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.
I’m once again back for the next MCU film and this time I had been looking forward to it, having liked the first film so much. This one is pretty much a standard sequel with all the same people involved except that the heist film template has been replaced with something simpler and, sadly, less interesting. The upshot is that the Wasp has now been upgraded to being a full peer and indeed director Peyton Reed has her doing all of the kickass stuff while Ant-Man is more or less her assistant.
This is a novel that I would never have known about if not for the recommendation in What Makes This Book So Great. It was successful enough to spawn sequels but author George Alec Effinger died before a fourth book could be completed and the series never seemed to have won any major awards. Apparently a supplement for this setting was made for the pencil and paper role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 which I do own.
I like to think that we’ve made a decent start at working through Akira Kurosawa’s most famous films but here is something completely different. Though the director is best known for his period samurai films, his filmography is wider than that. This one, made immediately following the end of the Second World War makes for a great example and it reveals a side of the director which isn’t evident in his later epics.
