A Mars A Day [work in progress]

Working on a Martian landscape, with some help from the Guru:

Someone should sweep up all these rocks...

Produced in Blender 2.76

Based on a Blender Guru tutorial

Scamanderick

Newt Scamander’s never quite tough enough

To catch his pet niffler who snaffles stuff.

Well-meaning, sincere,

And not quite all here:

In other words – typical Hufflepuff...

I'm a sucker for a French movie [Review: Evolution]

Nicholas is a young boy, probably eight or nine. He lives with his mother, and other young boys and their curiously pale-skinned mothers, in a town of concrete cube houses on an isolated island. Nicholas' very presence is an enigma - like the other boys, he bears no physical similarity to his mother, and also he likes to draw places and people that he cannot have experienced on the island. He starts to look for answers, but is whisked away to a sinister hospital where he makes an unlikely friend and discovers something truly horrific about the island.

This film has restored my faith in French horror cinema, and I can finally forgive our international neighbours for Eden Log. It's short, at about une heure et quart, and it's beautifully shot in stark colours, interspersed with awesome nature photography. The motif of the starfish recurs throughout the film and adds mystery and menace to the atmosphere - in one scene where the symbol appears in the operating theatre lights, I was dumbstruck.

Evolution is nightmare fuel of a subtle, quiet type. It's not a gore-fest, although some of the scenes in the hospital are bloody enough. It's more of an atmospheric chiller, with a surprisingly tender story at its heart about the unexpected friendship Nicholas finds at the hospital. Meanwhile the precision with which the plot unwinds, and the equally precise cinematography, gives the impression that everything in this enigmatic film is there for a reason, and I suspect I will be returning to it over and again trying to solve the puzzles.

I should point out as a public service that this is a French movie, directed in 2015 by Lucile Hadžihalilović. If at any point a youthful David Duchovny appears on your screen, you are watching the wrong film.

They're Here! They're Here! [Review: Arrival]

Monolithic alien spaceships appear in twelve seemingly random locations across Earth's continents. The military call on linguistics professor Louise (Amy Adams) for an opinion, and she quickly talks her way onto the contact team and finds herself leading the contact mission alongside physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner).

What follows is a beautifully low-key first contact movie with echoes of both Contact and Interstellar, as the team races against time to decode the aliens' language before the fragile pax between involved nations breaks down. Adams stands out with a melancholy and human performance as a scientist plagued by memories of loss, and this is very much her movie - Renner is here in a supporting role although there's some good chemistry between the two.



Overall this is a well-scripted movie, and there's lots to enjoy - not least the alien language which is realised in depth, and the tension that builds between nations as teams at different sites become suspicious of each other.

There are however a couple of minor shark-jumps. Louise's first successful communication with the aliens is based on such a simple idea, I had trouble believing this hadn't been tried already. Later, despite being set in a military camp with tight security, one soldier manages to connect to a fundamentalist website on his laptop without triggering any alarms. These do not spoil the movie which stands on its performances and eerie atmospherics. The big twist, which I won't reveal here, is a narrative gamble with internal logic that in my opinion just about holds together. I liked it but it may well divide viewers.

The theme of interpreting alien languages is a science fiction favourite, although it can also get swept under the metaphorical carpet (yes, Babel fish, I'm talking to you) and it's a potential pitfall if and when we make contact with aliens in the real world. Of the many sci-fi novels that take up this theme I particularly enjoyed Jennifer Foehner Wells' Fluency, which features a scientist hero not unlike Amy Adams' character in Arrival, and Embassytown by China Mieville, a particularly bizarre tale of aliens who recruit humans to become metaphors in their language.

When I Say Honey, You Say Bee [Work In Progress]

Created in Blender 2.76

"Broken Bird" TV Screening: On The Verge

Ariel Undine's "Broken Bird" was featured on Latest TV's "On The Verge" music video show. The folks at Latest TV have kindly put this episode up on YouTube so you can see it here. Latest TV is a Brighton-area TV channel with lots of fresh art and music strands - you can watch them in Brighton on Freeview 7, or via their website here.

Sand And Deliver [Review: The Sand]

It begins with a a group of students. It's always a group of students. How are there any students still living anywhere? These students have a spring break beach party that they think was pretty wild, although the evidence suggests otherwise, and wake up to find the beach deserted and themselves surrounded by an existential threat - anything living that makes contact with the sand itself leads to a sticky end. There's a lot of screaming. Seagulls die. And those students have to justify their 2:1 degrees and use their brains to escape.


I've seen a fair number of low-budget horror movies over the course of my life. This has got to be one of the low-budgetiest I've ever come across. It's actually quite an achievement to come up with a threat that has so little visual impact, much of the time all you ever see are tiny disturbances whipping up from the sand. The actors have to do the hard work, mostly by gurning and screaming, and the screaming in this movie is good quality, reminiscent of those old-school Doctor Who days. Brooke Butler could well have made it as an old-school Doctor Who companion, although I think any of the new batch would have kicked her ass.

This movie fails when it tries anything ambitious - with a fairly low setting of ambitious. The gruesome death scenes are not great, and as soon as the nature of the creature even starts to become apparent, the quality of the effects drops off and the creature effects towards the end are fairly limited. If only they'd had more faith in their original concept. Early on there's a suggestion that the sand-thing might be intelligent - it's able to manipulate surfboards and other physical objects to try to tip the humans over into its zone of influence. That's an idea that could have been developed further and could actually have been more threatening. Similarly, there's a subplot - goodness, what did those naughty students actually do the night of the party? No. Don't care.

This movie was fun in places, with the occasional scene that works really well, and some decent performances making the most of a very basic script, but overall it felt like watching Tremors but without the graboids, the pole-vaulting or the Bacon.