Here we have another modern Russian film and for once it isn’t one by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa, this one is as visually different as you can get from Zvyagintsev’s style due to its warm, rich and bright color palette. But don’t be mistaken, as we have come to expect from the tortured Russian psyche, this is just as searing and incisive a critique of contemporary Russian society as anything in Zvyagintsev’s oeuvre.
Continue reading A Gentle Creature (2017)
I worked a long time on this scene, even accounting for the fact that it reuses the potted plant I’d previously posted. There’s just so much stuff in it, the detailing on the walls for example, plus modelling the chandeliers, working out ways to make the curtains look not horrible. And even after all that time spent, it’s still far, far from perfect. You can view a larger, uncompressed version of the image by clicking this.
Continue reading Blender Scenes, Large and Small
This film had some of the shine taken off of it due to sexual misconduct allegations against James Franco. This supposedly caused the film to lose out on many of the awards it was widely expected to win at the time. Still I’ve always been an advocate of separating the artist from the art, even if there is a strange resonance between the events depicted here involving a sex scene starring the main character and Franco’s apparent actions in real life. Franco may or may not be a good person but this is still an amazing film.
Continue reading The Disaster Artist (2017)
So a number of critics drew attention to this as a film to take note of but obviously to international audiences the real draw here is that it stars Iko Uwais who first shot to fame in Gareth Evans’ Merantau and The Raid. This one was written and directed by a different director, Timo Tjahjanto, and Uwais is actually a co-star here but if you come in expecting plenty of gory, visceral violence you won’t be disappointed.
Continue reading The Night Comes For Us (2018)
Like everyone else I thought that the Toy Story series was done with the third film which was just about perfect. Trying to tack on anything more to the franchise seems cheap and doomed to failure. Yet after this came out we heard nothing but rave reviews about it and more than a few made particular remarks about its emotional ending. This persuaded my wife and myself to catch it at the cinemas before it has been pushed out by the new Spider-Man film.
Continue reading Toy Story 4 (2019)
I held off of this one for a long time as it took a while to go on a sale. To tell the truth, I didn’t even buy Enemy Within for the first game as I already have too many games to play. I played this one without War of the Chosen either and I probably won’t get it. That’s not because I think I won’t like it but because I’m happy enough with the gameplay that I already got and don’t actually need more. I suppose that must be another sign of growing old.
Continue reading XCOM 2
This is another film whose title is part of the modern cultural landscape but I don’t think many people have watched it and I don’t think the 2004 remake was very successful either. I watched this somewhat out of a sense of duty and indeed its treatment of the Russians and the Communist Chinese is laughable. Still, I ended up being surprised by how it’s very watchable even by modern standards and even novel in some ways.
Continue reading The Manchurian Candidate (1962)