I originally had no interest in watching this, thinking that the whole 1MDB saga is over and done with. What changed my mind was Najib Razak’s interview in it and his recent request to have the documentary taken down from Netflix. Hooray Streisand Effect! I’m not sure that this is actually a decent film as some of the editing choices are questionable and the interstitial scenes they made are downright cringey. I’m not sure how much sense it would make to non-Malaysian audiences either. I personally was able to follow along because I already mostly everything. Overall I’d say it was a worthwhile use of my time mainly due to the Najib interview and the perspective it offers from the FBI agent attached to the US embassy in Malaysia.
Not much in the way of science news for the first month of the year and I’ve decided to hold off on the more speculative announcements until they’re better supported.
First up in big picture news is the discovery of a cosmic megastructure, now called the Big Ring with a diameter of about 1.3 billion light years at a distance of more than 9 billion light years from Earth. It’s too faint to be seen with the naked eye of course but astronomers have been able to determine that it has something of a coil shape, aligned face-on with the Earth. This discovery joins a growing list of other megastructures and that poses a problem for our current understanding of the structure of the universe, that it is homogenous above a certain scale and looks identical in every direction. Either the scale must be redefined or we must admit that the universe has an overall structure after all.
Next is a development in particle physics that is applied to medicine. We all know about how radiation can be used to treat cancer as well as the problems of this approach. One obvious alternative is to use particles that dump a great deal of energy onto the targeted cancer cells and nowhere else in the body. This article talks about how protons beams can be used for treating cancer and how positron-emission tomography can be used to visualize and guide the proton beams. The difficulty is that the protons are very short-lived isotopes and so must be produced on-site using a cyclotron.
In Ecuador, archaeologists have discovered a huge ancient city lost underneath the jungles of the Amazon. Using both ground excavations and LiDAR imaging, they claim to have found plazas and houses connected by a network of roads and canals, with a population in the tens of thousands at least. The city was built around 2,500 years ago and people were living there up to about 1,000 years ago. If this pans out, this could mean the discovery of a completely unknown ancient civilization completely separate from the better known Mayan civilizations of Mexico and Central America.
Finally here a preprint paper detailing some observed trends in head size among humans and brain health. Using data from people born between 1902 and 1985 and controlling for many factors, they found that head sizes have been growing and memory performance has been improving over time. The authors believe that this is caused by early life environmental factors, better nutrition, better health and so on but there’s no telling really. It would be interesting to observe how long this trend can hold.
This is such an iconic film that not having watched it would be embarrassing to any serious cinephile. I always suspected that I wouldn’t like it and this is notable mostly because of it was a pioneer in so many filmmaking techniques. This was indeed largely the case as the film reads as being too obviously propaganda to me to have any emotional effect. I suppose it is impressive in being able to muster such large crowds for huge scenes, no CGI crowds back then, and it’s cool to see the Soviet-era battleships up close like this. But even the much vaunted Odessa Steps scene felt like nothing special to me because its lessons have been so thoroughly absorbed by other filmmakers already.
I do so love the films of Kelly Reichardt and though this one is set in Montana instead of Oregon as with most of her work, it’s not any less good. This consists of three individual stories of different women, adapted from short stories by Maile Meloy. As always, there is so much depth and understated emotion in the characters, different as they each are, through the landscape of Montana adds an element of isolation to all of them. Without being able to focus on one specific protagonist here, the emotional impact is more muted than something like Old Joy but every story is strong and enjoyable.
2023 seems to be a pretty good year for Malaysian films with a string of releases that are, if not great, at least interesting. This one was fully crowdfunded and then released for free on YouTube, allowing it ignore government censorship concerns. It’s effectively a dystopian action thriller that pushes racial segregation to its most extreme. It’s clever in how its appropriates the word ‘Pendatang’ and it slyly critiques how racism is manufactured by elites for their personal gain. I was disappointed however in that it’s not that well made and its scenario is really more about life under a totalitarian police state than about racism. It’s a valiant effort but it doesn’t really say much about life in modern day Malaysia.
I loved Slay the Spire, so it was only a matter of time before I got around to playing this deckbuilder game that was clearly inspired by it. It flips the theme around so you’re playing as the forces of hell fighting against good but the story hardly matters in a game like this. It modifies the formula so that you’re deploying monsters to defend a number of distinct battlefields for example. On the whole, it’s very similar however so those who loved Slay the Spire should love this as well. I’d say that the design here isn’t quite as elegant as its inspiration and it’s also a more forgiving game. Yet combined with its better production values, I found myself playing this a lot more than I’d expected.
At over seven hours long, this is by far the longest film we’ve watched. Even staggering it out over the course of a week, experiencing it in its entirety was quite a trial especially as it is an artistic film that isn’t always easy to understand and is entirely in black and white. I added this to my list because Béla Tarr is perhaps Hungary’s greatest director and this title often named among the greatest films ever made. The themes of desolation and hopelessness are obvious but it’s hard for someone unfamiliar with Hungary to place the circumstances under which the story takes place. I will say that this is easily one of the most pessimistic films I’ve ever encountered and it really is unique. Sitting through seven hours is still a big ask though.
