Fred Rogers is probably unknown to most non-Americans and I certainly wouldn’t have known about him if I hadn’t read about him on Broken Forum. This biographical documentary was timed to be released on what would have been the man’s 90th birthday if he had not passed away in 2003. But it’s also very apropos that this was made now as a dig at the current state of politics in the United States.
Just about every Russian film we’ve watched recently has been by Andrey Zvyagintsev, an indication of how influential he is and how he is seen as the best director at depicting contemporary Russian society. This is an earlier film before both the standout Leviathan and Loveless and unfortunately I found it to be nowhere as good.
I’ve been steadily working on more Blender scenes, growing my skills. The above is something I’ve wanted to make for a while now, a corridor with a vaulted ceiling. It took a very long time to model that and I had to consult a ton of resources and look at a lot of reference images. The final result isn’t a good render because at the end of it all I was too fed up to spend a lot of time on the textures so it’s far too crisp and clean. Learning to model architecture of this complexity was a very instructive experience however and I’ve found that you really need a solid plan for the whole thing. You can’t just jump in and start modelling.
This is of course another famous film based on an equally famous novel and it was directed by Miloš Forman who everyone surely knows due to Amadeus. Plus it stars Jack Nicholson in a film set in a mental institution. What could be more perfect, right? It turns out that the premise is actually that he plays the sole sane man in an asylum and that is even more awesome.
I confused myself by having two films with the same English language name released so close to one another though they are completely unlike one another. This one is a Chinese film by Feng Xiaogang who my wife notes is more of a mainstream director. Despite the plethora of awards this film racked up, it is utterly conventional and therefore uninteresting.
It has been a long, long time since I last wrote about this game, so long indeed that the post was on my old blog. I only revisited this because I was curious about the video game adaptations of some of the board games I already know and so bought the Humble Bundle of board games. It also happened to include this mini-pack for Sentinels of the Multiverse and I didn’t want it to go to waste.
Continue reading Sentinels of the Multiverse (Shattered Timelines)
This film made the news for all the wrong reasons as it was released digitally by Netflix instead of a more conventional distribution and that apparently upset its director Alex Garland. I didn’t have high expectations of it but the director did make Ex Machina and this was adapted from a science-fiction novel that managed to win the Nebula Award in 2014. I haven’t read it however and after watching this I have no desire to at all.