We keep going back in time for films by the Coen brothers and this is as far back as we can get as it is the very first feature film that they made. Apparently they had to scrounge for financing for a year after making a trailer for it on their own and yes, it does star an unrecognizably young Frances McDormand. It’s crude in some ways and bears some hallmarks of inexperienced directors but on the whole it is an excellent film and that is an impressive feat indeed.
Here’s another film by Noah Baumbach and he’s back working with his frequent collaborator and partner Greta Gerwig. One difference this time around is she isn’t playing the point of view character here as newcomer Lola Kirke is the lead. However she is credited as a co-scriptwriter, just as she was for Frances Ha, and I like how the two films share some similar themes.
I hate the idea of leaving games in my library unplayed so I’m determined at least to give a whirl to every one of the titles I bought a while back in the boardgames bundle. This one however is a worse candidate than usual because it’s one of those super social subjective judgment games. It does have AI and even comes with a single player Story Mode but this is really the kind of game that ought to be played in person with your friends.
Since Edgar Wright is mainly known as a director of comedy films, I initially dismissed this as more of the same, especially since my wife doesn’t get his English brand of humor. My cinephile friend told me that this is something else entirely and really quite good, so I put it on my list. But that was of course way after it had already finished its run in the cinemas.
We’ve been watching too many of these Disney live-action remakes recently. The reason for this latest one is The Lion King was one of my wife’s childhood favorites and she vacillated for a long time over whether or not to catch it in the cinemas. In the end she said yes but by now we’re at the tail end of the showings and it has been relegated to one of the less well equipped halls with markedly poorer sound quality.
Director Lee Chang-dong films have been very hit and miss for us. This was particularly anticipated since it was his first film in eight years since Poetry which we did like. It was also adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. Unfortunately once again this one left me with mixed feelings as the story went in a direction different from what I expected and I’m not sure what to think about that.
A much better selection of news this month, though it’s all about biology.
We start with a feature article about how China is leading the rest of the world by a large margin in using the CRISPR gene-editing technique to achieve new breakthroughs. This one focuses on how it is being deployed to rapidly make changes in crops, reducing corn’s vulnerability to a fungus for example or boost their resistance to insects, in order to grow enough food to feed China’s vast population. These new strains not on the market yet and they will be very soon.
Next is this very controversial report that a notable Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte has been working with Chinese scientists to make human-monkey hybrids. These aren’t complete organisms, being human stem cells injected into monkey embryos that are not allowed to grow for long. But it’s obvious why even this is highly disturbing.
As this article itself notes, the technology of editing memories has long been the province of science-fiction. While it isn’t really available yet, this review of various research avenues and techniques show that it isn’t impossible either. This article focuses on techniques that would be safe in humans for treatment of trauma and differentiates between those that focus on consolidation, meaning memories formed immediately after experiencing an event; and reconsolidation, meaning when an old memory is recalled and then stored away again. It seems that different techniques apply to those two stages.
In lighter news, here’s an announcement of the discovery of fossils of parrot bones in New Zealand dating from 19 million years ago. The cool part is that extrapolating from the size of the fossils, the parrots must have stood a metre-tall and weighed up to 7 kilograms, making them giants. It also goes on to speculate that the phenomenon of gigantism has been observed in New Zealand, probably due to the lack of competition, but this is the first time that it has been seen in parrots.
