For the love of movies.
‘You know my methods,’ Sherlock Holmes remarks in A Game Of Shadows. Although he addresses to his loyal companion Doctor Watson in the second installment of his cinematic modernization of the old Arthur Conan Doyle tales, we know his methods, too. As James Bond has done so many times in the past and will do again in Skyfall come November, Robert Downey jr. has returned as Holmes and Jude Law once again plays Watson. So what’s new about A Game Of Shadows then?
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Could somebody call Tony Jaa and let him know that his Indonesian replacement has arrived?
Iko Uwais, an up-and-comer Indonesian martial arts star blasts onto the screen with a humble look, a calm gait and an unstoppable kick, in his first widely publicized film, Merantau.
The story in Merantau is not much different from the majority of martial arts films, with the typical ‘martial arts master goes to the city, not looking for trouble, finds it and then saves the girl, rescues the kid.’ It’s strange that these martial arts masters are never looking for trouble, but they certainly always somehow find it.
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Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective, Sherlock Holmes, is one of English literature’s most recognizable and enduring characters. As such, he has made more than 200 movies appearances since the inception of cinema. The master snoop had been portrayed by such luminaries as Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Christopher Plummer, Patrick Macnee, Jonathan Pryce, Christopher Lee and Charlton Heston. When Madonna’s former husband, British director Guy Ritchie, announced his plans to create a new version of Sherlock Holmes for the big screen, his choice for the part seemed rather curious to a lot of people. The filmmaker went with American actor Robert Downey jr. in the eponym’s role. The oft-troubled performer from ‘the other side of the pond,’ although talented, was a much-criticized selection due to the fact that he was battling drug addiction and legal problems for the better part of the 1990s and, more importantly, because he is no Englishman. Would he be capable of a convincing performance worthy of the legendary mantle?
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Hot Tub Time Machine is a movie for the collective masses aimed at anybody over the age of 13 who can giggle at profanity and a weak, overplayed storyline – going back in time and altering the course of events. Let’s be honest, the concept wasn’t even new when the Back To The Future franchise came out and catapulted Michael J. Fox to superstardom.
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Letters scroll up the screen as if announcing a new episode of Star Wars. ‘The earth is on the brink of entering the next dimension,’ they tell us while ethno music plays in the background. ‘Thousands gather to mentally build an energy portal through which the earth will reach a higher spiritual level.’ That is the premise of META_MORPHOSIS, coming to you at a string of German science-fiction film festivals this spring.
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In the 1960s, West Germany prospered so much that people were referring to the period as Wirtschaftswunder, an ’economic miracle,’ so to speak. Although the country had full employment, there was still a need for even more workers. So the capitalist Germans recruited a myriad of laborers from abroad: Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Portuguese, Yugoslavians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and, of course, Turks. Their arrival would change the nation forever.
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Remember the days when there were no word processors and computers? ‘It was twenty years ago today,’ maybe a bit longer, when everybody used to write with a pen and some people did nothing else but interpret another person’s handwriting. Such a job was called ‘typist,’ and the French-Russian 1994 production Katya Ismailova by Hipsters director Valeri Todorovsky tells the story of one in the difficult early post-Soviet years.
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Do you fancy spy flicks? How about World War II era films where there are Nazis at every turn? Perhaps you just enjoy films from the Golden Age. Maybe, by chance, you also enjoyed the 1990s comedy flick Weekend At Bernie’s.
So, now you’re probably wondering what could spies, World War II and a random dead body who just so happens to be the life of the party have to do with each other?
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What would happen if you combined The Hangover (with less below-the-belt jokes and more sophisticated humor), Sex & The City, Road Trip, and then seasoned the recipe with some vodka, borsch, shashlyk, and other assorted Russian flavors? That is what the popular comedians ‘Kvartet I’ from Moscow asked themselves a while ago.
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