Though made by a Spanish production company, this animated film is set in a pre-9/11 version of New York City and is based on an American graphic novel. Not that it matters as there isn’t a single line of dialogue in it. The story is instead conveyed through nonverbal sounds, body language and on rare occasions text. The themes of friendship and loneliness here are simple and the plot a little silly. Still, the emotions are intense and both the visuals and the music are appealing, so I’d consider this better than what the big American animation studios mostly produce.
I like to try games of all genres such that I’d at least have a passing familiarity in them even if I’m never going to be an expert. One obvious lacuna in my ludography are military simulators. Well, here we have a submarine simulator that renders the German u-boats of World War II in such detail that you can walk around inside one in first-person view and press all of the buttons and switches yourself. It’s kind of insane and actually not as difficult to learn as I’d feared. I still didn’t spend that much time on it because it’s realistic enough that running a submarine in wartime is tedium most of the time, punctuated by brief moments of pure terror. But I sure enjoyed learning all about how submarines work and it is a very pretty game!
It’s strange to think that barely weeks after Jafar Panahi announced that he would be returning to Iran after completing the awards circuit for this film despite knowing that he will certainly be arrested that the current war broke out. The director has always a critic of the regime yet in tackling the subject of torture head-on here, he is at his harshest yet. Through the dialogue of the victims, he exposes not just details of what the torture was like but also what he himself would want to say to those responsible. I’m not sure if this is his best film but it certainly is the hardest hitting one and fully deserves the acclaim that it has won.
One would think that the subject of androids questioning what it means to be human is already oversaturated but Kogonada shows us here that it is not so. Similarly to his feature film debut Columbus, this one brims with a quiet, understated power set in a world that is far more fascinating that it initially seems. I have doubts about just why their android cannot be repaired and how it tries to introduce some conflict in a film that really doesn’t have any. But it is in all other ways a masterful film that I believe has been underrated.
After the acclaim he won for his first two films, Bi Gan certainly isn’t lacking in choices when it comes to what to make next. His latest film takes full advantage of the expanded resources available to him to execute an extremely ambitious vision. He stretches beyond the city of Kaili to tell what seems like a fantastical story with possibly science-fiction elements. But it’s really about cinema itself and the director’s intent seems to be to experiment and show off his mastery of a large variety of different genres and styles. I tend to dislike films that are overly meta and this is the case here as well. It’s a riveting watch as you’re never sure what Bi Gan is going to show you next but it doesn’t seem to me that he has anything interesting to say here.
Not a bad mix of articles this month though a key one is here more as a cautionary tale.
Said big news is of course the claim that a fly has been uploaded, fueling frenzied speculation that the singularity is nigh as demonstrated in a video released by the team behind the project. Detractors disagree with that assessment. The team behind the video used the FlyWire connectome, which mapped every one of the fruit fly’s neurons and synaptic connections with the assistance of AI. They then linked this to a relatively simple physics-based simulation of a fly body to create a video depicting realistic fly behaviors that include grooming, feeding, flying and so on. However these are canned behaviors of the body model and the connectome is only used to select the behavior without actually simulating all of the coordinated movements. The connectome itself is a remarkable achievement but this should not yet be considered a full upload.
Another fascinating news item that went viral is that a tech entrepreneur seemingly created a customized cancer vaccine for his dog with the help of ChatGPT. The dog was diagnosed with aggressive mast cell cancer that kept returning even after chemotherapy and surgery. The owner paid to have a lab sequence the DNA from the dog’s tumor and used ChatGPT to sift through the results to find a sequence that would make for a good neoantigen, a protein sequence that identifies the cancer and helps make it visible to the immune system. He then enlisted researchers who designed an mRNA construct that instruct the body to manufacture these spike proteins, in effect making it a vaccine. The dog’s tumors did shrink after being treated but it is difficult to attribute the success to the vaccine, given that this is a sample of one. The amazing thing about this story is that one person was to mobilize the scientific and medical apparatus to achieve this for his dog and for not very much money at all.
Also in medical news is a result that is perhaps obvious and still important to take note of for anyone who cares about maximizing their lifespan. It’s a study meant to find associations between infection history and frailty. To no one’s surprise, it found that a history of any infection at all is linked to frailty, increasing the risk of death. This means that any infections even after they have been treated and the patient has recovered, could be said to cause lasting damage to the body that affects your overall longevity.
The next paper similarly has implications about longevity. It claims to find an association between caffeine intake and lowered risk of dementia. It even differentiates between caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee and tea to determine that it is the caffeine content that matters. What’s especially impressive is the size and period of time covered by the study, over 131,000 individuals followed up over the course of 43 years, which will certainly ensure that this particular paper will establish an important baseline for years to come.
Coming from the same creative team behind Talk to Me, this one bears many of the same hallmarks and lacks the unique imagery that defined the earlier film. Yet it fixes one of the most glaring flaws I complained about by developing the characters enough that I actually care about them and so I would consider it the better film. I am somewhat disgusted that much of the horror is achieved by victimizing children who have little ability to fight back or even understand what is going on. But I can’t deny how viscerally effective the technique is.
