I didn’t actually believe that this would really turn out to be a comedy action movie but I suppose I really should have believed in the poster and all of the clues. It’s so weird watching this after Ms. Marvel because it’s doing so many of the same things and even has the same actress playing the villain despite not having any superpowers involved. In some ways, it’s even better since having people with superpowers resort to fisticuffs in the end always looked dumb. There are some points in this film where it crosses the line over into cringe territory but I’d say it’s a decent action movie in the growing girl power genre.
We’re continuing with the recent spate of Malaysian films I suppose as my wife insisted on catching this in the cinema to support local filmmakers. I admit that the idea of a Malay director, Tunku Mona Riza, directing a mostly Chinese cast in intriguing and I do like how it’s set in the town of Taiping. Unfortunately the material she has to work with is television drama level crap. It feels like something out of the 1980s with its moral conservatism and naive take on the human condition. I do want to watch something interesting set in Taiping but this isn’t it.
Videogames that are adapted from movie properties have a reputation of being so awful that they’ve become a meme and I’ve always avoided them. So it’s quite a shock to come across one that bucks the trend so much that gamers go out of their way to recommend it. Having to shoulder the baggage of being a well-known Marvel property, this game has steep hurdles to climb. So I’m pleased to report that it actually exceeded my expectations. The mechanics are only average and there are some annoying bugs. Yet the story is absolutely top-notch and I daresay better than any of the films are that part of the MCU trilogy. This game is clearly influenced by the movies but it uses none of the familiar stars. It draws instead from the wider comics universe and doesn’t hesitate to use original characters of its own to create a fantastic story.
This was added to my list because it’s a film by the Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I can’t say that I like it all that much even if it is known as one of the best British films of all time, but I am astounded that this really is all about a ballet production. In fact, its central feature is a performance that goes on for nearly twenty minutes and most of its cast are professional ballet dancers. There’s a delicious uncertainty for a long while as to where exactly this film is leading but it becomes more conventional once two of the main characters fall in love with one another.
I believe this is first film we’ve watched by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the great directors of Golden Age Japanese cinema alongside the better known Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu. This one is naturally one of his best works, apparently adapted from a folk tale. It’s a real tearjerker, piling tragedy after tragedy on top of its characters yet doesn’t feel over the top because of their folkloric origins. It’s absolutely brutal in portraying how pitiless the slave-owning society in medieval Japan was like. By the midpoint, I was ready to watch the protagonist lead a slave rebellion and burn it all down. This being not only a Japanese film but one that is all about imparting a Buddhist sense of mercy, this is very much not what happens.
Plenty of science news and what’s even better is that it’s a good mix of groundbreaking stuff and plain cool stuff.
The groundbreaking research relates to the discovery of a new type of viruslike entity that inhabits bacteria found in the human mouth and gut. The team has called these new structures obelisks and they are composed of loops of RNA. Scientists have previously known of the existence of viroids, similar loops RNA without the exterior protein shell that are seen in viruses, in plants. But this is the first time that these structures have been found in the human body. What’s insane about this paper is that we’d long have thought that every part of the human anatomy has already been thoroughly examined and mapped, yet we’ve now found these previously unknown structures and have no idea what roles they play in our biology.
In more depressing news, this paper examines the long-term effects of bullying among school children. What’s particularly notable here is the sheer length of time that the data encompasses. It covers a cohort born in Britain in 1958 up to the age of 62. The findings however are sobering and they find even after so long, it is possible to detect negative subjective effects on those who were bullied as children, lowers their probability of holding a job as adults and adversely affected their mortality.
The next paper is included because of how similar the situation it presents is to a short story by science-fiction writer Greg Egan and so he even linked it! The experimenters attached a camera and microphone to a single child for a certain number of hours everyday to record everything the child could see and hear. They then used the data to train a neural net to better understand how children learn language and to see if the AI they built in this way could similarly learn how to associate words with visual references in the real world. I’m not sure if they learned anything other than the fact that this approach does work but it sure makes for something right out of science-fiction.
There are too many announcements in AI to keep up so I’ll focus only on scientific papers especially when they pertain to real-world situations. This paper compares the performance of LLMs against junior lawyers and outsourced workers on reviewing legal contracts. As expected, the LLMs aren’t as good as senior lawyers and may only be slightly better or similar in performance to junior lawyers. But there is no question that the LLMs do that job far faster and for a much cheaper, almost insignificant cost. The conclusion is that junior lawyers certainly are at great risk of being disrupted.
Finally we have this news of the discovery of the brightest object in the universe found to date. It is a quasar located about 12 billion light-years away, stretches about 7 light-years across and is more than 500 trillion times brighter than our own sun. It’s just superlative, barely comprehensible numbers across the board and the funny thing is that astronomers actually noticed it in images taken in 1980 but misclassified it as a star.
This is a slickly made gangster film that takes place entirely within the confines of a tailor’s shop and is suffused with black humor. There’s probably a clever word for this specific genre but for the life of me, I can’t think of what it is. This kind of thing has all the hallmarks of a writer having great fun and is usually written by the director himself. Indeed this was the directorial debut of Graham Moore and he is also a co-writer. I found it entertaining and fun, though predictably for the genre there are perhaps one or two layers of obfuscation and deception too many. If I were younger, I would probably have found it to be great. As I now am, I think it’s cleverly written and that’s all it has going for it.
