There’s no way we would be missing this latest film by the Coen brothers, especially one that’s so much fun. This is one those films that seems like it’s a personal vanity project, possible only because the brothers are now so successful and well known that they can make pretty much anything they want. It’s incredible how the brothers are the farthest thing from being complacent in their success and keep trying new things. The wonder of it is that they make it all work and it’s fiendishly good.
When I told my wife we would be watching a long, modern Turkish film next, her first reaction was to ask whether or not it’s by the same director as Winter Sleep. Indeed this was made by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and its screenplay was co-written by him and his wife Ebru Ceylan. Unfortunately while I found the dialogue in Winter Sleep to be almost magical, the dialogue here while being similarly wordy feels mostly dead to me, as if it tries too hard to be insightful but reveals nothing much of note.
It has been a long time since I played the first Injustice but I still fondly remember it as one of my favorite ever fighting game and one of the very few video games to have a truly awesome story. So it was with a lot of anticipation that I wanted to play this sequel. In fact I even bought a fighting stick for it, my first ever, though it is the cheap and small Hori Mini Fighting Stick. I had a lot of trouble pulling off moves that require a quick backward-forward movement on the thumbsticks of the usual gamepads and thought this might be better and it really did help a lot. Unfortunately while this sequel’s mechanics are solid, the story is awful and really spoiled the experience for me.
We’ve watched plenty of classic Hollywood films but I realized that we’ve never watched a single film starring Elvis Presley. That’s probably because although his films were commercially successful, none of them are considered especially noteworthy from an artistic perspective. This one doesn’t particularly stand out either but it does star Ann-Margret who was pretty good in Bye Bye Birdie so it seemed as good a choice as any.
I knew going in that this was a documentary about a chimpanzee that was trained to communicate in sign language. As such I thought it would mainly be about the scientific data gathered from the experiment and the consequences for our understanding of language. Instead, this film is focused on how the entire project is unethical from its very conception and how almost everyone involved in it seems to have regretted it. That makes it a far more powerful documentary than I had expected.
Biology again predominates this month and they’re really interesting bits of news too.
The excellent Zootopia famously featured a sloth in a scene and this helped make them popular. This feature article details some of the workings of their biology, possible only because their tree-based life cycle means that they are almost completely free of predators. In many ways, they have adapted to be more like reptiles than other mammals, soaking up energy from the sun and moving slowly to conserve energy.
Next is an article featuring cats but isn’t actually about cats. Instead it uses the typical ranges of medical costs for cats and other pets to note how different this market is compared to healthcare for humans, especially in the US. While we all know about inflation in healthcare costs for humans, it notes that medical costs for pets have actually declined modestly. It’s interesting example of how insurance markets and greater consumer choice influence prices.
Moving on to people, we have an article about education. Many universities now allow students to rate the quality of their professors and the quality of the instruction they get. The article differentiates between active learning, using methods that encourage students to get involved, and passive learning which consists mostly of listening to lectures. The data show that active learning is unequivocally superior but require more effort from the students. Yet as a result, students give higher ratings to professors who employ passive learning methods, especially when they are enlivened with amusing stories and anecdotes. The tragedy is that students think they have learned a lot from superstar lecturers but tests actually show the opposite.
Are different languages spoken at different speeds? This article explores this and related questions. The truth is that they do and yet a new study concludes that despite this speed difference, the rate that information is conveyed using different languages is about the same. This is because some languages, such as English, are more efficient in that information can be conveyed in fewer syllables. Others like Japanese need more syllables but speakers speak faster using them and so need the same amount of time to convey the same information.
Finally we end with an article about Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). We all know that AI is all the rage but thus far most ANNs we use rely on blank slates that are then trained using vast reams of data. This article asserts that we ought to take a page from nature in that the brains of most animals don’t start out as blank slates but are highly structured by their genomes. As such the way to get past the bottlenecks of current ANNs is to incorporate innate behavior even in their initial state.
This Swedish film defies convention and expectation on every level. Its genre is billed as fantasy and given that it’s about trolls in modern day Sweden, that’s understandable. Yet it is a deadly serious film, touching on paedophilia and genocide, as well as pride in the characters’, by human standards, very unusual sexuality. It was also made by an Iranian director Ali Abbasi and based on a Swedish short story. It’s easily one of the most original works I’ve seen so far this year.
