A science-fiction film about cloning starring Robert Pattinson should be right up my alley but I held off on this for a while due to its middling reviews. It’s like there are two versions of Bong Joon Ho: the one who can make Memories of Murder, Mother and Parasite; and the one who can make Okja and now this Mickey 17. Though the setup is for the identity crisis of a cloned person, in the end this just devolves into another monstrous creature that is actually cuddly inside movie. The worldbuilding is entertaining in a wacky way and Pattinson acts his heart out but this is a middling, missable film with a misplaced focus on what is most interesting.
I’ve been watching films seriously for a while now so it astounds me that I still come across great directors whose entire careers I seem to have missed. It’s the turn of Éric Rohmer this time, said to be the last of the French New Wave directors with an adaptation of what must be one of the lesser known works of Jules Verne. I loved it from the start for its naturalistic dialogue, achieved apparently by having the actors improvise most of their lines themselves. I’m not a fan of its facile resolution but I found it engrossing as a depiction of a woman’s depressive state.
Joy Ride came to my attention because it’s the directorial debut of Malaysian Adele Lim whose columns I used to read as a teenager in The Star newspaper. It’s a raunchy sex comedy the likes of which Seth Rogen used to make and he’s a producer here. Except here it’s a bunch of Asian American girls who are the thirsty ones and most of it is set in China. I thought that would be enough to make interesting at least. I will concede that it’s unpredictable the girls go for the dumbest and craziest ideas. But it’s a terrible film all around and actually manages to be vaguely racist against Asians even while being all about Asians.
I spent more time on Cyberpunk 2077 than I wanted so I decided to opt for a simpler game to cool off. Obviously I know about poker, but I realized while playing Red Dead Redemption 2 that I’ve never played it seriously. A surprising number of players enjoyed the poker in the Western game including myself but long sessions on it doesn’t seem very feasible. For one thing, Arthur might starve if he spends days and nights at the poker table. So I bought this poker game that seems to have been made by just one person. It does use AI-generated art assets but I don’t much care about that and it seems whoever made it takes poker seriously enough to spend a lot of effort on its AI opponents.
I don’t believe I’ve ever properly watched any of the original Mad Max films after all so I thought I should watch at least one of them. The second one is widely considered the best of the lot as George Miller only had a very small budget when he made the first film and it’s actually set just before the apocalypse. The third film has Tina Turner but the violence is toned down. So the Road Warrior it is, as it’s known in the US. As with every film in the franchise, it’s all about vehicle combat and without the even bigger budget of Fury Road, it can’t match the spectacle of the newer film. But I also found that its groundedness makes it a more realistic film and I liked what it shows of Max’s character.
I can’t believe I’ve lived this long and call myself a cineaste and yet have never watched a single work by Yonfan. It’s strange too to think that it is this animated film that is my introduction to his filmography. Almost immediately upon watching this, I was struck by its almost comically languid pace and highly stylized visuals. This, I thought, is the work of an incredibly confident director who knows exactly what he wants. It’s a sumptuous and sensuous vision of Hong Kong in the 1960s and a fantastic nostalgia trip. The story starts promisingly but then veers into a bit of an odd direction. That doesn’t matter too much fortunately as No. 7 Cherry Lane is all about its atmosphere.
A slower news month and somewhat different in tone too as the articles are all on softer side of science.
The first one deals with the grim subject of suicide, now one of the leading causes of death for Americans in the 10 to 34 age range. This study highlights a novel approach to identifying who are most at risk of an imminent suicide attempt, thus warranting immediate intervention. The somewhat surprising finding is that the best indicator isn’t the severity of depression but the intensity of agitation. This comes statements such as the urgent need to alleviate pain or discomfort, o feeling like being in a burning room and wanting out, or wanting to shut the world out. These usually turn out to be temporary conditions and suicide is of course permanent. The hope is that equipped with these findings, clinicians will be able to better identify those most in need of immediate aid.
Next we have an interesting paper that attempts to quantify the addictiveness of the short-form video format that is increasingly successful at grabbing the limited attention of users. The author shows that users have a limited temptation horizon of some 11 minutes, which is short enough that traditional episodes aren’t appealing. The short-form clips that now make up the micro-drama format are only about a minute long each and so easily tempt users into watching them. Yet every time they start a new clip, that temptation is partially renewed, resulting in users spending far more time on them than originally intended.
Finally here is an article about a project to map the spatial distribution of coins of the Roman Republic. It takes advantage of the digitization of archaeological collections to bring together millions of records from excavations conducted in many different countries. The result covers some 4 million coins focusing on the period from 155 BCE to 2 CE. It reveals a map of Roman influence, showing that the monetary circulation closely follows the development of Roman infrastructure. It also shows that while the coins were disseminated at first in the wake of the Roman army, they later became the basis of the local economy, generating demand for more coins.
