I watched this documentary on hoopla about Yayoi Kusama’s life and art. It chronicles her difficult childhood, struggles with mental illness, and her resilient journey from decades of isolation and obscurity to eventual acclaim and influence on the art world.
The documentary is visually compelling and deeply inspiring. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in art, psychology, and the power of perseverance.
2026-09-13
Kusama: Infinity
2025-01-10
Baby driver
Bumped into this movie on a long flight as I was looking for something light and entertaining amidst external noise and internal drowsiness. It turned out to be much better than I thought, essentially a (rap) musical wrapped in actions instead of a mindless action flick.
A good movie is like a novel research project; one never knows apriori what it really is about or feels like, not from the title, synopsis, or even the trailer, until completing it.
2024-03-17
Loving Vincent
I absolutely love the hand-painted oil effects of this film which I watched on hoopladigital.
The backgrounds are mostly flat and static and thus can be painted more sparsely while the foreground characters and objects are rotoscoped over (green-screen) captured live actions.
The actors were chosen to resemble the subjects in the original paintings which were used as style references for the painting process.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/d9/63/d963638c-22fd-4363-9282-c0f329ec016f/lovingv.jpg)
2023-09-09
Vivarium
Spoiler alert!
Among all these recent movies that are mostly derivative it is a pleasure to finally find one that is original and thought provoking.
Vivarium is about a young couple who were trapped in a suburban neighborhood and forced to raise a child that seems like a human but is actually a creature from a specie with advanced technology but parasitic morale.
The plot by itself is an interesting sci-fi psychological horror story, but also reflects on the current state of our society, such as housing, parenting, inequality, and resource extraction.
2022-05-22
Apollo 10½
I watched Apollo 10½ thinking it was a science fiction only to find out the story is even more interesting.
The animated actions looked lively, which turns out to be based on a type of rotoscoping-over-live-action that the director also employed with his prior works such as A Scanner Darkly.
2021-12-21
Video texture
I captured this raw video of spatial-temporal light patterns and stabilized it via Ae.
2021-01-16
Not found
Not found pic.twitter.com/I90DM6pwJX
— Li-Yi Wei (@liyiwei) January 17, 2021
2020-12-23
Unnatural selection
One day, we will be able to program genomes for purposes good or bad.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11063952/
2020-12-15
Self reflection
I spotted this intriguing reflection off a large glass wall and took a photo for potential drawing reference, but have yet to figure out what to do.
