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)
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 MoreThere is more to all the movies I watched for this week, so let's get to part 2!
Read MoreLemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is awkward, but not in the way it wants to be. It wants to be Tim Burton-awkward, with strange characters in a weird world full of unusual locations, visual effects and props. And it has all of those ingredients, but its tone is what is really strange about it. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but I personally didn’t think it was very funny. Jim Carrey is so over-the-top and so much of the movie focuses on him that it’s almost distracting, like a one-man-show. I can’t really put my finger on it, but the movie didn’t work for me. I’m not even sure what its intended audience is as many jokes are not for kids but overall the movie isn’t all that appealing to adults either.
Read MoreAt Close Range is a strangely conventional film made in an unconventional way and suffering at bit from its 80s heritage. It stars a young Sean Penn following his father’s criminal life for a while before moving away from it again. It both feels like an indie movie and a Brat Pack movie at the same time, due to its unusual filmmaking choices and the cast of young actors that were or would become famous. It is a bit long and not very exciting most of the time, but it has a certain appeal that gets stronger as the movie progresses. It doesn’t feel like a typical crime movie, more like a meditation exercise, many scenes of people staring and being silent, but it’s not necessarily boring. It is not a bad movie at all, even if I make it sound this way, it’s well filmed with an interesting use of light and shadows. I didn’t like the overly tropy opening scene, in which we learn just how cool of a character Sean Penn is and how fast the right girl falls for him. But it gets much better after that, apart from the ending (see below). The music is as 80s-synthie-bad as possible, though. The way it switches between fascinating and contrived is very symptomatic for James Foley’s future career as a director (who would follow this movie with the Madonna-vehicle Who's That Girl? and some years later would direct the classic Glengarry Glen Ross).
Read MoreReal Steel is a movie you don’t think you want to see and which surprises you insofar as it isn’t completely stupid and somewhat entertaining. But it is still a movie about robot fights, so the good will only goes so far. Nevertheless, Hugh Jackman is always entertaining (I think) despite some overly manhood mannerisms and the effects are pretty good too. The plot is mostly free of surprises while the characters are written well enough for the most part. Danny Elfman’s score is terrible, tough, which is a shame. It’s also very much too long. This is no masterpiece by any chance, but it’s entertaining to some degree.
Read More(spoilers for a movie without surprises)
After Earth is a movie that earns my respect for being incredibly bad. A $120 million budget, a big name star and a script revised many times by some big names (that don’t appear in the credits), and this movie still looks and sounds like no one knows what they’re doing. It’s an amateurish, convoluted and silly attempt of pretending to be a movie. It is incoherent in its excuse for a plot, ridiculous in coming up with a future world where nothing is practical and delivers a message that is incredibly dangerous and stupid. I know, if you just squint a little, this might look like a harmless sci-fi movie, but if you really look at it, it is a total mess that made me laugh out loud several times. And let’s not even talk about the (non-existent) acting or that it’s directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
Read More(spoilers ahead, which is only really relevant if you’re under 6, the movie is not that unpredictable)
The Land Before Time is a rather typical animated movie for its time, I’d say. I probably saw it as a kid but rewatched it now because I’m intrigued by children’s movies and the messages they’re sending. This movie is okay, I guess, but so clearly aimed at children, meaning it tries to be cute and soft all the time, with a fair amount of scares to balance it out. There isn’t much for adults here, which in turn means I think it’s not great for kids either. It doesn’t hurt them (depending on how harmful you view its messages), but it also doesn’t challenge them, except for emotional manipulation. It’s not a movie I necessarily would show to my kids.
Read More(no real spoilers until I tell you so)
Interstellar is certainly something like an event, a movie that is highly entertaining and engaging, but somewhat hollow at its core. The movie wants a lot but ultimately fails to reach its own ambitions. The production values are excellent, the images are stunning, the music is epic, the visual and sound effects are flawless. The editing shows some of the movie’s problems, because it uses hard cuts for effects but overuses them, showing that the movie really wants to be special. This also goes for the parallel montages that are interesting but ultimately don’t lead to much. You find the same problem in many of the movie’s aspects, especially the last twenty minutes, where the movie really tries to be clever but simply isn’t. It’s more show than tell, unfortunately. The acting is very good but some dialogue doesn’t do the talent of the actors justice. My impressions are still fresh, but I’m not sure where the movie lands in my perception. I loved it’s ideas about time and there’s one very emotional scene that I found really effective. It’s worth watching it, I think, but it’s one of those movies that seems more problematic in its ideas the longer I think about it.
Read MoreA very interesting study that proves a point I often try to make here, that the way we deal with our children can be as damaging as physically hurting them, something we often ignore in our culture. Which makes sense, since psychological abuse is basically an essential part of parenting in our culture.
Read MoreIt’s time for posters again! Last time I non-scientifically looked at some posters from the IMP homepage, I found some questionable portrayal of women there, unsurprisingly. Well, today I do the same, grabbing some posters from the site that got my attention.
Read MoreIt’s 1980 Week! What does that mean, you ask? Well, I decided to try out doing theme weeks from time to time, dedicating each post during that week to cultural artifacts (movies, comics, books, music) or historic events from one specific year. In the future, I will pick those years randomly, but for a start I decided on 1980, the year I was born, because, well, today’s my birthday. I don’t know how this will work out, so it’s an experiment. But I like experiments, obviously, which means I’m very excited!
To get an overview of this particular year, I thought it would be nice to look at its movie posters. I looked at all the posters of 1980 that can be found on IMP Awards and picked out the ones I found interesting. Which is still a lot (49). But because there are so many, I grouped them in categories, because many things repeat themselves. Without further ado, let’s give it up for 1980!
Read More(spoilers ahead)
All Good Things is a fascinating movie that maybe doesn’t completely satisfy in the end, but is still able to hold the audience’s attention all the way through. It’s the story of David Marks and Katherine McCarthy (or the real-life story of Robert Durst and Katherine McCormack on whom the movie is based) and it’s clear why director Andrew Jarecki was intrigued by this story. Its biggest problem is that the movie can’t provide a satisfying conclusion because it has to stay true to the facts and the facts don’t provide an answer either. But this doesn’t lessen the movie’s power, which is mostly due to the strong performances. Ryan Gosling is as good as always, but the real surprise is Kirsten Dunst. She surely was never a bad actress, but she shines so brightly in this movie that when her character disappears, the movie loses a lot of its appeal. Still, the direction is strong and the score keeps you entertained for the last 30 minutes where the doomed romance turns into an unsolved crime mystery.
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 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 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.
![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)
![Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) [2004 Week]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54206d12e4b0e2c159748fd6/1436037923608-LVAHVPNROHEIJRGEVHOB/image-asset.jpeg)
![The Land Before Time (1988) [1988 Week]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54206d12e4b0e2c159748fd6/1417898326581-0G8C88KAJ0JYNV3M35G5/image-asset.jpeg)
