Guadagnino".
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.
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.
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.
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.