Preface: side conversation.

I rearranged the webpage to have the "Filmmaking in the Age of AI" series under a separate collection, as the old collection was reaching its limit on the number of entries I could have. Framer seems to be making lots of updates lately, to avoid losing information, I compiled it under this new tab, even though now all dates are messed up. I'm too lazy to fix it, so here it is. Ps, the time is in New Zealand time, since framer has its headquarters in New Zealand. There's no option to put it under local time as we speak, or maybe I just don't know how to do it.

I've paused on updating for a bit since I've been going to The San Fransisco International Film Festival to catch up on the new films that came out this year. After watching four films from USA, Turkey, Japan, and I guess one co-production between Germany and France, I realized globally, as a collective human civilization, we are moving forward a lot with film as a medium, in terms of the topics we cover, techniques we use. However, American movies are clearly falling behind, with repetitive themes, structures, or just in general I feel like there's nothing that's being said that's new, or really required a movie to be made to say it. Not sure what is happening, but people have stopped taking risks, and making changes, to create something new, despite the vast amount of resources at their disposal. All of the headliner of SFFILM are American movies. I watched one of them, Late Fame, which is not bad, but very uneventful two hours of my life. I didn't finish it, went out to the bathroom, killed time waiting outside and observing the architecture of the venue: the theater itself was more interesting than the movie.

Late Fame is a 2025 American drama directed by Kent Jones, written by Samy Burch, and based on a posthumously published novella by Arthur Schnitzler. Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian writer — born in Vienna in 1862, died in 1931. He was a physician by training, which shaped his writing significantly. He was deeply interested in psychology, sexuality, and the interior lives of his characters at a time when Freud was developing psychoanalysis in the same city. It stars Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, and Edmund Donovan. Despite the movie adapted from a last century story, it's set in modern day New York, which is a bit jarring, and I personally thought it'd be better if it was set back in original books timeline. It mocks the pretentiousness of the writer / creative circle, and an aging poet's complicated inner desire of wanting to be understood as a creative only to realized that the group praises him so much for his work don't actually care about his work, but more about being associated with him for their role-playing of being a writer as rich kids who don't need a job. It's melodramatic and a bit underwhelming, or perhaps I just had too much hope for the headliners.

Meanwhile, other movies I watched, including Renior from Japan, Salvation from Turkey, and a co-production featuring Tony Leung about a tree called Silent Friend were all impressive in their own ways. Renoir is a 2025 coming-of-age drama written and directed by Chie Hayakawa, starring Yui Suzuki, Lily Franky, and Hikari Ishida. It follows the childhood of 11-year-old Fuki in late-1980s Tokyo. The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or. The movie reads like an impressionist painting at times. I'm not sure how to describe how it made me feel, but when I realized the movie was about herself and her own father towards the end, I started bawling. It's tender, personal, captures that 1980s bubble economy japan had. Everything was hopeful, yet in a nihilistic and disconnected way. People were navigating through life and relationships, each with their own trauma, disclosed, moving forward.

Salvation from Turkey was not like anything I saw before. I've seen a few movies from Turkey, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's About Dry Grasses.

(writing)