Movies

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 […]

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 […]

13 September 2015

The Fall

In a sea of formulaic film fads full of replace heroes and exchangeable plots, it’s getting harder and harder to find films that are truly fantastic, fabulous and fascinating. But they are out there, and one such film which I have seen only this year, is Tarsem Singh’s 2006 film The Fall. The frame story is that of a curious little girl in a hospital in 1920s Los Angeles, who befriends a fellow patient, an injured stuntman (played by Lee Pace). He tells her a fantastic story of five peculiar heroes on a quest to find a woman. In 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 […]

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 December 2010

Of Parallel Universes, Alternate Realities, Realms and Dimensions

As a side effect of the significant amount of Science Fiction I’ve been enjoying lately (most recently having devoured Fringe in no time), I’ve noticed a phenomenon that is almost as inexplicably over-present in fiction as vampires or zombies are: Parallel Universes. There’s just one thing in which Parallel Universes strikingly differ from fiction-favorites vampires and zombies: their existence can not be proven, nor can be proven that they don’t exist. They are the lab cat of science, locked in a box labeled “Schrodinger’s”. Science usually refers to Parallel Universes as the “Multiverse”, which I will also do here, mostly. […]

3 August 2010

Inception – A Labyrinth of Dreams

Warning: Contains spoilers for the movie Inception! Will probably also not make much sense without having seen the movie. Sometimes I dream that I’m slipping or falling over, and the sensation I feel in the dream sends impulses to my body causing my legs and arms to try catch the fall (and thus move) – which instantly wakes me up. But it has happened that I dreamed about falling down and down from somewhere very high for a long time, without being able to wake up from the dream. I kept falling and I felt that tingling, yet incredibly scary, […]

20 January 2010

Movies of the Zeros

Some people argued about when the millennium would start – 2000 or 2001? And when does the decade start? I’m gonna take the easy route and regard the ten years from 2000 to 2009 as the last century, they all have at least two zeros in them. So, this post will be something like a Best Movies of the Decade List, widely influenced by my own personal opinion. The Zero-Decade is the decade in which my interest for movies and culture in general developed into what it is today. I was 15 years old when the century began and 25 […]

12 May 2009

Have you tried… not being a mutant? (X-Men Origins: Wolverine)

I’m not much of a superhero geek, I never read a lot of superhero comics (except Witchblade maybe), but every once in a while I enjoy a bit of easy-to-digest entertainment a la Spider-Man, Batman Begins or Superman Returns. But the X-Men are probably the most interesting among those present day movie superheroes. They work because they are not just a single individual in the fight against evil, but a group of human subspecies which acts as an allegory for minorities – complete with awesome superpowers every kid who’s been mobbed in school dreamed of. With a devoted fan like […]