adastra

13 June 2013

Vikings: Raiding your TV

The History Channel wants to ride the wave of success many American TV channels are currently experiencing with their serial productions. They have attempted this by creating a fictionalized TV show about the Vikings, the people who lived in Scandinavia in the middle ages and who are probably most famous as seafarers. Fun side note: 99% of vikings were farmers. The TV show was brought to life by none other than Michael Hirst, most famous for the two Elizabeth films with Cate Blanchett in the lead, as well as for the TV show The Tudors, about which I blogged a […]

11 June 2013

16.145 kilometers: Australia

Three weeks from now, I will be on a plane. That plane will take me to the other end of the world, 16.145 kilometers away from where I’m sitting now: Brisbane, Australia. There, I will attend The University of Queensland for one semester as a Study Abroad guest student. I have chosen this university because it’s one of the five best universities in Australia. Naturally, I have also chosen it because of its location: I wanted to go to Australia because a stay of several months is the best possible opportunity to get to know this country. Since it takes […]

8 June 2013

Surfacing: Identity

Margaret Atwood’s second novel Surfacing (1972) follows in the footsteps of her debut novel The Edible Woman: it also portrays a woman who undergoes a transformation, albeit a strikingly different one. The Narrator of Surfacing has no name, which I think is deliberate: she has no identity, but she could also represent something bigger – all women, all Canadians. In the novel, the Narrator, together with her boyfriend Joe and her friends, married couple Anna and David, travel to the Narrator’s family cabin next to a lake in a remote area of Quebec. There, the Narrator wants to find her […]

5 June 2013

Düsseldorf in the Movies

For no particular reason, my home town of Düsseldorf appears to be a favorite among film producers in Hollywood. Maybe I only notice this because I live in Düsseldorf, but somehow I get the feeling that whenever a German town is mentioned in a Hollywood movie, it’s Düsseldorf. Naturally I always have to laugh when this is the case, sometimes more, sometimes less – depending on the degree and accuracy of what is mentioned. Düsseldorf is mentioned only once in Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained (2012) – one of the main characters, Dr. King Schulz, is a former dentist and […]

2 June 2013

The Utopia Experiment

Where is Jessica Hyde? This is the central question of Channel 4’s unique, somewhat experimental six-part series Utopia. This series has attracted my attention by coincidence, but I’m glad it did – it’s been a long time since I have seen something to utterly weird and compelling. The central characters of the show are a group of comic book fans who know each other from an online chatroom. They are united in their obsession for a mysterious comic called “The Utopia Experiments”, which was written by a mad men in a psychiatric ward. When it is discovered that there may […]

27 May 2013

This is what it’s like to study at a German university

Since 2011 I have been studying English and Linguistics at the local university here in Düsseldorf, Germany. Unlike the universities in the anglophone world, universities in my local state of North-Rhine Westphalia do not require students to pay tuition (merely a small fee for the free train ticket every semester, which currently is about 280€). Education is supposed to be free for everyone in Germany. German universities also don’t have a strict selection process in their applications – there is merely a regulation by average grade (something like GPA). Based on the intake of students in a particular degree program […]

22 May 2013

International Cinema V: English, please.

Here we go again! After no less than 5 years, finally another post about my favorite films from allover the world! This is a rather special special, as it’s completely linguistically unchallenging. All the movies are in the English language, with the slight advantage of not being Hollywood crap but made in and focusing on the countries they originate from. Contrary to my previous installments of this long neglected series of blog posts, you might actually have seen some of these movies. Australia Ned Kelly (2003) Apparently Ned Kelly is the Jesse James (or something) and this film attempts to […]

16 May 2013

Deus Ex Machina: Person of Interest

Person of Interest is an American TV show about former CIA agent John Reese who teams up with mysterious hacker Harold Finch. Together they help people involved in premeditated crimes – with the help of a secret machine which detects such crimes. The machine was originally built to protect the US from the threat of terror, but it also detects crimes that are not relevant to national security. With the help of a back door built into the code of the machine, Finch is able to determine the identities of the people in need of help and sends Reese out […]

10 May 2013

The Edible Woman

Margaret Atwood’s debut novel, first published in 1969, was way ahead of its time. Initially it reminded me of Mad Men: a TV show in which women are undermined by the patriarch society from not so long ago. For the record, I have only seen three episodes of Mad Men and then I gave up, because it is neither fun to watch nor did I really care about any of the characters. What Mad Men and The Edible Woman have in common is the behavior of men towards women. The Edible Woman, however, is an “original”, a real product of […]