Trying to change the world, one movie at a time (and other things)
Trying to save the world, one movie at a time (and other things)
After two obscure choices that were on my mind when cooking up the idea for this series, I want to come to something more ‘profound’, I want to say, although that might be the wrong word. My next pick is an album that also has a special place in my childhood gangsta rap heart and this is Ice-T’s second album Power, released in 1988.
Read MoreFor about three months I have been watching movies on a regular basis again, after a long hiatus of about 5-7 years. This resurgence in movie-watching was inspired by my year 11 English course students who had to write film reviews. After I read some reviews that made movies I didn’t know sound really interesting, I decided I should start watching them. Well, this evolved into an almost daily movie festival that makes me very happy because I had forgotten (or buried) how much I love movies. Eventually all of this lead to this blog (with some help by Noam Chomsky) because I really wanted to write down the thoughts about Man of Steel or The Wolf of Wall Street that kept me awake at night.
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Movie adaptations of novels are an impossible task, at least for anyone who has read the book. It’s almost given that they are worse than the book, you always have this nagging feeling of “there’s so much missing” and it is just hard to judge the movie on its own (unless it's The Lovely Bones that I watched recently too and that turned one of my favorite books into a total mess). Never Let Me Go is a novel that very much lives by its unreliable narration (as I discussed yesterday) which is a hard thing to translate into a movie. Although the movie opens with a voice-over, it doesn’t keep it until the very end, taking the opening and closing sentences of the novel almost word for word. Altogether the movie succeeds as a movie even if it deviates from the novel in many major aspects and, as expected, leaves out large chunks of the story. Nevertheless, it is a successful movie, well-directed by Mark Romanek and almost perfectly cast with Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley (getting the rare “and-role” despite being one of the major characters).
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is a tricky novel. It seems almost innocent in describing the lives of its three main characters which live an uneventful life in a boarding school and how they grow up. But beneath that unexciting surface lurks a dark story about rearing children in ignorance, teaching them to pretend and making them believe in authority at all times. Yes, the book also deals with cloning and what makes us human, but this has been dealt with in enough other books and movies. What fascinates me about that book is the way it portrays education and society but also the way it incorporates the three things I tell my students too often about: ignorance, authority and pretense. I just finished reading the book in my main class and was happy to see it was received (mostly) well, because I wasn’t sure students would find it appealing. But now I know that I would read it again and while working on it, I was surprised how much the novel has to offer and how thought-provoking it is. It has a lot of aspects to discuss and I want to try to get at most of what I deem important, which will still be a lot. For structure’s sake, I will follow the three-part division of the book.
Read MoreDistrict 9 disappointed me more than I expected. I had heard so many good things about it, it garnered really surprising Oscar nominations and seemed thematically to be right up my alley. And I felt most of that in the first 30 minutes or so and then suddenly everything disappeared and I was watching a decent body horror movie followed by a decent sci-fi-action movie that didn’t have that much to say anymore. The movie felt unsure about itself after that turning point since it had worked well as a mockumentary and continued that style although the content didn’t fit anymore. Director Neill Blomkamp has a good idea on its hand but lets it slip through.
Read MoreIt’s been a while since I read an interview with Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), one of the best and most influential comics writer ever, who is known for having “extreme” opinions and for favoring anarchism. This interview was published in 1987 and is very long and very interesting. What I want to look at is something he said that keeps coming back to me ever since then:
Read MorePrometheus seems to be one of the most discussed movies of the last couple of years. You find an endless amount of posts about its general meaning, the ending, individual scenes or just lines. I find it fascinating that a movie can have such a strong reaction that is not simply love or hate but thought. People think about this movie to figure it out and even people who don’t like it mostly do because of unanswered questions that bother them. How often does a movie get that kind of feedback, especially one that cost more than $100 million? It is a rare example of a movie full of ideas (even if the execution is not perfect).
Read MoreTying in to yesterday’s post about Four Lions, I thought this is a good time to write about something that I also care about a lot but haven’t mentioned yet, which is comics. In fact, since I started again trying to watch every movie ever produced, my comic reading has been strongly reduced. Anyway, I recently read another volume of DMZ, the post-9/11 analogy by Brian Wood and I liked it a lot and thought it was worth writing about.
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Four Lions is a movie that you wouldn’t think exists. It’s brilliant in many ways but it is an unlikely success. The story of five suicide bombers as a comedy could have gone in many wrong directions but Christopher Morris directs this movie so skilfully and determinedly that there never is a wrong beat. The acting is wonderful, the documentary style works and above all the movie is extremely funny. I was laughing out loud several times and that doesn’t happen very often. What a little amazing clever and utterly uncompromising movie this is.
Read MoreRemember Me is a movie I did not expect to like based on my assumptions. But it surprised me even if there were many things I didn’t actually like. What’s great in the movie are the performances (especially Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Ruby Jerin and most of all Pierce Brosnan), the characters and their relationships and… well, that’s it. The problem is that the plot is too constructed, one character is annoying as hell (Tate Ellington as the roommate Aidan) and the first and last ten minutes feel very contrived and unnecessary.
Read MoreBecause I enjoyed my first re-listening to 90s hip-hop so much, I dove a bit more into it and realized two things: 1) I know a lot of albums from 1990 to 1992, but almost nothing from 1993, making a radical change in course for my music taste (and for the worse since it was time for Eurodance), which also means I listened to all of that rap music between the ages of 10 to 12. That amazes me and will continue to do so when I listen to more albums. 2) I know a lot of albums from that period. And this was the beginning of the 90s without the internet. I didn’t even have a lot of money, so I have no idea how I got all that music. I had a good friend with similar tastes but that doesn't explain where all the music came from.
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Lawrence of Arabia came up as another random 60s movie and of course it’s also one the big classics that I had not seen yet. I know many old movies but still admit that I can get impatient quickly because, well, they’re old and often slow. And I grew impatient in the first 30-50 minutes because I found it slow and the movie is three hours long, so I was scared! But somehow the movie managed to turn around for me and got me more than I expected. It’s a weird movie or maybe just a weird main character but still an intriguing one. Peter O’Toole is great and I was really impressed with the set design and camera work. You have to be impressed seeing all those amazing shots, towns and masses of people and realizing this was long before the convenience of CGI. I think, it’s worth for these moments alone. The work that director David Lean has put into the movie is very visible. It is a good movie if you have the patience. I didn’t really get much of a 60s vibe from the movie, though. Maybe it’s a bit darker than I expected, especially the second half went down some surprising roads, but I didn’t see too much of the typical zeitgeist. Then again, the movie and O’Toole didn’t shy away from portraying Lawrence as clearly homosexual (Lean thought he was although experts say it’s not clear).
Read MoreI tried my experiment again recently. Two different students tried to be teacher for a whole lesson. They are generally good students, they had a plan and motivation, so what could go wrong? Yes, everything! At the end of the lesson, they felt depressed, angry and frustrated. They did not understand what had happened. No one was listening to them. They lost control quickly. Their plan didn’t turn out as they thought.On the other hand, I made some observations myself while sitting in the last row with the other students. I was shocked at several things. How I didn’t hear anything anyone else said when they participated and how little anyone cared. How quickly I fell back into the role of a student, talking to others, looking at the clock repeatedly, waiting for the lesson to end. How other students completely went nuts, running around in class, throwing stuff, insulting the teachers, although I saw everything.
Read MoreAfter my 70s movie didn’t give me anything I wanted to write about (Mean Streets), I got to an 80s movie. I find it much easier to talk about the 60s and 70s, for one thing because they seem more special to me, but also because I find it harder to grasp the 80s, to get a feel for them. Maybe also because I was born in 1980 and it’s harder to view a decade if you’ve actually been there. Distance certainly helps. Anyway, the 80s to me are somewhat the antithesis of the 60s and 70s, which were a time where real change was possible, while the 80s felt like taking two steps back. But instead of the conservatism of the 50s, the 80s were governed by extreme capitalism and a superficiality that is often mocked but still true. Even if it’s an overgeneralization (as it must be if you try to summarize 10 years in history in a few keywords), there’s a reason why MTV, hairstyles and silly pop music are representative for this era.
Read MoreI was having a discussion in class yesterday (which I initiated) about stereotypes and it got me thinking that this is an excellent topic to write about. Especially since I realized that most of my posts deal with stereotypes in one way or another. So here, in no particular order some thoughts on stereotypes.
Read MorePirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is not a great movie but has some entertaining bits. But it’s also very long and at stretches boring, especially since it rehashes so many elements of the first movie which gets tired fast, including Jack Sparrow. Which is surprising since his character basically carried the first movie. I was also frustrated with the depiction of the Keira Knightley character who is supposed to have grown tough but a for a long scene just acts like a pouty girl while the men are fighting.That was annoying. On the other hand, I loved the design of Davey Jones and his crew so much that it almost saved the rest of the movie for me. No, to be clear, these characters are so well designed, produced and played that it’s worth seeing the movie for. The rest, not so much, since it’s mostly action set pieces that feel like action set pieces.
Read MoreOne reason why I like being a teacher so much is the fact that you can experiment a lot. You are so free in what you do in class and how you do it, that it is very refreshing to change things up and try something new. Actually school gets boring fast if you don’t try something new.
Read MoreSkyline is a really unspectacular and boring movie that I can’t really say much about in terms of a review. Don’t watch it, you’ll fall asleep seeing people standing around in a murky apartment looking out of the window at decent-looking special effects.
Read MoreA blog about saving the world by looking at movies, music, comics, books, school and anything else connected to society.
Who is this?
David Turgay, teacher and writer from Germany, writing about things he thinks about too much, mostly movies, comics, books and school. And now this podcast.
