This Chilean film by a new director Felipe Gálvez Haberle is instantly recognizable as a Western. It has rugged characters riding horses across vast landscapes, gunfights and especially the killing of natives. This is no action movie however as the action is all one-sided. The cowboys here are literally committing genocide against defenseless Indians on behalf of their wealthy rancher employer, based on historically real events. It’s brutally blunt both in its messaging and in its imagery but it certainly succeeds in its goal of bringing more attention to an atrocity that most of the world is probably unaware of.
We liked Asura so much we decided to give this earlier series that Hirokazu Kore-eda also made for Netflix a shot and its focus on food would only be a plus for my wife. However it becomes evident quickly that this is not at all in Kore-eda’s usual style. Instead it’s a sweetly wholesome story without an ounce of darkness in it and barely any conflict at all. I suspected that this was adapted from a manga and indeed it was so. It’s prettily made and serves as a neat pocket tour of the customs surrounding the geisha of Kyoto but it’s too superficial to engage with seriously.
A slow start to the year in terms of science news even the world is being rocked on the geopolitics front.
Maybe it’s just me but I’ve been noticing that people have been focusing more on aging healthily, perhaps due to a new breed of activists such as Bryan Johnson. They should take heart in this new development about a potential treatment for cartilage loss. It works by blocking the 15-PGDH protein which becomes more abundant in the body as we age which is thought to inhibit the regeneration of cartilage. In mice, they found that it led to thicker knee cartilage in the older animals they tried in on and there are ongoing trials in humans in humans. The hope is that this will successfully treat osteoarthritis without having to rely on injecting stem cell.
Next is a paper that will likely be of interest only to computer science nerds but is a clear sign that Chinese scientists are now very much state of the art. It presents a new algorithm to find the shortest path from a source to every other vertex in a graph. For over 60 years, the best possible algorithm to solve this fundamental graph problem was Dijkstra’s algorithm and it was thought to be optimal. Now this team presents a new way to solve the problem without having to sort the entire set of vertex distances in advance. It’s a huge deal in the world of computer science as such algorithms are widely used in all sorts of networks and even the smallest of optimizations can scale up.
Finally here’s the results of an experiment about creating the largest ever superposition yet. Instead of mere electrons or even single atoms, the team assembled clusters of around 7,000 atoms of sodium atoms and directed them through the equivalent of slits constructed with laser beams. They proved that rather than behaving as a single object, each cluster behaved like a wave, spreading out into a superposition and interfering to form a pattern. The results are identical to that of the famous double-slit experiment with tiny particles and suggest that there truly is no limit to how big a superposition can be, provided it can isolated enough, as predicted by quantum theory.
Jia Zhangke’s work hasn’t felt relevant for some time and a new film that recycles footage from his previous work seems even more dubious. This is something Jia can accomplish only because his wife Zhao Tao appears in all of his films so he can edit the old footage into a new story. Yet it surprisingly does work. I don’t care at all for the main story about the couple, but what entranced me is that it’s really also the story of the vast changes China has gone through over the past two decades or so. Returning to the city of Datong in Shanxi province which is Jia’s own hometown in the final sequence is a more powerful statement than what happens to the characters.
As many have observed, it is immediately obvious that this film was inspired by the work of Terence Malick. The quiet, still shots, the way it highlights the majesty of the nature, even its understated story about the life of an ordinary man are all reminiscent of the grandmaster. That’s admirable and this is fine work. Even so, it never manages to reach the sublime heights that Malick achieved at his best. The dialogue is flat at times and the third-person narration does too much work instead of trusting in the power of images alone to convey what is needed. This appears to only be director Clint Bentley’s second feature film so he’s someone worth watching out for.
Everyone has been hyping this one up so much since its release and this once it’s absolutely justified. Not only is it far and away the best action movie of the year, it crosses genres and is as much a musical as a horror film. It looks and sounds fantastic, fearlessly imaginative while being grounded in the Jim Crow-era South and is perfectly paced. There’s actually not that much action, but when it arrives, it’s explosive and definitive. It’s what a blockbuster Hollywood movie should be and I only regret not catching it in the cinemas earlier.
I became a fan of the new style stealth-focus RTS games due to Shadow Tactics but unfortunately the developer Minimi Games is no more. I’ll probably get around to playing their last pirate-themed game at some point but in the meantime here’s a World War 2-themed game in the same vein by a different developer. This one is much more combat focused and features a base management component in between missions.
