“When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority. They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.”
Isaac Bashevis Singer, speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1978
There’s a Simon Munnery joke, often repeated by comedian Stewart Lee, which says something to the effect of: “If the crowd’s behind you, you’re facing the wrong way.” It actually reads more like a philosophical maxim than a gag, and implicit in it is a suspicion of universal acclaim.
David Michod grabbed the world’s attention almost a decade ago with a lean, mean drama about loyalty and retribution, which focused on a Melbourne crime family (Animal Kingdom).
It’s entirely fitting, then, that the Australian director has chosen a bloody power struggle surrounding the English throne as the subject of his mid-career opus. Given the scale and ambition of the project, Michod has wisely enlisted the support of a master storyteller — The King is based on Shakespeare’s Henriad plays.
The King: An engrossing tale of power and treachery almost as good as the taxing and parliamentary landscapes ...
The King review – Shakespeare reboot is Game-of-Thrones lite with touch of Python
Much of the poetry and emotion has gone from this decaff version of the Henry plays, letting down Timothée Chalamet’s decent lead performance
The Problem With Critics Who Worry That The New ‘Joker’ Movie Will Goad Crazy Incels Into Shooting People
Dan Brooks: “Ostensibly too sophisticated for superhero stories, our critics have accepted the Joker’s power to corrupt the masses in real life, on a more literal level than the most addled comic-book fan ever would. That’s a failure to maintain critical distance, but it’s being projected onto an audience that critics imagine to be more suggestible than themselves — insanely more suggestible, almost comically so.” – The New York Times Magazine
Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—A Lot - Smithsonian.com – A machine learning algorithm helped decode the squeaks Egyptian fruit bats make in their roost, revealing that they “speak” to one another as individuals: “Plenty of animals communicate with one another, at least in a general way—wolves howl to each other, birds sing and dance to attract mates and big cats mark their territory with urine. But researchers at Tel Aviv University recently discovered that when at least one species communicates, it gets very specific. Egyptian fruit bats, it turns out, aren’t just making high pitched squeals when they gather together in their roosts. They’re communicating specific problems, reports Bob Yirka at Phys.org. According to Ramin Skibba at Nature, neuroecologist Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.
They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people. Skibba points out that besides humans, only dolphins and a handful of other species are known to address individuals rather than making broad communication sounds. The research appears in the journal Scientific Reports…”
