Based on the title and the poster, I’d thought that this was a supernatural horror film. But I should have known better, given that it was directed by Kaneto ShindÅ who was responsible for the excellent and very grounded The Naked Island. It is indeed horror but the evil is born from the hearts of people themselves. It’s a powerful retelling of a classic Buddhist parable set in so dystopic a world that it’s almost hell on Earth. My only complaint would be that it drags on a little with too many repetitive shots but it truly is a unique film with few contemporary peers.
Horrors movies have the advantage of usually being short and easy to watch but I find myself liking them less and less. This one has decent reviews and once again stars Nicolas Cage who seemingly will appear in any schlocky project these days. It’s decently put together and has strong vibes but that’s all it has. Not only is it a mishmash of the usual tropes: scary clown-like figure, Satanic cults, dolls and so on, it makes no attempt whatsoever at verisimilitude. The frustrating thing is that at times it’s reminiscent of David Fincher’s style but in the end it’s not a serious film at all.
A few years back, I was extremely impressed by Capernaum, the only Lebanese film I’ve seen so far. Well, this earlier was both the debut of its director Nadine Labaki and she also stars in it. Once again I love the authenticity of its Beirut setting and the matter-of-factly way that it tells the stories of five women there, leaving aside the country’s post-war tensions and instability. Unfortunately this is a lighter film that goes for breadth rather than depth and relies too much on maudlin music. I admire what it’s going for and enjoyed it but it’s nowhere as good as Capernaum.
This bird-themed game won a lot of praise and awards a few years back and I’d always been curious about it though I’d stopped playing physical boardgames by then. So when they made this digital version, I thought I’d at least learn the rules and check it out for myself. I’ve read that some players have had synchronizing issues with multiplayer but that doesn’t concern me and I have to say that this is an exceptionally pretty and slick digital conversion.
I noticed when this popped up on Netflix but didn’t think it was worth paying attention to. Then I read a wonderful essay about how it’s really a masterclass in management as Lionel Richie and Quincey Jones wrangled the biggest pop stars of the 1980s to work on a single world-changing song. Watching it, this really is the case and is full of amusing little anecdotes about these stars interacting with one another. If you’re a child of the ’80s like I am and have fond memories of We are the World, you owe it to yourself to watch this.
This film is said to be representative of the new kind of feminism in China, championing women who are strong enough to take charge and live their own lives as they please. With its rapid fire dialogue and dominant woman characters, it reminds me of the American screwball comedies of the early 20th-century but adapted for China and with both partners of the duo being women. I found it modern, smart and very funny. Unfortunately I’m not hip with Chinese culture and the language often moves too quickly for me to follow, so much of its cleverness is lost on me but I do so admire this film.
Quite a rich trove of articles this month but once again the really fascinating stuff are in the life sciences.
Easily the most significant and controversial finding of this month’s batch is the discovery in China of a human skull that dates from a million years ago. The skull found in Hubei province and called Yunxian 2 was originally assumed to belong to a member of Homo erectus. New analysis now suggests that it was actually a member of Homo longi who was thought to have lived alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. If true, this sets the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back by at least half a million years. Some are using this finding to challenge the established provenance of humans as being from Africa but it’s more likely evidence that there is still so much more that we don’t know.
One of the key symptoms of schizophrenia is auditory hallucinations, hearing things that aren’t there. One explanation for what is going on is that the patients are unable to distinguish between inner speech and external voices. A new study tests this hypothesis using EEG to monitor brain activity while they were asked to internally produce a sound without speaking it out loud and while listening to an audible syllable without doing anything else. The team found that patients known to have auditory hallucinations had brain activity that suggests they experience inner speech as more real than external sounds.
Here’s something that won’t occur to most people but will likely seem like a horror story once they hear about it. Some children suffer from epilepsy so severe that the treatment consists of surgically disconnecting the part of the brain in which the seizures originate from the rest of the brain. Yet the tissue remains intact and remains alive. One team wanted to find out whether the part that gets disconnected still has some awareness. So they took EEG readings of both the intact brain and the disconnected region before the surgery and at regular intervals afterwards. Thankfully the results aren’t horrifying. Electrical activity in the intact portion of the brain showed no changes but in the severed portion, the EEG showed slow rhythms called delta waves which are consistent with deep sleep. So it’s not dead but at least it isn’t fully aware all the time.
Finally here’s an article about similarities in sounds made by birds of different species separated by vast distances and how the phenomenon provides new insight into the development of human language. The researchers found that more than 20 different bird species across four continents produce nearly identical “whining” vocalizations when they spot parasitic birds. They performed playback experiments which showed that birds who hear the calls for the first time will come to investigate the sound. They are then able to learn and reproduce that sound in the future. This suggests a novel pathway for how languages might have developed.
