This film may not be straight out pornography but it sure looks like it. It is a film, an art film even as it has received the cachet of being shown at international film festivals, that is about the pornography industry itself. As such it has plenty of scenes that could be in porn but it shies short of actually depicting any sex. The film does depict the unsavory aspects of the industry but at the same time it actually makes it look like the industry isn’t that different from any other. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s all that good a film as it struggles with the characterization of its protagonist.
Just to have some variation in the television shows, I though I might try this, a British adaptation of Dracula that was advertised as being made by the creators of Sherlock. The showrunners being of course Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, this uses the British format of only three episodes but each one being about an hour and half long. The first episode seemed promising, adhering to the source material quite closely with some important and interesting variations including making Van Helsing a nun named Agatha. However it goes off the rails very quickly after that with the intent obviously being to be as different as possible from its inspiration. This is to its detriment in my opinion.
Picked a nice puzzle game to change up the pace a bit and of course it’s a programming game. As I understand the people who made this achieved some success with games like Human Resource Machine on mobile platforms and this is a sequel with an expanded scope and a similar office-type setting. There’s a backstory about how the world is ruled by robots and the humans are drones who need to be given precise instructions to get them to do anything with cutscenes and everything. It’s a little amusing but it’s not a great story and not really relevant.
This is billed as an epic fantasy film but if you’re expecting an action fantasy movie you would be sorely disappointed as I don’t believe there is a single swordfight in the entire film. It is rather an adaptation of the 14-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Without prior knowledge of it, I fear that watching this would be quite a befuddling experience as this was the case for me. Still, the film evokes a feeling of old fantasy before it was completely colonized by games and paperback novels and as such there’s an undeniable lyrical power in it.
A discussion on the more notable Argentinean films of the recent past led us to Nine Queens, which we of course loved. The other film is this one which was considered good enough to merit being adapted by Hollywood. This one also stars Ricardo Darín as the lead but is otherwise a very different film. Though it seems at first to be a crime thriller, it is actually a very romantic film. This combination is strange enough to intrigue me and it is a very emotionally intense film. I think however that while this film does capture some of the political conflict in Argentina the earlier film still better represents it.
Some films aren’t so well received initially upon release and later grow to become cult classics or are revised to become great in the estimation of critics. This film however seems to have taken the opposite trajectory, being lauded early on but its reputation has suffered as time goes by. Partly this was because director Michael Cimino never made another good film after this and Heaven’s Gate in particular was one of the greatest flops of all time. After watching it, that seems about right to me as while the film is beautifully crafted, its core premise is fatally flawed and fundamentally stupid.
Not too much of note this month on the science front and even I have been mostly preoccupied following up on events in Ukraine. Still I’ve seen some announcements of medical advancements that sound very exciting.
The bit of news that has been shared around the most widely is the announcement of how a man with a complete spinal cord injury is able to walk again with the help of an implant. This sort of paralysis is very common in fiction so we all know that such people are unable to walk because the nerve signals sent down the signal cord are unable to reach the lower body and legs. The experimental implant bridges the damaged area with electrodes that target the dormant nerves beyond that area to amplify the signals coming from the brain. The most surprising finding is that the participants in the study were able to stand up and walk almost immediately after the surgery had healed without much training at all. Note that this is still not full recovery as they still need to be supported by a walking frame and the device must be specifically programmed to accommodate different types of movements but this really is science-fiction technology come to life.
The invention that is more likely to be of help to most people however is synthetic enamel than promises to be harder and stronger than the real thing. As you may already know, we can’t ever regrow tooth enamel that has been lost, the best we can do is remineralize the enamel that we do still have but over time this inevitably wears down. So that’s why this announcement of a synthetic version that replicates the natural version even on multiple microscopic scales is an exciting development.
Finally we end with a speculative article based on a study that I must warn uses very few participants. The claim is that by inserting electrodes into the temporal lobe of the brain, the researchers are able to determine exactly which neurons fire up during specific tasks. In doing so, they noticed that specific groups of neurons fire up when doing different mathematical operations. This is specific enough that an addition operation activates a different group of neurons than a subtraction operation, suggesting that the brain contains highly specialized circuits for specific operations. This accords well with improved understanding of how the brain works in that it is not an all purpose general computing machine but consists of many circuits, each highly specialized in different tasks but the circuity can be retrained when needed. But of course this is all highly speculative at the moment.
