I have a podcast as well! It is called Outside of a Dog (yes, I know, another dog pun). There, I will discuss literature with my friend Jonas rather than analyse films. However, this time – and maybe some other times in the future – I made an exception and wrote a blog post about a film adaptation of a book: Stanley Kubrick’s version of Lolita. You can find the post here. Check out the cast and subscribe to it on iTunes!
Since I wasn’t aware that there are people who still don’t know the basic premise of this film and managed to casually spoil it for others for the second time, let me start with a disclaimer:
SPOILERS FOR A CLASSIC FILM FROM 1968 BUT OKAY WHO AM I TO JUDGE
With that warning, let me add another one: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!
It’s unfair, really. Here I am, my head full of ideas, but not even managing to keep a second-rate film blog going. And then there was those two guys. Those … magnificent bastards.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a.k.a. The Archers, as they called themselves, are maybe one of the best-kept secrets of 20th century cinema. Hardly household names, at least outside the UK, they are nevertheless counted among the best and most influential directors in film history. More precisely, they are maybe the perfect example of film-makers’ film-makers, influencing and inspiring a whole string of famous directors in their own right – your Spielbergs, Scorseses, Coppolas, and so on.
This time, all spoiler warnings are entirely and necessarily justified. This is one of the few films where I managed to stay (almost) entirely unspoilt until I finally watched it – mainly because all I heard and read about it was basically a lot of giggling and “You won’t believe what happens!”. So I closed my eyes and ears, and, yes, it really added to the experience. Therefore, a big warning sign:
HERE BE SPOILERS
Missed me yet?
*cough*
Yes, another long (even longer – it’s mid-2014!) break, another sense of shame. However, I shouldn’t hang my head too low. I actually managed to get a few productive things done. Plus, this gives me the chance to do another mini-review wrap-up, talking about a few things I actually managed to watch and play. So without further ado …
And now the thrilling conclusion …
Warning: massive spoilers ahead!
In Spec Ops, it’s a walkie-talkie that provides one of the game’s most crucial moments – the walkie-talkie that Walker has used to communicate with Big Bad Colonel Konrad, giving you ever new instructions that you (yes, YOU) mindlessly followed, turns out to be broken, revealing the horrible scope of Walker’s insanity. This moment is not only a clever critique and subversion of games’ tendency to feature incorporeal voices assuredly ordering the players around (a kind of critique and subversion also found elsewhere). It’s also a veritable wham moment, well-integrated into the plot in order to shake you up and make you go “OMG!”. From hindsight, it might have been almost obviously inevitable, but at least for me, it really worked its magic.
Warning: massive spoilers ahead!
Well, another video game review in a blog that was supposed to be mainly about films. Does that mean that I’ve succumbed to the temptations of artless, cheap entertainment? Hell yeah! Seriously though, I wanted to talk about the last two games I played (apart from the frustratingly disappointing Brütal Legend and the brilliant but very short Stanley Parable and Gone Home, which probably merit their own post) and which gave me much more than many films, shows or books the past few months, by depressing me immensely and shaking my soul to the core. Video games are fun!
You’re the one who thought psychopaths were so interesting, but they’re kinda tiresome after a while, don’t you think? (Hans, Seven Psychopaths)
I have a confession to make: I like clever films.
In recent postmodern – and I have the suspicion that this mainly means internet-era – times, “clever” seems to have become one of those epithets like “wicked” and “awesome” that has changed its meaning and its connotations. When once it simply meant “intelligent”, “smart”, and so on, something positive, it now seems to be mainly used as a description accompanied by rolled eyes, sighs and a knowing smile. “Clever” as in “too clever for its own good”, “trying too hard”, “too convinced of its own intelligence”. “Yeah, that was clever” is rarely meant as a compliment – at best it’s a grudging acknowledgement that an idea is not entirely unoriginal. It doesn’t mean that it’s good. Continue reading
In my pop culture life (and really, is there much else to life these days?), there is an ever-growing list of what you might call “The 1001”, after the popular and sometimes ridiculous bucket list books that make one feel incredibly lazy and stupid. One of the more obvious of these lists concerns video games – more obvious, because I only need to open my Steam account to see the incredible amount of games once bought for a song during a sale. This list bothers me maybe even more than the must-read or must-watch lists I have, because 1) I already own the games and it seems like a waste not to play them, and 2) games take sooooooo long. For someone that apparently has problems to write about films because it is hard to find two hours among all the procrastinating and playing Candy Crush, finding 10 to 30 hours is even more utopian. But slowly, very slowly, I’m crawling my way through the modern classics of video game history. And Bioshock certainly counts among them. Continue reading
Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I’m sorry for not updating this more often. Typical blogitis, obviously, with the wide and unforgiving plains of the web littered with the ruins of abandoned settlements, never even getting close to lost-civilisation status. In this case, my own tendency towards nasty hyperrealism (“This isn’t worth my – or anybody’s – time”, “No one’s going to read this”, “I NEED TO FIND A JOB”) torpedoed any plans of writing a bit more about films or other things.
It’s not that I didn’t watch anything worthwhile – rather the opposite. There were quite a few cinema visits, long-delayed DVD tips and finally finished video games that made an impact, in some way or another. I also noticed that my opinion on each of them has become so irrevocably analytical, tainted by the plague called academia, that I started to think about them in Ebert-like bon mots, trying to encapsulate my experience in a few pro/con bullet points and referencing as many other works as possible. That would have been perfect food for my poor neglected cinematic canine here. Continue reading
The Vertovian Dog 