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[Weekly Update] December 5, 2021 (Patreon)

Published:
2021-12-05 21:56:54
Imported:
2023-04

Content

It's December, which means it is holiday season. I hope you are having a good festive time! With so much hardship happening in the last few years, we all deserve a bit of warmth in this winter.

CHANNEL UPDATE

  • Script for our next video is complete! I'll be recording it tonight, and hopefully publish it before the 15th.
  • Another smaller script will be worked on and uploaded by the 20th.
  • Speaking of recording, I got a new mic! For the entire history of this channel, I've been using a very low budget Blue Snowball Ice microphone. I do have an expensive XLR mic, but I'm too lazy to hook it up to my computer every time. Well, I managed to snatch a Blue Yeti Nano on Black Friday for cheap. Let's see if it'll make my voice sound better.
  • Finally, for our upcoming short film: We have signed on to a art director! It has been such a long time since I made a short film, I forgot how many people are involved in a production. This is giving me anxiety. But it's also exciting.

MEDIA TALK

  • If you follow me on Twitter (sorry, Facebook), you may have saw my review/rant about Dune. I saw it in theatres, and I have to say... My strong feelings towards the film only grew stronger now that I have time to process it.
  • So, Dune is a sci-fi story written back in the 1960s. It's essentially a colonial era court political thriller, but set in space. It draws parallel from the spices trade and the colonization of India. It's an all time classic, to a point where many of its elements are now considered cliche: The voice is the inspiration for the force. The desert planet with two moons became a desert planet with two suns. The sand worm became the  sarlacc pit... Wow, nothing's original in Star Wars isn't it.
  • So, there really isn't much I can criticize the film for when it comes to story. There's only so much you can do before Dune isn't Dune any more.
  • However, I can whine about how the story is presented. And boy, I have a lot of problems with the film's artistic decisions.
  • First of all, the spice. For a MacGuffin critical to the universe of Dune, the film does a piss poor job at explaining what it is. A friend who has never read the book went to see the film with me, and she was confused as to what spice really does.
  • The primary problem is that, unlike the David Lynch version, which shows people using the spice to do intergalactic jumps, The 2021 version never shows such scene. Spice exists almost entirely in the background. Its use is explained through throwaway lines, with contradictory informations. My friend don't know which explanation is true, and which is unimportant: is it medicinal? or is it a recreational drug? But no, it's neither.
  • And then, the heats, or the lack the off. While characters keep saying the sun is too high and people will die from the heat, rarely is any character sweats. I don't think the main character sweat even once. With it's predominantly white and grey color grade, the desert feels cold and dry, still and lifeless. Added with the fact that people are often wearing layers of clothings, or bulky armours, the narrative and the visual clash all the time.
  • Speaking of armours... Wow they look bad. Actually most of the costumes in this film is kinda meh to me. With its dialogue and its politics, the film demands very regal and ornate clothings. While some of the official suits look great (particularly the royal messengers from the opening of the film), a lot of them look like generic button up shirts made of slightly different materials.
  • And the armour is perhaps the one that clashes the most. Th generic giant shoulder pad design looks more like something out of Justice League than anything. People don't really wear armour in colonial period, so why have them? And if you have them, why not have something more inspired by chain mails or other historical amor styles? It makes no sense to me why they'd have a generic "cool power armour" in this film.
  • Do people really buy Dune action figures?!
  • While the architecture sometimes resembles that of a high fantasy setting, the machinery is just... shall I say, too realistic? Too grounded? The ornithopters are amazing to look at, but its brutal militaristic aesthetic is too far removed from a story that has a lot of religious undertone.
  • The spice harvester, especially, looks like a generic piece of machine that would appear in any other sci-fi movie.
  • Check out, again, David Lynch's version. The gate that people make the jump through has extremely detailed ornamentations on it. It looks like an entrance to a cathedral. To me, not only is that more unique to look at, it's also fitting for Dune, a story that is essentially Hamlet in Space.
  • Overall, I just feel like Dune is a technically well done film, build on some very questionable artistic decisions. And the more I think about it, the more it frustrates me. Maybe I'm just being a big baby, but Dune could've been so much more unique.

Anyway, that is the update! With the year coming to an end, let's take a bit of time to look back at the films released this year. What is your favourite film so far? Mine is Last Night in Soho. but I'm just a bias Edgar Wright fan.

In any case, I'll see you in our next update, and may be in our next video, which ever comes first!

Files

Comments

Anonymous

I thought Dune was quite unique. Instead of going the Lynch route of practically just transplanting 18th Century Europe into the year 10191, the new film goes far into humanity's past, way back into ancient Mesopotamia for the bas reliefs on the walls and doors. The structural design is pretty brutalist with harsh geometric shapes, which as you say is shared by the technology. The art design matches the brutalism of the system of the Faufreluches where House struggles against House with existential consequences. Comparatively, Lynch's Baroque period art design sets it in the early modern period of nascent nation-states, with heads of state having control over fairly unified countries. Re: Sweat in the desert - I live in the tropics and I've only been in the desert twice, and desert heat is a lot less uncomfortable, at least for short periods. The desert has a "dry" heat as the air has little moisture, so sweat readily evaporates and does not pool into droplets like in the tropics, where it is humid and evaporation is slower.

Anonymous

In interviews Denis Villeneuve talked about the difficulty to "find his own way" between the book's description and Lynch's legacy. I think his new designs are very interesting and quite unique, it's much more monolithic and functional than Star Wars or Star Trek. It gives structures and ships a more believable feel. I do agree that it'll become super dry for 3 movies! All major scifi tech has been showcased already, there's not much to wow people in sequels...

Anonymous

There are a lot of items not fleshed out in the movie, spice being one of many. Let see how part 2 of the movie fleshes out

Anonymous

Interesting, I've yet to see Dune. I just saw Soho at a refurbished indie cinema in Singapore and it was a lovely experience, brilliant film to see in that setting. It's really entertaining and absolutely gorgeous. In fact I went mainly because it has cinematography by Chung Chung-hoon of Park Chan-Wook collaboration fame. My favourite film this year is still Seobok, a South Korean sci fi film with Train to Busan's Gong Yoo. It's another visual stunner, but I mainly liked it because it's quite "small" in the events it portrays, it felt like a thoughtful sci fi short story put to film (admittedly with a couple of loud action set pieces). Apparently it retells a Joseon era folktale about the search for immortality, so for those with more historical knowledge it probably works even better.

AccentedCinema
>>73162246

The problem is some characters sweats while others don't. Like Jason Momoa's character does, a lot of the native characters do, but the main characters don't. It's odd and inconsistent.

Anonymous
>>73162246

I honestly never noticed that. I'll look out of it if I rewatch the film.

Anonymous

I think Dune worked much better for me than it did for you, but I will concede that it was strangely coy about what spice was all about. If I remember correctly the book says it not only provides the key to long distance space travel, but is also used in small quantities by everyone who can afford it for its health benefits. It seems strange that the movie never got around to spending a minute explaining why it was so important.

jaded cynic

As a MacGuffin, do we really care what spice does other than knowing it is an important resource that everyone fights over? Isn't that the definition of a MacGuffin? We know it is essential for space travel; we know the House of Harkonnen got rich harvesting it over 80 years; we know Paul is sensitive to it and it enhances his "visions." It drives the plot. Isn't that enough? Sure, the book goes into more details, but I appreciate the film does not dive into the LORE. It's a precious thing that the colonizers oppress the natives for. It could be a stand-in for oil, spices, precious metals, what have you. It doesn't matter. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention to MCU movies, but I still don't know what the Tesseract does. The fact that the Fremen care about water more than anything, including spice, also drives it home. Maybe we should all care less about what it does and leave Arrakis alone.

AccentedCinema
>>73717838

I think the filmmakers were thinking about the same thing when they decides to leave spice more or less unexplained, which sounds like a good decision to focus more on the plot and less on the lore. But my friend ended up finding the world more interesting than the characters, and want to know more about the spice than the people. So in a sense, this whole thing is less a problem and more of a symptom.