Reviews

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 […]

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 […]

12 March 2013

On TV, Toronto is the new New York

I watch a lot of TV shows and one thing I always notice immediately is when New York is not New York on screen. Lots of TV shows have been doing that for ages – good examples are Friends and Castle, both of which are shot in LA. Most film companies just don’t want to invest in the authenticity of shooting in the real New York, so they stay in Hollywood. But in the last couple of years, even LA appears to have become too expensive – as more and more US shows are shot in Canada. The trick is […]

1 February 2013

Welcome to Babylon 5

There are very few TV shows which send you on an emotional roller coaster beyond compare. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005), Downton Abbey and The Sopranos are among them, but none of the shows currently out there can live up to them. It’s a paradox, actually – we know that all those characters and events are fictional, yet we still invest emotionally and our capability for empathy makes us feel with the characters. I have seen so many shows by now, I daresay I suffer from TV show fatigue – the lack of emotional turmoil as experienced during […]

7 June 2011

Much Ado About David Tennant And Catherine Tate

Back in January, on a boring Sunday while doing the usual nothing on the internet, I got a Twitter pop-up on my screen from David Tennant’s news channel. It had just been announced that David Tennant and Catherine Tate would be performing on stage in a new production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. “Interesting…”, I thought aloud to myself, which alerted my boyfriend who was sitting next to me doing stuff on his own computer. I told him about this discovery, and after about 3 minutes of discussion, we had spontaneously decided that our summer vacation would take place […]

5 June 2011

In the QI audience

I’ve been planning my current trip to London since January, so naturally I continuously kept checking out cool stuff do to while I’m there. One of the things I checked out was applausestore.com, which is a platform where you can apply for TV studio audience tickets. And I got extra lucky – after applying for the waiting list, the reserve list and the actual ticket list, I got a priority ticket to the show QI! Yay! Unless you’re not British or a total Stephen Fry fanatic, you might be thinking “huh?”. QI (Quite Interesting) is a panel quiz show hosted […]