While watching this, we had the vague impression that we’ve already seen this before yet couldn’t be sure. Since I now have a record of every film I’ve watched, I could check and see that it wasn’t the case. It’s just how the film makes use of the usual techniques of the horror genre that makes it seem so familiar. This is a supremely creepy, suspenseful film and it represents perhaps the very epitome of what can be achieved with this style. Yet it also illustrates their limits as it’s all pure atmosphere and the film doesn’t really go anywhere at the end.
I thought this film was a thriller but it’s really more of a psychological drama of a Vietnam War veteran’s weird ways of coping with his trauma. It’s a surprisingly more complex film that I expected yet the execution doesn’t quite live up to its full potential. This is the first film we’ve watched by director Ivan Passer but he was a close collaborator of fellow Czech Miloš Forman whose work we’ve loved. Imperfect as this film is, it seems to already be the pinnacle of Passer’s career so it’s doubtful that we’ll be watching more of his work.
Both my wife and myself somehow missed watched this film by Tsui Hark from back when he actually a good director. I thought about looking for it later but it seemed impossible to find anywhere except for YouTube. Recently my wife’s interest in it was rekindled after watching an online lecture about it and so we settled for the YouTube version despite its inferior quality. It is very much a film of its era with its kitschy special effects. Yet it is amazingly, even shockingly shock though perhaps much of the credit should go to Lilian Lee, as the author of the novel this was adapted from.
I’m still feeling a bit burned out on Warhammer 40,000 due to overexposure but so many people have been raving about this take on the traditional 4X genre that I felt like giving a spin. This isn’t really a 4X game in that in line with the Warhammer theme there is only war, so there’s no diplomacy or trade between factions. But you do still get to found cities, build an economy and most importantly raise armies with which to wipe out the map.
We’ve seen plenty of films by Akira Kurosawa already but we’re far from done. It’s another film set in post-war Japan and is loosely based on an American novel. It starts out as an old-fashioned kidnapping story of a type that we don’t really see nowadays any longer but nothing too remarkable. So it’s only when we see the police embark on a massive manhunt for the perpetrator that the film truly comes into its own. The investigation is so sophisticated and the step by step process shown here so detailed that I felt compelled to check if this was based on a true story.
Obviously I’m way late on this one. It’s that I have an established routine of stuff to watch and I’m loth to just skip through the stuff in my backlog. Though I don’t know League of Legends as I never play any multiplayer games, I was always going to watch this due to the fantastic reception it has received. I’m pleased to say that I found it every bit as good as everyone says it is and it’s powerful repudiation of the old rule that videogame adaptations inevitably suck.
Mostly articles about biology this month, except for the big release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Note that one bit of news that has been circulating this month talks about how plankton levels in the Atlantic Ocean has dropped precipitously. I was going to include it but there has been pushback about how that paper wasn’t peer reviewed and in any case covers only one part of the ocean and not the whole ocean, so I dropped it. No doubt those claims will be examined more closely and will make the news again if it proves to be true.
The James Webb Space Telescope images are just that images and it will be some time before new scientific discoveries will come from it. Still they are of such high quality that they are exciting to look at and the first glimpse of the farthest away galaxies 13 billion light years away is quite something. You may wish to read up on the telescope’s potential and how much effort, including over-engineering, was made into ensuring that the launch went perfectly and that this very expensive investment would not be a failure.
I first wrote about a possible link between gum problems and Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and now another new study appears to offer more confirmation. This one actually covers a different type of oral bacteria than previous studies and is based on animal experiments only. Yet it does show that the bacteria causes an inflammatory response that subsequently leads to the symptoms of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s getting worse.
This news came pretty late in the month but it’s too important to ignore and is also about Alzheimer’s disease. The claim is that a key study from 2006 about the main cause of the disease being sticky plaques in the brain formed by amyloid beta protein may be fraudulent as it used doctored images of the brain including such simple tricks like copying and pasting the same images. Given that the original basis was the foundation of a lot of research devoted to this approach of treating the disease, this revelation is a fairly big scandal in the scientific community and is still playing out.
Next here’s a study that follows up on previous findings that music seems to sooth pain. The new study involved playing different sounds and music to mice while testing their response to pain from an injection on their paws. They found that the type of sound or music doesn’t matter, even white noise works, but the key is that the volume of the sound is at a constantly level just above background noise. This successfully made the mice appear to feel less pain and they were even able to confirm the phenomenon by looking at the mice’s auditory cortex.
Finally here’s a really cool article on how dolphins identify themselves to others of their kind through names, effectively whistling a melody specific to themselves. It goes into how different types of whistling are used in different habitats and population sizes of dolphins and how some may use a whistle copied from their mothers but altered to be unique to themselves. Some groups even have group whistles that identify the group as a whole while still retaining enough uniqueness to refer to specific individuals in the group.
