This is an older Taiwanese anthology film from our usual cinephile friend. As a collection of four short films, each made by a different director and cast of performers, it would be pretty unremarkable, except that one of the directors is Edward Yang and a couple of the stories feature highly recognizable stars, a very young Sylvia Chang and child actress Shi An Ni.
About a year after gushing about Dirt Rally, I’m back playing the newer Dirt 4. As its title indicates this is a more mainstream title meant as the newest entry in the franchise and is therefore more accessible. However it does allow you to opt for either simulation or gamer levels of realism. Major improvements were made with the weather system, the damage model and a more complete career mode. In addition to rallying there are the rally cross and land rush events which will also be familiar to those who played the earlier titles of the series.
We’ve watched a few films by director Wim Wenders but this one is arguably his most celebrated work so it’s about time we got around to it. This film has a loudly American, specifically Texan, look with its shots of the desert landscapes, rolling highways and dusty towns but its essence feels very European. Indeed it was by French and German companies and apparently Wenders has an entire series of road trip films made in this manner.
Since I started watching films more seriously, there is a temptation to eagerly latch on to anything exotic and treat it as if it were an artistic work. I read about this on Broken Forum, noted that it was shown the the Cannes Film Festival and has a suitably high Rotten Tomatoes. I knew nothing else about it other than that it was about dogs but it seemed like a respectably artistic film. Of course, the truth is that just because it was made in what is to us exotic Hungary doesn’t automatically mean that it’s good.
I’ve been playing around with Blender so much it’s been cutting away at my videogaming time. It seems to me that modelling is still the task that takes up the most time even if Andrew Price of Blender Guru is correct that materials and textures is what makes renders look realistic. Meanwhile I’ve been having a hard time getting colors and such to look right. Especially after you throw in stuff like volume absorption, subsurface color, the color of the lighting, the background etc., the final result that you get seems really iffy.
As I’ve been playing with water effects and caustics, render times are also becoming a significant issue. Even bumping up sampling numbers to truly ludicrous values doesn’t entirely eliminate fireflies. I was so delighted to learn about the denoising tool in Blender. Anyway here’s some of the stuff I’ve been working on though they are still very flawed and it’s been slow going.
Going back to the well of classic Hollywood films, here is one that was directed by Elia Kazan and stars Marlon Brando. We’ve already watched the earlier A Streetcar Named Desire that the two also worked on and loved it so I was hoping for more of that magic. Though ostensibly about mobsters who have taken over a union of dock workers, this film can also be read as Kazan’s response to his critics over his willingness to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities to root out suspected Communists in Hollywood.
This one is another Chinese film that has garnered a fair share of plaudits and its the debut film of its director Zhou Ziyang. Interestingly, it is set in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, the same city that some years ago was paraded about in the Western press for being a prime example of China’s overbuilding spree, resulting in empty streets and buildings. I’ve read however that since that enough people have since moved to make it, if not exactly a thriving city, at least a real one.