So this definitely isn’t the sort of film that we usually go to the cinema for, what with it being a crassly commercial romantic comedy with no artistic aspirations and a bog standard plot. But I still got caught up in the cultural buzz surrounding it and I have to admit that the cultural representation thing has me excited as well, especially as there are so many Malaysians involved in it.
The Return (2003)
This was added to our list on the strength of the two other films we watched so far by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. This is the earliest yet being his first feature film that was made on a very small budget. It effectively only has the three male actors playing the father and the two brothers with the mother having only a very limited supporting role.
Brimstone & Glory (2017)
Documentaries are always good for being a serious watch without being too emotionally draining and this one especially so with its strong emphasis on spectacular visuals alone with very little commentary or dialogue. With a running time of only about an hour it’s short as well.
Fire effects in Blender
So as the title indicates, I’ve been playing with fire effects in Blender recently. It seems that making cool animations with them is especially popular but I’ve found that rendering fire of any significant size makes my render times explode so I’ve had to curtail my ambitions massively. At the same time, it felt like a good opportunity to experiment with darker scenes and maybe some atmospheric lighting as well. Like so:
Nobody Knows (2004)
So this is another film by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and we’ve certainly watched a fair few of his works across the past several months. This is the earliest of his films yet and it’s based on a real event that took place in 1988 albeit very loosely. It’s odd now that I notice how so much of his work share a theme about parents failing their children.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Once again, I’ve barely watched any entries of the highly successful Mission Impossible franchise though I did write about the fourth one. The rave reviews for this latest entry, with some critics going so far as to call it one of the best action movies ever made, convinced me to turn up at the cinema for it. Like everyone else, I am left amazed by how hard Tom Cruise is still working at the age of 56.
The Black Tides of Heaven
So I decided to pay a bit more attention at what happens at the Hugo and Nebula Awards every year. Browsing through the list of nominees, I noticed this among the novellas, a work by a relatively new Singaporean writer JY Yang that is sometimes described as being in the ‘silkpunk’ genre. It was published together with the second book of the series Red Threads of Fortune as a bit of an experiment though each is short enough that I wonder why they didn’t just sell it as a single book. I only bought this one first to check it out however.