septemblog

29 September 2015

The 100

Yet another TV show about a post-apocalyptic world? Well… yay! (Honestly!) I’m a big fan of this genre, so big that I actually wrote my bachelor’s thesis about it. And quite a few blog posts / reviews ([1] [2] [3]). So here’s another one of those review blog posts: this one is about The 100, a TV show that began airing on The CW (US) in 2014. The 100 begins loaded with teen drama (or whatever you want to call it), as the premise of the show is that 100 juvenile delinquents are banished to a post-apocalyptic earth which is […]

26 September 2015

Red Dog

Australian films – do they exist? Well they do, but a lot of them are not exactly great. Also, a lot of them try to hide the fact that they’re Australian, such as for example the first three Mad Max films. So when I came to Australia, I tried to finds some good ‘real’ Australian films just to learn a little bit more about the culture. And perhaps the most unexpected film I came across was Red Dog. When I first heard the name of the film, Red Dog, I just couldn’t imagine what it could possibly be about. “Red […]

25 September 2015

Blood and Chocolate

Yesterday I finally finished watching the latest and likely final season of Hannibal. Sadly, Hannibal has been cancelled by NBC and by now it doesn’t look like the show will be picked up by another production company, as most people involved in it have already moved on to other projects. Though I always did admire Hannibal for its writing and cinematography, I did not always necessarily enjoy watching it – it’s just a bit too disgusting for me, and way too sick. I think that’s pretty obvious if you read my profanity-laden post-season-one review of Hannibal. Therefore, I have to […]

24 September 2015

The Crime Scene Cleaner

I have not owned a device capable of receiving German television in ten years, because I can’t bear to watch German television. The primary reason for that is that I just can’t watch dubbed stuff anymore. You’ll find a plethora of reasons for that on against-dubbing.com. So naturally, with the absence from German television, I really have no idea about what’s good in actual German-language productions. Good German films or TV shows are very rare anyway – the only two good German films I can think of are Knockin on Heaven’s Door and Das Leben der Anderen. But as a […]

23 September 2015

The Awful Birth of the Gothic Genre: The Castle of Otranto

Remember when I blogged about Penny Dreadful a while ago? In that blog post, I mentioned The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole as the novel that sparked the entire genre of Gothic fiction. Well, yesterday I actually got around to reading The Castle of Otranto for a project I’m working on – and wow, this is really one of the most terrible books I’ve ever read. It’s like a soap opera meets a B-movie, and the writing style is just indescribably awful. I’ve read better fanfiction. Apparently Horace Walpole must have been at least a little bit ashamed of […]

22 September 2015

Mad Max (The One Where I Didn’t Fall Asleep)

On Sunday, I watched Mad Max: Fury Road for the second time. I had previously seen it in the theater while I was visiting Edinburgh in June. My expectations were somewhere between very high and very low; Very high because of all the internet hype, and very low because I found all previous three Mad Max movies incredibly boring. I actually found them so boring that I fell asleep while watching every single one of them. For that reason, I also cannot really say if I think they are anything other than boring. It’s all a bit of blur. While […]

21 September 2015

Sense8: A Feast for the Senses

When I learned that J. Michael Straczynski, creator and writer of the brilliant Babylon 5, would be writing a new science fiction series, I was very excited. And to make things even more exciting, he was joining forces with the Wachowskis – who, despite the not-good-at-all Jupiter Ascending, are still pioneers of science fiction. Sense8, however, is different from anything they have ever done. In fact, it’s different from everything that ever has been done on television – at least as far as I can tell, and I do watch way too many TV shows. It’s not exactly science fiction. […]

20 September 2015

ðə ˈspɛlɪŋ ɒv ˈɪŋglɪʃ

ˈɛvə ˈwʌndəd waɪ ˈɪŋglɪʃ ˈspɛlɪŋ ɪz səʊ keɪˈɒtɪk? wɛl, wiː hæv tuː θæŋk ðə ˈnɔːmənz fɔː ðæt. wɛn ðeɪ ɪnˈveɪdɪd ˈɪŋglənd ɪn 1066, ðeɪ rʊɪnd ˈɛvrɪθɪŋ. bɪˈfɔː ðæt ɪnˈveɪʒən, ˈɪŋglɪʃ wɒz ə ʤɜːˈmænɪk ˈlæŋgwɪʤ, wɪʧ keɪm tuː ˈɪŋglənd wɪð ði ˈæŋglz, ˈsæksnz, ʤuːts ænd ˈfrɪzɪənz ɪn 449. ɪt wɒz ˈvɛri kləʊs tuː ðə ˈlæŋgwɪʤɪz ˈspəʊkən ɪn wɒt ɪz naʊ ˈʤɜːməni. ɪt wɒz ˈɔːlsəʊ ˈriːznəbli kləʊs tuː ðə ˈlæŋgwɪʤɪz ˈspəʊkən ɪn ˌskændɪˈneɪvɪə. səʊ ˈækʧʊəli, ði ˈɜːlɪɪst ˈlæŋgwɪʤ ˈkɒntækt ˈɪŋglɪʃ ɪksˈpɪərɪənst wɒz wɪð ðə ˌskændɪˈneɪvjənz, huː ɪnˈveɪdɪd ˈnɔːðən ˈɪŋglənd ɪn ði eɪt, naɪnθ ænd tɛnθ ˈsɛnʧʊri. bʌt sɪns ðiːz ˈlæŋgwɪʤɪz wɜː ˈvɛri […]

16 September 2015

Американцы (The Americans)

On Netflix, a TV series with the rather unobtrusive name The Americans caught my attention. I wondered why I hadn’t really heard much about it before, and I also wondered what kind of show this could be – seriously, who would name a show The Americans? It sounds so obscenely patriotic. And you could argue that the show actually is obscenely patriotic – but definitely not the in the American sense. It is a show about two KGB agents in deep cover, living the normal 1980s American family life by day and spying for the Russians by night. These two […]