I was skeptical of Luca Guadagnino's films like Call Me By Your Name until I saw them. It felt like Luca is making high brow dramas that are designed solely as tear-squeezers that appeal to contemporary politics. But then I saw his movies. From Call Me By Your Name to instant horror classics like Bones And All he proved time and time again that he is truly great. His movies are insanely visceral emotional roller-coasters that are not afraid to be sincere, while every other movie these days cannot take anything seriously. But then came a trailer of Luca Guadagnino making a movie about Tennis.
Let's go straight into the controversial part, to get it out of the park. In my review of May December I mentioned how Natalie Portman was perhaps trying to think through her experience during and after Leon. And that the arc of that movie was a kind of journey for her to understand people like Luc Besson who could make such a thing as Leon. Natalie, or at the time Neta Li, was born in Jerusalem of all places ( I have 4 brothers who were born there ). But most of her life she was an American. Therefor we can think of her as an American for the sake of this argument. I think that her confusion with the experience had to do a lot with the fact that she was American. And the large majority of the controversy that this movie has, has to do with American perspective on the subject.
In the age of LGBTQP+ this movie scares a lot of people on the right side of the political spectrum. It is a love story between two men. Actually I am lying. It is a love story between a man and a teenage boy. He is deliberately illegal. I think it is a kind of Luca Guadagnino's method of making us feel the same amount of paranoia that people of their sexual orientation might feel. There is a scene where Oliver, the older man, doubts that Elliot, the teenage boy, has any feelings for him for real. He thinks that perhaps the stuff that they did last night were a kind of way for the boy to take control over him, or something. And even that paranoia aspect of the film is very subtly communicated by Guadagnino. If you wonder off a little bit too much, you will miss it.
The direction of the movie is obviously very good. Luca Guadagnino shoots his movies with very precise camera. Nothing too fancy. Everything serves emotional purpose. He likes people to do things that would be in their character, but not necessarily important to the story, like dance. Which makes his editing very intuition-based and less clarity based. Which reminds the style of Lars Von Trier but not quite there. If there would be a scale between chaotic documentary style and a very precise and calculated cinematic style, Lars would be way closer to documentary than Luca. Luca is more in control, but lets a lot of character and intuition through. Which is very interesting.
Do you know a video of a woman stopped by a police man while she was speeding or something? You know, that meme video where she refuses to sign the paper and the policeman, then, goes to arrest her. And she tries to escape, resulting in a much worse situation than where she was in the beginning. You know the video I'm talking about? So it seems to me like that's not a luck problem as many assume it is. It's a communication skill problem.
course he did. The main character's name is also Humbert in that film. He said it's better to show him the older film, since the newer film, shot in 1997, draws Humbert as a kind of psychopathic evil person. While in the Kubrick version he is just a fool. Mr. Hambleton recommended "1984" shot in 1984. It was, as he said, a movie that justifies sexual crimes, making all laws against them sound ridiculous. Chloe recommended Leon: The Professional by Luc Besson. She thought that it would make Mendel feel more. Sheiny didn't take any of their suggestions.
They had a habit of picking a movie at random. That day Sheiny wanted to choose one herself. Mr. Humbert showed her the drawer of film reels. And asked her to choose one. She inserted her hand into the drawer of 16:9 movies, without looking. She knew that she is choosing a 16:9 film. Everybody agreed on it already. She took out her hand grabbing a 35 mm print of "Call Me By Your Name" directed by Luca Guadagnino. There was no poster, no trailer. Just a name and a director's name written with a marker on the casing of the film.
On the technical side it's a visual effects heavy movie from the 70s. So if you are expecting high end CGI work, don't. It was made before CGI was a thing. Just before this movie was released, Star Wars dropped. And if you compare the two. In some strange way, Close Encounters actually looks better. Even George Lucas agrees with that point of view.
Cinema is now at a point where deleting finished movies is way more lucrative for them than actually publishing them. It has something to do with how taxes work in the US. And the films that are made are more mindless and sterile. Gone are the days of interesting mid-budget cinema. Gone are the days of dramatic pieces of art. And gone are the times when people craved something original.
The paradox of freedom is by no means a new concept, but it is showing itself in most unexpected places, which are unfortunate sometimes and bring chills down the right people's spines when realized. Thus was the story your writer is going to tell in this wonderful piece of writing. Scary! Truly scary, it was! Battle-scars will appear on the protagonist's flesh, after healing from this experience. How utterly idiotic he was! Almost failed due to an error. Due to an expectation and presupposition that was at most erroneous. But still, how lucky. Because through all those struggles a victory was acquired non-the-less.
There was already enough in the movie to understand that the US had sent a spy to fly over the Soviet territory and make photos of it using very cool looking huge lenses built into the aircraft. So we start with the guy slowly flying through the air making pictures. Suddenly from the back flies a rocket! It misses. Bam! A second rocked just explodes near the aircraft! The pilot panics! And a third rocket hits a wing! In the same shot we learn that one of the engines stops working. And still in the same shot we see the aircraft starting to fall towards the ground. As it falls and pilot panics the window around the pilot starts to slowly crack away as the plane spin-falls towards the ground. The pilot prepares to evacuate, he unlocks his straps. And is about to press the big red button that says "Destruct". Since his mission is also to not let the soviets know that they have been spied on. But bam! The window shutters. The pilot flies out of the aircraft but is still holding to it on the oxygen cable! The spin of the plane accelerates! And the pilot is bumping into the plane in a chaotic fashion. And in one unbroken shot we see the pilot catching onto the spinning plane and reaching again for the Destruct button. Closeup on the finger! And even closer closeup on the finger! The oxygen cable bursts and the pilot is falling away from the plane. From the position at which he fell he is falling faster than the aircraft! But he stabilizes himself in the air and releases the parachute. But it's not the end. The camera pans up and looks through the hole in the top of the parachute. The aircraft is falling right at the pilot! But luckily it misses the pilot by the few inches.
But how about something other than Blender? Well related to Blender there is the existence of such formats like OpenEXR developed by Industrial Light and Magic, a company started by George Lucas and a company responsible for Jar Jar Binks. They did not try to make the format proprietary like some kind of Autodesk would. There is also the Open Shading Language which sounds like something related to OpenGL, but no... It's a something that helps somehow with rendering pretty images. And it was developed strangely by the godfather of bad companies, Sony. And then released as Free Software, because Film Industry is all about collaboration, I suppose. According to the Wikipedia page, it first appeared in the 2012 Men In Black film. And the interview from the beginning of this article is from the August of 2011. Maybe one thing has something to do with another. Steven Spielberg, mind you, was one of the producers on the Men In Black film.
By mistake, or perhaps luck, I saw a link to another game called Rigs of Rods while researching around BeamNG. At first I barely noticed it. Just another game with a similar premise. I mean even the developers of Flat Out made their "Wreckfest" game with more or less the same tech as BeamNG. So another copycat was expected. Then I noticed something. The Wikipedia article had the words "open source" in it. Wait a second? There is a Free Software clone of BeamNG? Really?
It's rather a deep dive to explain how this is a matter of human rights. But luckily I don't need to. Richard Stallman made a very good, short presentation on the subject on TEDx in 2014. So here is the video.