satter was able to inject into the material and it works especially well if you have no idea who Reality Winner is before watching this.
