Reviews

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

11 September 2015

Victorian Gothic Embodied: Penny Dreadful

Gothic is a literary genre that is as popular today as it was in the past. First attributed to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it has inspired an entire array of subgenres, such as horror, the supernatural and even science fiction. Not only do these genres still play an important role in present day literature, film and television – also, the Gothic genre has sparked an entire subculture that mostly defines itself around its music and dresscode. A recent television series that embodies everything about the spirit of Gothic literature is Penny Dreadful, which is set in a […]

23 May 2015

The Future is looking Grimm

Or is it? Over its past four seasons, Grimm has established itself as a rather serene show. Despite it dark and gritty outward appearance, its serialized plots always tend towards a happy ending – as one would expect of a show that is largely inspired by fairy tales. The world of Grimm is inhabited by creatures (‘Wesen’) that cannot be seen by the majority of the population. They are sort of creatures that live inside people, but the people themselves are the creatures. They only show this when they want to or when they get emotional (‘Woge’). Some of them […]

26 September 2013

The Glory of Spartacus

Let us break words on most glorious entertainment! When my ears first received tale of a television spectacle bearing the name of Spartacus, they did not stand to attention. “Meh”, was the only thought that sprang to mind, “gladiators, Romans, they have been so numerous on our screens in the past. Why bother…” The thought fell from mind and was not brought back to surface for many moons. But word from trusted friend left impression and action was taken. Familiar names among scribes accelerated process – Steven S. DeKnight and Jed Whedon of Whedonverse fame stand among them. Thus, shortly […]

18 August 2013

Farscape: Not sure if good or bad TV show.

Imagine the impossible: coincidentally ending up at the other end of the universe, being unable to ever lay eyes on planet earth again. It happened to John Crichton, protagonist and only human of the TV show Farscape. Farscape is essentially one thing: far. Far away. By far one of the most imaginative shows. Far and wide. So far out there. John Crichton is an astronaut from the good old US of A. He is apparently also a talented engineer or something, since he built a module by the name of Farscape which he volunteered to take out into space. It […]

7 August 2013

Hannibal will eat you up inside

Oh my god, that’s fucking disgusting! Excuse my language, but it’s absolutely necessary, because that’s essentially what you will keep telling yourself if you decide to watch the TV adaptation of Hannibal. Initially I was hesitant to watch this at all, because I have the feeling that Hannibal Lecter is a topic as worn out as a pair of twenty year old sneakers. Sure, we all love Anthony Hopkins for his creepy-ass portrayal of fiction’s most famous cannibal. But after Silence of the Lambs, things got a bit less mind-blowing. The feature film Hannibal was fucking disgusting (tough in a […]

27 June 2013

The Handmaid’s Tale: Feminist Dystopia

In my recent post on apocalyptic fiction, I promised you a post on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – and here it is! The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985 and is therefore the most recent of my reviewed books of Atwood (I have previously written reviews on The Edible Woman and Surfacing). However, it is actually the first book I read by Atwood – I read The Handmaid’s Tale about a year and a half ago for the first time because it kept appearing in connection with science fiction and dystopian literature. That sparked my interested and I was […]