Erkki

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Posts posted by Erkki

  1. Posted

    I bought the Tim Lucas book (All the colors of the dark) after 4 years of coveting it! Have only read a tiny bit so far, though, but it's an awesome book for sure.

     

    I also found some copies of more Bava films. Caltiki is not a bad monster movie, not great either. The blob-like monster effects are quite good for the day, even if some of the miniatures now seem obviously so. I think Bava only directed the special effects shots here, not the actors.

     

    Roy Colt and Winchester Jack was rather a bore, though. I think Bava wasn't really into westerns? And this is a western comedy, not a particularly funny one. Although it kind of seems to be a good twist on the much used "playing both sides against each other" western trope. Some matte paintings just don't look like they are part of the scene in HD, the characters are not strong enough to make me care, and neither is the plot.

     

    In an attempt to get Bava back into my top 10 most watched directors, I'm trying to watch a few more films soon, if I can find them. Next up:

    Four Times that Night (Bava's sex-comedy version of Rashomon?)

    The Wonders of Aladdin (I haven't got high hopes as most of his peplum movies that I've seen have been his worst so far IMHO, along with the Western mentioned above)

    The House of Exorcism (this is just to boost the view count, it can't be better than Lisa and the Devil, of which it is a different cut)

  2. Posted

    I just had a crazy Marvel week:

    image.thumb.png.4c0a82d46c313881de1c747ccaa86550.png

     

    As you can see from my ratings, I don't think any of them are great, but I still enjoyed it, at least most of the actors are good. I have seen some of the ones missing from this list, this was mainly for filling in gaps in my movie watching because almost everyone has seen these and they also featured in several lists I was following. I'm glad it's over with, I don't know what my future approach is to future Marvel movies... obviously I'm not a fan, but will I keep watching them more regularly now just to avoid having to do a similar marathon in 10 years? I don't know.

     

    But now I'm also starting to doubt myself a little bit. Would I maybe have thought more highly of some of these movies (e.g. Thor: Ragnarök), if I hadn't watched them as part of a crazy marathon, but for example as a single Marvel movie that I've seen all year? It's possible, because I remember I enjoyed Dr. Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy way more than any of these ones, when I saw them out of the blue because friends invited me.

  4. Posted

    I mostly care about finally getting an UHD Bly-Ray player (PS5) and maybe a system that is better/faster/quieter with improved versions of streaming apps (I hope) than my current PS3.

     

    For some reason after my first XBox died (I don't even remember which version it was, maybe the 360) I switched to PlayStation and never looked back.

     

    But yeah, I plan to play some games on it too. Not sure if I care about any of the PS5 games, but I still haven't played some PS4 games that I'd like to.

  5. Posted

    Finished it! It's kind of one of those things where your memory plays tricks and you think "isn't this how Outcast always looked?" But I did get occasional flashbacks to how it actually looked, mostly with the Hoti fruit that were neon-red in the original so that even my colorblind eyes could spot them much more easily, especially since the terrain was also much less detailed.

     

    Got 95% side quests, not sure what I missed. I read about some smoke grenade gun or something that I never found, maybe because Oru died before I met Kyuran. So many details in this game, but it does play a lot worse compared to newer open world games. Not sure how I like that many items are placed along walls and other extremities so it keeps you running along walls.

     

    And the twon-has ended up being so useless, even as I had 3 guis in the end :(

     

    There were several places that looked like secret doors, e.g. in the temples of Shamazaar, I never found out if I could open them or they are not actual doors. Tried several essence idol combinations.

  6. Posted

    One of the things I was stuck with was the Daoka to Okaar. I thought I had to do something to get to it, but as I just found it, I realized I could have easily gone there in the beginning of the game. That's one of the cool things about Outcast, that it's really open world from the start. There was a boatman that kept yapping on about that Daoka, I think to give me more chance to find it, but I wasn't paying close attention to what he said. I think I had the same problem the first time I played Outcast.

  7. Posted

    Oh man, this game. It has so many flaws, but I think at the time it came out it had so many new ideas. As I'm playing it for the 3rd 6th time I still needed to get the help of a walkthrough when it seemed I was stuck because I had forgotten a few things and because the names of the talan are so similar (e.g. Zeb vs. Zeo).

     

    As I'm trying to ride the twon-ha again, I think this is where the main flaw of the game is with regarding getting stuck in terrain. It's such a faster mode of transport, but can't really get arround the same terrain that I can on foot and has to use stairs in Shamazaar :(

     

    All the high-tech equipment seems kind of unnecessary in this game. Well, maybe for an alternative play style the PPS would be useful, but I'm just killing soldiers wherever I can now. The land mines don't seem to work at all and the CALPR-T is also something I haven't found a use for, yet I have like 70 of them. Same with proxy and UBIK stuff really.

  9. Posted

    @Roderick I started playing Second Contact and I know Outcast's controls feel very clunky now and I still feel it too. Especially the swimming feels so imprecise when you are trying to reach some underwater object. But I think I can tolerate the controls and the poor geometry interactions because I just loved that game to death.

     

    I think it's worth to remember that at the time of it's launch, wasn't it actually the very first (or one of the first) 3rd person 3D action adventure game where you had isolation of upper and lower body movement - separation of looking, aiming, shooting from what the legs were doing? At least some memories are coming back to me that this felt revolutionary at the time. AFAIK, before Outcast, 3rd person action game characters had you running only in the direction you were looking.

     

    I hope I'm not totally off with this, maybe I'm remembering only in terms of games that people in adventuregamers.com accepted as adventure games.

  10. Posted

    Well, I have the Valve Index now, but before I properly get into playing games on it, I have to clean up a room to have a nice playing area of about 10 square meters and I'm also waiting for RTX 30xx availability. Actually saw the local store had just one option of 3080 in stock, but it was 1000€ +. I might actually get a RTX 3090, even as it's very expensive, it should last longer with the increased memory size and be more useful for video editing as well. And I think it's probably the last video card I'll get for my current system, as the next one would likely be a completely new build with PCIe 4.0 in a couple of years or so.

  13. Posted

    I just realized that if I’m going to reduce the dynamic range of audio volume, I’ll possibly have to be more precise with dialogue, SFX volumes etc., re-tweaking the hundreds of clips...

     

    Or maybe I could just apply a compressor to the whole audio mix...

  14. Posted

    Although I listened to it on my living room screen, which I had to put on quiet recently because of neighbours and I realized that I can't hear half the background sounds. Then started reading about good practices for mixing sound and realized I might have to go over the audio mix so that everything is within a dynamic range of just 20 dB or so.

  16. Posted

    @Ben X , well I'm almost done with step 1. now :) I don't know why but I just couldn't work on the film for months, also because with the coronavirus I had moved my work office to my editing room and I was too lazy to clear the desk for the editing work. But anyway now I had to make these kickstarter pre-launch videos (this also got delayed months) and got back into the habit of editing. I almost finished my film today (yeah, all I needed was one day really :|) and all I need is to add some more footsteps and maybe office ambiance.

     

    My music license will expire in about 4 months so I think I will skip step 2. and just put the film online and then start looking into festivals that accept movies that are already online. And hopefully next month I'll do step 5.

  18. Posted

    Yesterday I finished my movie-watching quest of recent years. I looked up some old posts in this thread I made when I starting it.

     

    On 11/3/2016 at 8:33 AM, Erkki said:

    I thought I'd give myself some movie watching goals for the rest of the year, since I have somehow developed a 400-item watchlist and it takes thought to pick what to see next. I might still pick something else any given day of course.

     

    1. All Ingmar Bergman movies -- I'll go with the highest rated ones first, and I'll stop if I end up disappointed by more than one, as I've only seen a couple so far. I loved all of Tarkovsky and since he and Bergman inspired each other I hope I will enjoy most of these a lot.

     

    2. Letterboxd Top 100 -- or maybe Rotten Tomatoes* Top 100, or something like that. I'm currently going with Letterboxd as it's easy to see the top with the ones I've seen dimmed out. I notice that Satantango and Shoah are on that list and I have no idea how to approach watching these 7+ hour movies. I hope they are at least divided into chapters of some sorts, but I guess random breaks would also work. It may just be like a TV series binge on steroids?

     

    3. 1000 movies marked as seen on Letterboxd -- I'm at 835 and considering my current rate of 30+ movies a month I should hit that. Also I might still remember some movies I've seen already.

     

    [edit] * PS Actually I think Letterboxd is replacing RT for me as the go-to place for ratings. Although I haven't made an actual comparison, I feel like I find myself far more in accord with the ratings on that site. I guess it may change once Letterboxd gets more users.

     

    1. I did see a lot of Bergman movies and liked most of them, but I realized he made so many movies, that I'm probably never going to watch all of them. I have the new Blu-Ray box set, will go through that and I'm sure Bergman will actually become my most watched director.

     

    2. It took me a while to actually get the Letterbox Top 100 watched! I only finished it this month. Because it had Satantango and I just never picked it for watching. I had to go through almost all the other films in the various Top 100s and Top 250s I ended up going through, before I dared go for the 10 or so 4-15 hour length movies that were on Letterboxd and Sight & Sound Top 250.

     

    3. I have now marked 2871 films as watched. Always my disclaimer when talking about number of movies watched: some of them were shorts. (But then again a couple of them were 14 hours long).
     

    On 11/3/2016 at 8:56 AM, Patrick R said:

    I am a fan of Tarkovsky and, for the most part, can't stand Bergman. YMMV, naturally, but I wouldn't personally recommend it.

     

    I recently made a list of shame on Letterboxd and am in the process of trying to knock most of them out by the end of the year. The list is compiled of every Oscar best picture winner, every IMDB top 250 film, every "essential arthouse" film, every big box office hit I haven't seen. It's more about cultural context than actual shame (I in no way shape or form suspect I will like Avatar even a little bit), but it has been rewarding knocking a lot of stuff off.

     

    Then again, it's also made me watch Driving Miss Daisy, so maybe it's a terrible idea.

     

    EDIT: Don't know Satantango, but Shoah is episodic.

     

    Hi Patrick! I also took it as a side quest to watch through all the Oscar best picture winners now. 15 to go, I hope to finish in June. Driving Miss Daisy, yeah, not great. I'm not sure how one would compile a list of every "essential arthouse" film, but I do think I have some more to do here. So I should maybe start looking in that direction, but no doubt I've seen a lot of them by now.

     

    On 20/3/2016 at 11:34 PM, Erkki said:

    My second viewing of Snowpiercer left a way better impression than the first time. This time I just gave up on the idea that the premise had to make sense and it became very enjoyable.


    Also, saw Harakiri today. What a movie. This is really an ageless film.

     

    And Harakiri by Kobayashi was one of the first movies I picked to watch back then from the very top and then started going down from there. And yesterday I appropriately closed the circle with the same director's Samurai Rebellion.

     

    To sum up, these are the lists I ended up watching to 100%, in order of completion:

     

    1. AFI 100 Years 100 Movies

    2. Sight & Sound 2012 Directors Poll Extended

    3. Sight & Sound 2012 Critics Poll Extended

    4. First 300 only: /r/TrueFilm Canon (1000 films) (it was mostly automatic, seems to match my watching habits well - only had to watch 3  or so extra films from here)

    5. Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films

    Bonus side quest TODO:

    6. Academy Award Winners for Best Picture

     

    And I think after doing the last one I will still at some point try to get more of IMDB Top 250, maybe during a decade or so every movie from 1000 films to watch before you die etc. But generally I will start to scale down my film watching now, I hope. Or at least try to be less obsessive about it.

     

    What have I learned from all this? I'm not sure. I am not very good at expressing my thoughts about the films or deeply analyzing them so I haven't even written short reviews on Letterboxd for most of them. But recently I did start writing more reviews, even if they don't say much. I mostly watch these films as entertainment, and to broaden my horizon. Eventually I did start having a more analytical thoughts while watching and I definitely get a feeling early on just from the cinematography whether a movie is going to be a 3-star or 4-star movie for me. And I try to analyze the dramatic structure and take that into account when rating.

     

    I also made a short film while doing this, and I want to continue making those. I also started taking part of a local movie quiz season and my team is nearing 3rd place but never quite able to get there. Most of the ones above us have film critics, distribution professionals etc. in their teams, though.

     

    Was it worth it? Eventually it definitely got obsessive, and when this quarantine started I saw that as a chance to get this over with more quickly than I had planned. I like that I've seen all these films now and have a wider picture of the history of cinema. I have some regrets about not spending my free time in a more balanced way... but not so much really, it was fine.

  19. Posted

    The Best of Youth is made up of two 3 hour parts, so it's a relatively easily watchable superlong (> 4 hour) movie and my favourite of those so far. It tells the life story of two brothers and their extended family from their time as students in the 1960s Italy to the 2000s. Even though I think the movie has some flaws, it became one of my favourite movies ever because it really affected me a lot emotionally and I can't stop thinking about it.

     

    I wish I was watching it again right now, but it will have to wait until I'm done with my list-watching (4 movies totaling 35 hours + 27 historic Oscar Best Picture winners to go).

     

    [edit] I found out it was originally shot for Italian TV as a miniseries. Now suddenly it makes even more sense why it is so easy to watch, has perfect pacing and looks somehow more modern than most movies.

  20. Posted

    I mostly run into 3 people's ratings and reviews on Letterboxd who seem to watch or have watched a lot of the same films as I have:

     

    PatrickRipoll - from here (used to be), good well-argued reviews, I don't always agree though. Also I follow Patrick's co-hosts from Director's Club podcast, but they don't seem to write reviews there.

     

    MikeMariano - also from here. Really interesting ratings that usually seem to go against the consensus. I wish you also wrote more reviews, @mikemariano !

     

    hamburgersplash - I thought they were from here, but search doesn't reveal. So I can't remember how I started following them, but as I'm watching world cinema they are almost always ahead of me with a one sentence review (and no rating).

     

    [edit] ah, realized that I probably followed hamburgerslash because he made a popular list https://letterboxd.com/hamburgersplash/list/weirdo-watchlist/

     

    [edit2] oh and I forgot the 4th one I mostly run into: Sean Baker, the director of Tangerine and The Florida Project. He seems to watch a lot of movies and actively logs them with some comments. He usually avoids giving an opinion, though, which I guess is understandable viewpoint for a director of popular movies.

  22. Posted

    I want the best one, I guess Index is it at the moment? Although it's pretty much the maximum I would pay for one (well I'm willing to get a new graphics card too).

     

    I heard a lot of good about Beat Saber but somewhy I have doubts if it's for me. We'll see.

  23. Posted

    You're right. I've been putting it off for years. Time to do it!

     

    [edit] Damn! I think I was a bit late. If I'm not wrong, then a couple of days ago it would have been in stock, but now there's a 8 week wait.

     

    [edit2] So sad. I was getting excited, but I guess I can wait... and maybe I was wrong aobut availability couple of days ago, some site is still showing that it's "available" after google search. Anyway, sad news is that I have the EXACT minimum GPU for Index , so to play games I probably want a newer one and good news! hardware hasn't made some kind of leap in the mean time so my pci-express 3.0 slot still seems valid for newest graphics cards?!?! I didn't dare hope so but lucky me.

  24. Posted

    I just found out that I'll be working from home for AT LEAST 3 more months... I should find some outdoor activities , but also really tempted to get a VR now... Valve Index seems to be in stock even?

     

    But I'm still really doubtful that it will get much use beyond this game and a couple of others. And I don't even have that much time for extra indoor activities...

  25. Posted

    I have now seen 8 Yuzo Kawashima movies! None of them have been quite as good as Suzaki Paradise, but his best work is still ahead. Anyway, I hope the restorations of these films will end up getting some more exposure in the coming years (maybe Criterion). One thing that all of his movies seem to have in common is that they are almost all more about women than men, or at least they treat both as equals, often having main characters of both genders. And some of the films highlight the struggle that women have had to face. I'm not sure I'd call these feminist movies, but it's still so good to find that even back in the 50s Japan, not all filmmakers were sexist or focusing mainly on men's stories.