The Small Picture
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Which genius gets drunk faster?
Read MoreThe Fate of the Furious (2017)
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If you go all the way on everything, why not embrace the silliness on every level and call it F8 of the Furious?
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Captain America: Civil War (2016)
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Captain America: Civil War is another entertaining Marvel movie that reinforces the studio's movie-making and universe-building qualities its competitors can only dream of.
Read MoreBatman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
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(spoilers!)
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has an appropriately silly title for a movie that is so bad, it could easily work as an unintentional comedy or a drinking game or a thesis on how not to make a comic book movie. It is that bad, one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a cinema in a long time. Granted, I expected not to like it but had to see it anyway, mainly because its predecessor Man of Steel was one of the kickstarters for this blog. I’m not sure BvS:DoJ can solicit as deep an analysis as Man of Steel did, but there is plenty to discuss anyway. But let me stress one more time: this movie is really, really bad, worse than Man of Steel, incompetently bad and a really bad sign for DC’s attempt at creating a movie universe. And I say that as a confessing comic book and superhero fan. This movie is stupid, incoherent, annoying, laughable and boring. I’ll keep my bets on Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse even more than before.
Read MoreBehind These Castle Walls, Part IV: Dumbo (1941)
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We're still in the 40s with our Disney movies and now we get to the famous elephant who is known for the slur everyone else uses for him. That is a good indication for the weirdness of this movie. It is a movie I had seen before. For its short runtime, it is not very entertaining and feels stretched anyway. It also does not have the same artistic skills the previous movies have shown.
Read MoreTrailing Tropes: When Angela Bassett Cries
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I’ve been wanting to write about trailers a while now, but when I was sitting in the cinema recently, it again occurred to me how strongly trailers rely on certain tropes. It doesn’t mean that the movies they are advertising do things wrong because a trailer is never really as representative as we are supposed to believe. But what fascinates me is how trailers use certain images to promote their movies, how the reduction to a couple of images leads to images that have clear connotations audiences should respond to. I don’t know if this will become a recurring feature, but for now, let’s take a look at some trailers and the tropes they market besides their actual product.
Read MoreDivergent (2014)
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(spoilers!)
Divergent is exactly what you think it is: a second-rate Hunger Games with a similar story that’s less appealing and actors that are less interesting. It’s an incredibly silly movie that is still somewhat entertaining but filmed with a great lack of skill (other than its sequel Insurgent which is still silly, less entertaining but better filmed), especially in the last third where action sequences almost seem amateurish as the editing mostly renders them incoherent (can this movie really be edited by Se7en's Richard Francis-Bruce?). Only Kate Winslet somewhat elevates the material, if maybe only because it is refreshing to see her as a (spoiler!) villain. Still, it’s mostly a forgettable film where it is hard to believe that is stretched to another four movie series.
Read MoreA Series of Series: Jessica Jones, Episode 4-6
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Episodes 4 to 6 of Jessica Jones don’t disappoint and continue what the first three episodes started so excellently already. The themes are followed through but by showing more of Kilgrave, the show attempts a little of what Daredevil did with Wilson Fisk, although up to now, he has not really been humanized much more. But he’s not that mystery figure anymore. I also like how all the other characters, especially Malcolm and Will, become more layered and really develop, which is something, just like in Daredevil, these shows seem to do extremely well. I don’t know if Marvel gets enough credit for both shows, not just as good entertainment, like their movies, but really deep, well-made, thought-provoking shows that rarely fall into clichés or stereotypes. This is not just another comic book TV show (but then again, this is not based on just another comic). I’m going to focus on some highlights from the next three episodes (again, spoilers, obviously).
Read More3 Months of Movies (VI)
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It’s that time of the year again, the time for reflecting upon the movies I’ve watched in the last three months. It was a weird time because it also covers the summer holidays during which I watched a crazy amount of movies at home and at the cinema, but since the holidays are over and school has started I barely watched anything. I’m not sure how this will pan out in the statistics but I remember that I was thinking during summer that I might break a record for watching the most movies in that timespan and now I know this will definitely not be the case. But who cares about records anyway? I only care about statistics.
Read MoreInventing the Child - The Genetics of Pretty Things
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I somehow imagined I’d be writing these kinds of articles more often, but one little drop in interest in books by my older daughter stops a lot of the material for them. But now it’s time for more, as I’ve found a bunch of new examples of both the bad and the good in children’s books that try to sell ideas to kids.
Read MoreDie bleierne Zeit on Golden Pond: The Movies of 1981, Part 2 [1981 Week]
/![Die bleierne Zeit on Golden Pond: The Movies of 1981, Part 2 [1981 Week]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54206d12e4b0e2c159748fd6/1442737599184-9UR0ZA1IKLHVP3U7PEZ9/image-asset.jpeg)
There is more to all the movies I watched for this week, so let's get to part 2!
Read MorePoster of a Girl: 1981 Edition [1981 Week]
/![Poster of a Girl: 1981 Edition [1981 Week]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54206d12e4b0e2c159748fd6/1442563604533-9QMZPZEPZD21NMBRZ1WL/image-asset.jpeg)
I just love movie poster analysis too much to not do it in a theme week. I know things often repeat themselves, but to me, instead of getting boring, drives the points just home even more. So here we go again, 1981 style!
Read MoreX-Men: First Class (2011)
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(some spoilers)
X-Men: First Class is an excellent comic book movie that is very satisfying for a comic book reader on a sheer entertainment level. It adapts the source material with joy and knowledge that is really refreshing. I honestly can’t say how enjoyable the movie is for a non-comic reader but I know that the acting is great (showing off a great cast from Michael Fassbender to Jennifer Lawrence to Nicholas Hoult to Kevin Bacon to Rose Byrne and, yes, James McAvoy who I’m not a fan of, but was still good), the effects are impressive, the 60s style camera and editing is fun and director Matthew Vaughn (also not a fan, but) does some nice things with the movie. The movie knows how to balance action, drama and humor unlike many other movies.
Read MoreUncredited Terrorists
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So, I read this really fascinating article at GQ about Arab American actors being typecast as terrorists. At first, this seems like an obvious story, nothing that would surprise you, “Of course they mostly cast them as terrorists, so what?” but the story pointed out some aspects even I wasn’t aware of.
Read MoreSouthpaw (2015)
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Southpaw is an utterly conventional and manipulative movie that is only saved one of Jake Gyllenhaal’s most unique (and best) performances as the boxer Billy Hope. Gyllenhaal is not just good, he creates a character unlike anything we’ve seen before. Hope is so different and ambiguous. We cannot entirely figure him out, but that is part of his appeal. If you have seen the trailer, you basically know everything about the movie’s standard plot. There are no surprises and the emotions asked of you are a high form of manipulation. Sure, on some level it still works (daddy-daughter dramas always get me), but I can still criticize the movie’s laziness. The script by Kurt Sutter is a mess, leaving many plotlines unresolved and instead relying on us knowing how these stories go. Aside from some questionable shots, Antoine Fuqua’s direction is well done, especially the boxing scenes. I would recommend the movie only for Gyllenhaal’s performance, although it is strangely effective if you turn off your brain.
Read MoreBehind These Castle Walls, Part I: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
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Ever since I read J. Zornado’s revolutionary important book Inventing the Child, in which he examines children’s fiction and its underlying messages, I looked at books and movies in a different way. Among all the brilliant things this book achieves, what spoke to me in a special way was how he dissected Disney movies, specifically The Young Mermaid and The Lion King. Uncovering their themes of parent authority, gender politics and identity manipulation was a big revelation to me. And ever since then I wanted to look at Disney movies, which are so beloved and popular until today, and see if I could figure out which ideas they sell to kids. So, today I’m starting a new series in which I’ll chronologically go through every major animated Disney movie and try to analyze it closely. I’m not the first one to do this, but I hope I have something new to say anyway. I have seen most of them already in the past, but I will watch them again with different eyes now.
Read More3 Months of Movies (V) / 15 Months of Movies
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Three months have passed again, so it’s time for another survey. And because I’ve been doing this for a year now, it’s also time for one year of “3 Months of Movies” (which actually is not 12 but 15 months of movies, but let’s ignore that for now). So, get ready for many numbers!
Read MoreSuperman Returns (2006)
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Superman Returns is a disaster I didn’t see coming. I read about the movie of course and I know people were disappointed. And after Man of Steel, I thought, well, I should watch this one too because even if it’s not great, it can’t be that bad. And it wasn’t, but only in the most objective perspective I can imagine. I hated Man of Steel, but it wasn’t boring and it had an emotional impact on me. True, that impact was mostly negative because it made me so angry for its content. But Superman Returns made me angry because it was such a waste of a movie, of talent, of ideas. It is one of the most boring movies I’ve seen in a long time, where absolutely nothing happens for the first thirty minutes and where even the action set pieces seem off, like it’s an accident if they actually excite you. The main problem is that it is almost impossible to care about any of the characters. This is also one of the most bland movies I have ever seen, a word I rarely use, but the only word I could think of (beside ‘boring’). None of the characters seem to be interested in anything, no real stakes are ever raised. How a great actor like Kevin Spacey can make a fascinating character like Lex Luthor so uninspired is beyond me. The attempts at recreating a feel for the original Superman movie made me cringe because it just didn’t work. Nothing really worked me. It just made me more angry the longer I had to suffer through all its incredible 154 minutes in which not much happens for 80% of the running time and the main character barely speaks.
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