This is a strong Hong Kong film that was the directorial debut of Norris Wong who also wrote the story. The title refers to a particular neighborhood in Hong Kong and the setting is one specific shopping mall there that specializes in weddings. The director apparently grew up right opposite the mall and is so often the case for good films, this immediate, personal connection lends it a powerful sense of authenticity, all the so as the director is herself a woman and can relate to the main character.
Video game movies have a terrible track record but they do seem to be getting better. This one has as video gamey a theme as you can imagine and it’s a surprisingly fun and effective action movie. I credit this to Ryan Reynolds’ enthusiasm for the project as this fits perfectly with the comedic persona he has cultivated. Of course this isn’t to be considered a serious science-fiction film as there is no consistency at all to the rules of the world and video game development definitely does not work like that. But the world has been begging for a video game movie like this for ages and this does deliver.
A few scattered articles this month even as the war in Ukraine rages and the world is embroiled in a food crisis. These really are extraordinarily tough times.
By far the most exciting announcement this month is the release of the very first image of Sagittarius A*, the colossal black hole at the center of the Milk Way galaxy. This isn’t a photograph of course but an image assembled from data collected by a set of 8 radio telescopes. Similarly we can’t see the black hole directly but we can perceive some of the matter that accretes around it so it looks like a bright, glowing doughnut. I’m not how much new scientific insight can be learned from this project but I’m suppose it’s enough of an achievement that it earns the public’s attention and fosters greater interest in astronomy.
Another really import finding also concerns space by way of the meteorites that fall on Earth. It’s an announcement that all five of the nucleobases that constitute DNA have now been found in meteorites. Some of the bases have been detected as far back as the 1960s but it is only recently with the refinement of new techniques to increase the sensitivity of detection methods that all of the bases have been found. It’s not definitive proof of anything but it helps lend credence to the old theory that life on Earth was originally seeded from meteorites.
Next we have an intriguing and highly speculative paper on how some insect colonies may possess cultural transmission of knowledge and engage in cognition on a social level. It’s a review of other studies rather than new research and it calls attention to findings such as how wasps able to recognize one another’s faces and memorize information about each other, how bumblebees can observe others use techniques and learn them and mate preferences of female fruit flies seem to be culturally transmitted over generations. The purpose is to underline how much we still don’t know about how cognition works in such seemingly simple animals and that far from being hardwired by evolution, so much of their behavior may be learned and transmitted from one generation to the next.
Finally a really scary article about the self-destructive behavior of octopus mothers as their eggs get close to hatching. The new finding is really about working out the specific biochemical processes that occur in these octopuses, beginning from their optic glands, to prompt the behavior. But the results that have long been known about is that they might beat themselves against rocks, tear at themselves or even eat themselves when the time of hatching draws near. It’s still exactly clear why this occurs but the best guess is that octopuses are cannibals so this kind of programmed suicide protects babies from being eaten by their own mothers once they are hatched.
My wife likes to be forewarned before watching any films that might be particularly dense or difficult to parse and a documentary about Chile’s political history seems to qualify. Yet the first one third of this hour and a half film seemingly has nothing at all to do with politics as it discusses the country’s love for astronomy and how the dryness of the Atacama Desert makes it one of the best places in the world to observe the stars. But the film does eventually swing around to the massacred victims of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and so we see filmmaker Patricio Guzmán genius in linking these seeming unrelated topics. To be fair this style of documentary is too light on the facts for my tastes as it aims instead to make an emotional impact but I must admit it is critically acclaimed for good reason.
Horror films that try to combine a science-fiction theme with mysticism usually fail but this is one of the better attempts at it that I’ve seen. It’s also the first film we’ve seen that was made during the covid-19 pandemic and is set during the pandemic itself. Apparently director Ben Wheatley had gotten bored while everything was shut down and made this in a mere 15 days. This is still a quick film made on a small budget and a tiny cast and there are limits to how much one can achieve in this way but this truly is a solid horror film.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul now seems intent on expanding his career outside of his native Thailand with his first foreign film, this one set in Colombia and uses a mixture of both Spanish and English. His film before this was so cryptic that it was hard to even tell what is going on. This new one may leave you questioning the intent behind his choices but the overall plot is actually rather straightforward to follow. Towards the end there is a twist totally unlike anything the director has done before which I’m not sure I like but all directors must innovate I suppose. But overall this is another masterful work that reaffirms the director as being among the best working today.
I tend to shy away from any first person shooters now especially ones that aren’t open-world games. They’re just not my thing now that I’m older and they all mostly cater to the multiplayer crowd nowadays anyway. But enough people have called the single-player campaign in Titanfall 2 best-in-class, that is the best entry in the shooter genre for years, that I feel that I have to check it out especially since it’s so cheap now. Honestly this is a 2016 game but I’m so far behind the curve and so ignorant of graphics in general I suppose, that this looks like the prettiest game I’ve played in a while.
