One thing I disliked about my city building scene the last time around was that after spending so much time on the building itself, I was too lazy to make the plant models myself that I used to decorate the balcony with. So I wanted to make a separate balcony scene and focus on making my own models of plants and flowers. This turned out to be a massive undertaking, much more than I had expected. I had to research plant species, find lots of reference photos, and limit myself to textures that were available to me.
This is an MCU film so it was a must watch but I’m beginning to think that I’ll have to be pickier after Avengers: Endgame. As Marvel’s first solo movie featuring a female superhero lead, this was always going to be heavily anticipated and predictably elicited a toxic response from the anti-feminists. Unfortunately while the intentions here are laudable, this is a mediocre film at best, let down I think by the untested directing duo of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.
Clocking in at nearly four hours, this is one of the longest films we’ve watched. It’s also one of the darkest, an observation that is made especially poignant by the fact that its director Hu Bo committed suicide shortly after finishing it at the age of 29. The film itself is based on a novel by the director himself, apparently being what caused him to shoot to fame. This therefore represents the director’s first and final feature film.
Since the last time I wrote about this, I’ve bought the Horizons DLC and put in many more hours into this game. I have to say that the learning curve just to get back in is pretty brutal. Not only did I have to refamiliarize myself with my custom control setup, the addition of Horizons and patch changes since I last played meant that there are now many more controls, all of which are not automatically bound. It’s pretty hard to set up these keybinds when you don’t even know how all these new systems work.
Here’s another John Hughes directed teen film that is considered a cultural touchstone of America. It also reentered the public consciousness recently when its star Molly Ringwald spoke about this along with The Breakfast Club in the wake of the #MeToo revelations. I wanted to watch this one as well because while The Breakfast Club isn’t exactly great, it did take the worries and concerns of teens seriously. Unfortunately Sixteen Candles is nothing at all like it and is an execrable film all around.
This film, made on the occasion of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday, caught my attention when it appeared on the festival circuit and so added it to my list. I only later noticed that it has a rather atrocious Rotten Tomatoes rating. Having watched it, I understand why but I don’t regret spending the time on it at all as I admire director Raoul Peck’s clear passion for the subject and for knowing exactly what he intended to achieve with this film.
I found this on the usual critics’ lists and knew it that it starred Ethan Hawke playing a priest. I did not realize that it was directed by Paul Schrader who seems to have been desperately trying for the past several years to revive his career and make money through a succession of awful films. I don’t understand how he convinced Hawke to appear in this one. Indeed while it starts out as a fairly conventional story about a priest wrestling with internal demons, it soon goes off in a dark direction that is not at all convincing.
