Independent filmmakers come up with great horror concepts and this one mines the stuff of nightmares for its material. The director Anthony Scott Burns and the cast aren’t complete unknowns but they’re all new enough that most people probably haven’t seen anything they have been it. This film is imperfect in that it offers no satisfactory explanation to the strange phenomena that happens in it, yet as my wife notes that may be a deliberate decision to heighten its scariness and this is indeed one horror film that is undoubtedly scary.
Here’s another shot at a film by Claire Denis even though we keep not quite being able to get what critics love so much about her work. This one is a very subtle film, perhaps too subtle as it seems almost bereft of any plot, but after getting to know its characters, it comes closest to a film by this director that I actually like. It also presents a view of the Parisian suburbs that is almost completely inhabited by people of color. That isn’t directly relevant to the themes or the characters but it still is a rather startling portrayal of France.
I always knew I would play this after enjoying the previous game so much, only that was four years ago! It simply took this long for me to get around to it after waiting for all episodes to be released. I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished everything yet before writing this. There’s just too much content so I’ll leave the DLC content for a later date. Even with the base content trying to be truly completionist is too much. I’d had to settle for doing all of the mission stories and achieving level 20 mastery on each map but I gave up on the really exotic and tedious challenges.
Nicholas Cage does so much awful work these days that it was quite a surprise last year to see this low budget, independent film shoot to the top of critics’ charts. After learning about its premise, I was disinclined to like this, worried that it would be mostly about watching one or more animals suffer. As it turned out, this film isn’t really about the pig at all and is a lot more like John Wick than I ever imagined, albeit in a radically different direction. It sure is an interesting and creatively impressive film but it has as little to do with real cooking and food as John Wick has with real combat.
Due to how much I loved The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, I am certainly going to watch more of the work of its two directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who as a duo call themselves the Archers. This is again a film that is really about Britishness itself, being inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but set during the Second World War. As Chaucer’s collection of stories is about a group of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury, so too is this film about a group of people who befriend each other on the road and find themselves going to Canterbury as well. In this way, it captures a little of what the pilgrimage experience might have been like for those in the Middle Ages and shows off the city and its surroundings to wonderful effect.
As I write this, director Jafar Panahi has once again been imprisoned. His sad fate contrasts sharply with the tone of this, one of his better known films that is about the oppression of women in Iran but is lighthearted and patriotic. This is about how the country stops women from attending football matches but this doesn’t deter a determined group of female fans. It was apparently filmed in a stadium during an actual qualifying match which gives this an electrifying atmosphere and incredible sense of authenticity. It’s fiction of course because no way would real soldiers and police officers be as empathetic and as easily bullied as the ones shown here as the director’s own fate demonstrates. But it sure does make for a fun movie.
A little light on science news this month and we’re all preoccupied by political events here in Malaysia but also in the US and elsewhere.
This isn’t really a new scientific discovery but it earns its place here due to sheer coolness factor. It’s NASA interpreting the data coming from the Perseus black hole as sound audible to the human hearing range. As the team explains, while space is mostly vacuum and therefore cannot transmit sound, the clouds of gas around the supermassive black hole is dense enough that sound can propagate there. The sound is far too low in frequency to be audible to human ears and so must be processed and of course the data that we get comes from the x-rays it emits.
Next we have a paper by a team from China about genetic engineering rice to boost yield and reduce growth duration. This particular effort overexpressed a particular gene that they identified by its responsiveness to low light and low nitrogen. The plant that resulted seemed to be able to use nitrogen more efficiently and therefore grew faster. This is only one of many genetic engineering projects on crops but I wanted to highlight this as it is a project from China and if commercially distributed, would result in being able to produce the same amount of rice by using much less land and using less nitrogen fertilizer.
Then we have a huge study that serves as an update on an earlier one that made quite an impact when it was released back in 2000. It was about the erosion of social interaction between Americans who are mostly strangers to one another, calling this social capital. The new study mines Facebook for data, mapping the connections between millions of users. The findings seem to broadly agree with the previous study and found that the deterioration of ties across social classes makes it more difficult for those born in poorer families to improve their station in life.
Finally this just made the cut by appearing within the last few days of the month and I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s an announcement by a team from China that they have successfully created the world’s first mammal with fully reprogrammed genes. What this means is that they took the chromosomes of a mouse, broke them apart, stitched them back together and used it to birth live animals. To get the mice to survive, they had to shorten the chromosomes and use few numbers of them but it’s unknown how else the new mice have been changed. It seems mostly like an effort to develop and prove expertise in the application of genetic engineering techniques than anything else, but I’ll have to wait to see reactions from the rest of the scientific community to learn more.
