You Belong on the Radio - German Music Charts

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You Belong on the Radio - German Music Charts

Inspired by someone‘s suggestion (you know who you are, constant reader) and following something I did many years ago, I decided to start a new series about music. Here’s the plan: I look at the music charts to see what the most popular songs are actually telling us. Most people can sing along the lyrics without ever thinking about them. If you do that, sometimes you discover interesting, disturbing or surprising issues. Today I look at the top 10 of the German single charts but only pick the songs where I find something worth writing about. Whatever I write about the songs does not necessarily say anything about whether I like them, so no one should feel offended. I don’t know what will happen, but that’s part of the appeal!

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Looper (2012) [Part 1]

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Looper (2012) [Part 1]

(spoilers ahead)

Looper is the rare intelligent movie that also delivers on action, suspense and sci-fi elements. To me, it was a perfectly constructed story that constantly surprised me (I’m not surprised by movies very often) and kept me at the edge of my seat. When it ended, the first thing I thought was: “I want to watch that again.” It’s also one of those movies I enjoyed so much while it was still on that I was sure it would fail at its ending. But it certainly didn’t disappoint. It definitely cranks up the action factor towards the end, but the action always has a purpose and is story-driven and Rian Johnson, the writer-director, keeps coming up with innovative ideas to film the action. In fact, the whole movie is so well-made and uses the possibilities of cinema in a way that you wonder why everyone else doesn’t do that more (I guess it boils down to talent). Johnson’s use of camera and editing is brilliant, which is maybe surprising because his script is so well-written, too. Is this the better Inception? I don’t know if it’s a fair comparison, but the moment a student mentioned it, I couldn’t stop thinking that Looper shows why Inception might be overrated. Then again, both feature great performances, but I enjoyed the Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Bruce Willis pairing so much and all the supporting actors and actresses keep up that level easily. The movie doesn’t even disappoint when it comes to the role of women (I think), but I should save that for my analysis.

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Comics Are For Everyone - Captain America Comics #1-19

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Comics Are For Everyone - Captain America Comics #1-19

Comics are of course no exception when it comes to depicting stereotypes, dealing with authority and discussing our society. I have a long list of comics that deal with various topics and now is a good as any to start digging through my archives. And when I say “archives”, it sounds like going way back in time, so let’s do that.

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Our Life Is a Movie: Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) (1998)

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Our Life Is a Movie: Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) (1998)

The movies I have written about here up to now have all been movies I had just seen for the first time. Today I wanted to start writing about movies that I already know and also love and the first one has to be Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run Lola Run), mostly because I really, really love it, it changed my way of looking at movies and I just recently discussed it with one of my courses and noticed some new things. So, with other movies I’d just talk about the one thing that makes the movie interesting to me, but Lola rennt is stuffed with things to talk about. Again, I could write a long book about this movie and obviously people have written about it already, but that’s not my intention here. I want to focus on some aspects that fit on this blog the most and that are by coincidence the things I only recently discovered (or realized) on my 20th+ viewing. But just so you know how much there potentially is to discuss, all the things I’m not talking about here now:

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Lady in the Water (2006)

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Lady in the Water (2006)

(spoilers ahead)

Lady in the Water is not a misunderstood movie. It bombed when it came out and Wikipedia says since then it has been more appreciated than critics did then, but seeing it for the first time now, it’s easy to see that it’s a big failure and the definitive tipping point for director M. Night Shyamalan. Sixth Sense was great, Unbreakable maybe even greater, Signs I still liked a lot (even if I was suddenly alone), The Village is not good but somewhat enjoyable, but Lady in the Water hit a new, very low level. It has its few moments, but overall it’s a complete mess. The opening is already confusing and goes on for too long, the movie then goes back and forth on the same ideas over and over again for what feels like forever only to end with one of the most absurd endings ever seen. The bad thing about the ending is that it is supposed to feel grand and spectacular, but you can only sit there and wonder if all of this really happened. The biggest reason for disbelief for the end is that the movie tries to be some kind of metaphor most of the time, but throws of all that out of the window for an effects-heavy fairytale ending that is just laughable.

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Fack ju Göhte (2013)

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Fack ju Göhte (2013)

(spoilers ahead)

Fack ju Göhte is the most successful film in Germany in 2013. Does that mean anything? Probably not, as success is rarely in conjunction with quality when it comes to movies (or anything). The movie is something like a school comedy, which might be a reason why it is so beloved by students since they enjoy laughing about school. But the plot is… you can’t even call it absurd because it so obviously is just an excuse for the movie to get a bank robber into a school posing as a teacher – that’s the “gimmick” of the movie and the plot behind it (that his bait money is buried under the school) is not believable for a second. Does the movie work? It’s difficult for me to say. My expectations were very low and the movie was better than I had thought. But it wasn’t great. It has its moments but the style of comedy, a sort of constant noisy, over-the-top, aggressive humor, is hard to bear at first, but you get used to it. The characters are mostly clichés, but they are allowed to have some depth at times and even some growth, more or less. Some of the humor works too. The movie strangely grows on you over time, if you don’t think about it too much. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it didn’t hurt to watch it.

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I Want to Hear What You've Got to Say

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I Want to Hear What You've Got to Say

Every year every teacher and student dreads the last weeks before the holidays. Once the grades are made, all potential motivation vanishes and everyone just waits until it’s over. This is interesting because it shows the pretense we hold up that we learn important things in school. If they were so important, it wouldn’t matter if there are grades or not, but the last weeks always unmask how everything is governed by grades, thereby taking away any interest students could have in a subject. But that’s a different story.

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The Wicker Man (2006)

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The Wicker Man (2006)

(spoilers ahead)

The Wicker Man is one of those notorious movies where it’s hard not to stumble upon YouTube clips before you’ve actually seen it. It stars Nicolas Cage and probably marks the movie that started his downward spiral during which he became known for making crappy movies and overacting wildly in them. The Wicker Man somehow qualifies for both as he acts sleepily for most of the movie before going completely over the top in the end. Is the movie crappy? That is so hard to say, at least for me. I know it is heralded as one of the most unintentionally funny movies ever and I can see that. There are definitely enough scenes that can make you laugh because they are so weird. But the director is Neil LaBute who is normally a very deliberate writer and director of thought-provoking movies that never make it easy for the viewer to make easy judgments. I have read his plays in school and really liked some of his movies (The Shape of Things, Nurse Betty). So what happened here? Cage said in interviews that they intended to make an absurd comedy but the movie does not make that clear enough. LaBute is also known for challenging gender roles and The Wicker Man is full of that. But what is the movie trying to say?

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Music Box: Morrissey's "World Peace Is None of Your Business"

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Music Box: Morrissey's "World Peace Is None of Your Business"

When I think of political music, I either think of the 60s and 70s, Gang of Four or hip-hop (at least some of it). I could think of Morrissey and the Smiths but it’s not the first thing on my mind, since Morrissey is more known for making political statements outside his music nowadays and Meat Is Murder and Margaret on the Guillotine are still in the minority compared to his other songs. So I was somewhat surprised to listen to his new album and realize, hey, for an old man he sure has some statements left to make. Maybe I’m just so surprised because his last albums didn’t feature many political songs in comparison. But here is his new album, after years of delay, and its title already makes some allusions that make you think: World Peace Is None of Your Business.

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Neighbors (2014)

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Neighbors (2014)

(Bad) Neighbors is not a film that made me happy. It somehow tries to show what it means to grow up and have a family but it only occasionally dares to show any of its themes in a realistic way. It goes for over-the-top and silly instead, which is not surprising and not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a shame since there are some glimpses of a better, truer movie in here. Blink and you’ll miss them, but they’re there. Yes, you have less time as a parent and sometimes wish to do something you can’t do anymore, but if your deepest desires are having parties with people who are ten years younger than you and to get high, well… then maybe something hasn’t been working for you even before you had kids. Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne do their job well enough, but most of the time you feel like watching some improv scenes that never end. It is funny at times but there is no real structure behind it, as they just seem to keep going. The plot is also annoying because there probably could have been a much better movie if it hadn’t been moving in the “Let’s see who’s meaner” direction so relentlessly. It’s such a lazy thing to show two sides battling each other for no real reason. I felt amusement and embarrassment simultaneously throughout the movie but the more time passes since I've seen it, the worse I feel about it.

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The Bourne Legacy (2012)

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The Bourne Legacy (2012)

The Bourne Legacy is a very interesting sequel. I watched it in school with my 7th graders because one of them suggested it. Most of them hadn’t known the earlier movies and were very confused by the plot. I would argue that this comes from a rather intelligently written screenplay by director Tony Gilroy and his brother Dan Gilroy. I know the movie was rather panned by critics but I enjoyed it a lot. The plot is demanding, the acting is excellent because of its amazing cast (especially Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton and Dennis Boutsikaris) and the action is well-made and mostly has a story-telling purpose. There is a moment where Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) climbs up a house parkour-style and shoots someone, which is expressive physically (although there probably was some trickery involved) but is also filmed amazingly as the camera (by the great Robert Elswit) follows him from the outside of the house through the window to the inside in one amazing take. The action scenes in Bangkok are less convincing, though, and expect us to suspend a lot of disbelief.

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Winter's Bone (2010)

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Winter's Bone (2010)

Winter’s Bone is a good and solid movie. It states early on what it wants to do and then follows that plan until the very end. There is a certain suspense to the question if Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) can find her father, so that she won’t lose her house but the movie is not the most exciting one, which is not necessarily a bad thing. It lives through its characters, the performances and its setting. Jennifer Lawrence is as excellent as expected but John Hawkes also does a great job in playing her uncle as an unpredictable man who doesn’t make it easy for us to like him. The scene in the boat is chilling and unexpected. I’m not sure if the movie is really great but Lawrence is so good and the center of the movie that she almost makes you forget everything else.

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Did I Like This? (Power)

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Did I Like This? (Power)

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.

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3 Months of Movies

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3 Months of Movies

For 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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Never Let Me Go (2010)

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Never Let Me Go (2010)

(spoilers ahead)

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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