[Weekly Update] December 5, 2021

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!