Bones And All
It is very hard to describe the style of Luca Guadagnino, the director of Bones And All. His films are very good. But it seems like he is not interested in plot, which is weird, considering that the movies are good. He is famous for his erotic dramas, films centered around a sexual tension between people, like his perhaps most acclaimed movie Call Me By Your Name, in which all the substance comes from very subtle things. A character looks a certain way on another character. Or perhaps holds onto another character's hand for way too long. And you have to piece together all these little clues to even start feeling some kind of presence of a plot. Because if you don't pay attention it all looks like people just casually hanging out. And then suddenly a payoff happens, which would make sense only if you paid attention to the little clues.
The Breakfast Club
Imagine a situation when you have to go to school on a weekend to basically waste your morning there. Imagine that somebody wanted to make a movie about it. It would be the worst kind of movie idea imaginable. How could you even make that interesting? Well John Hughes did. The movie should not work under any circumstance, but it does. And it does so well, it's a bloody cinematic miracle.
SimpliSafe Is Far From Safe
Once in a while, while watching a video on Invidious ( a proxy site allowing to watch YouTube videos in freedom ) I come across a very interesting advertising. SimpliSafe. A collection of home appliances that make security of the home supposedly simpler. And therefor makes your home safer.
Planned Obsolescence
A lot of electrical devices today have a switch of some kind to deactivate the device after a certain period of time. Sometimes the device just gets annoyingly slow. In any case, it is implemented in software on that device. And the reason for that is Planned Obsolescence. Forcing the user to throw away this device and buy a new one.
3 Dimentional Political Spectrum
When it comes to the utter war between Libertarians and Conservatives, the so called, Right and Left sides of the political spectrum, a lot of people avoid the fighting by simply choosing the center. I, on the other hand joke sometimes that the best option is to choose the square root of -1.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
During the making of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Steven Spielberg was already kind of a big man in Hollywood. But from the other side he was still young. Technically speaking this was his third theatrical film. He did work for television from the late 60s. At that time he already directed a number of feature length TV movies. One of them was the famous Duel. And then he did only 2 theatrical pictures: the 1972's The Sugarland Express and the 1974's Jaws. And now there is this movie.
Deception
Sometimes developers of a program will lie to the user knowing very well that they are lying. This kind of Deception is often implemented as a malicious functionality.
The Killer
I miss the times when you could see a David Fincher movie in the cinema. The last time he made a true cinema picture was almost 10 years ago in 2014. Since then he fully embraced the DRM filled streaming dis-service models. And his latest film The Killer is a straight to Netflix production. And it seems like he himself feels a bit off about it. Because if we take the character as a proxy for Fincher himself. This character is complex in how much he tries to justify himself being a terrible person.
Something Evil
Conceptually the film is very much like Stanley Kubrick's "The Shinning". It deals with a parent going slowly insane and becoming a threat to the children. Both movies suggest a possibility of a supernatural explanation of the insanity. But the movies are made in such a smart way where there is enough doubt in those supernatural occurrences that you can read it as psychological deterioration only. Which is a very interesting challenge to a filmmaker. And young Spielberg pulled it off.
Plausible Deniability
"I think you may like it" - said Mendel to Sheiny one day as he was looking at his TV screen. He was just browsing the web in search of some interesting things to look about and found an old interview with Jacque Fresco who was talking about an idea for a language of the future. He claimed that the languages of today are to vague and allow for multiple interpretations of the same idea, which allows for things like religion to be so successful and for people like lawyers to have successful jobs. And that in the future people would develop a concrete scientific language which will not allow for misunderstandings. Which will make all people understand each other perfectly. And which will put an end to such things like Plausible Deniability.
CGI vs AI
I showed my movie Moria's Race in a gas station once. A woman came by, saw it and asked me "Is it AI?". I obviously cringed. Because it wasn't AI, it was CGI. And there is a difference. Well technically there was one AI tool that was used. The open-image-denoise denoiser that comes preinstalled with Blender. But it's not really AI. Or is it?
Addons For SuperTuxKart
There is this game called SuperTuxKart that I didn't develop. But which is among the best Free Software games out there. And they have a way to make and publish addons. This is a list of addons that I made for SuperTuxKart.
May December
Natalie Portman is an interesting figure in the world of cinema. And the movie May December is a meta-analysis of Natalie's psychological journey through Hollywood. It is not a surprise that her first movie Leon: The Professional caused some levels of controversy. It was mainly an action film, so there was not that much controversy. But the dramatic elements of the film were questioned a lot by American audiences. Even Natalie Portman herself, being half-American described Leon as "cringe". And it seems like the growing obsession with all kind of sexual misconducts in Hollywood together with growing feelings of cringe from Leon made her into needing a movie like May December to evaluate everything and understand the phenomenon better.
The Peach Scene
It was one of those days when Mr. Humbert invited Sheiny and Chloe to watch a random movie in his dirty cinema. They avoided films shot in 16:9 aspect ratio since, well, Mr. Humbert's screen was an ultra-wide, curved CinemaScope. 16:9 films looked rather strange on this screen. But it seems like, this time, they were bored of the ultra-wide movies.
No Respect For Those Who Give Up
When I was about 16 years old I went into my friend's house and saw a guitar. Without even having any money I asked him "How much for the guitar?". And bought it immediately. I had to return him chunks of money for the next year or so. A bit later, an old lady living in the same building as my mom, who was once a musician, decided that I worth be given a small electronic piano. Obviously I was quite excited to learn to make music and so I decided to record a bunch of songs. Which ended up being my first album ( 2015 ) "No Respect For Those Who Give Up".
Riddle Of Fire
There is a sub genre of film which includes my movie Moria's Race and things like Spy Kids. Those are movies where child characters are opposing adults. And winning them. But there is a kind of spectrum in this sub genre. Spy Kids franchise, for example, is very clean and sterile. Trying as hard as possible to get a good age rating. While others might get a bit riskier. Riddle Of Fire is one such film.
Are You Sure That You Remember
Unfinished book about future where freedom is established much better than today. If we look few hundred years into the past, people had less freedom than people have now. So optimistically in future people will even more freedom. Thought, it doesn't mean that the characters will live a care-free problem-free life. Quite the contrary. With freedom comes responsibility. With freedom comes a huge amount of strange situations. And of course, there is the obvious question. How the hell people sell things in the future?
Team Of LiViT and Space Chabad
Team Of LiViT and Space Chabad are perhaps the stupidest epic idea I ever had in mind as a movie project. And which taught me a great bunch of things. This is why I want to write about the expenses of these projects.