For the love of movies.
Every once in while movies give a new direction to pop culture by starting a new epoch. Take A Clockwork Orange (1971), which influenced the punk movement by providing a new dress and language code for youth culture. Moreover, a hip-hop culture without Scarface (1983) would be hard to imagine. The movie I am going to discuss in this article is not only such an epoch-making movie but also the maker of a new medium known as ‘cinema.’
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In Hollywood, Jon Favreau has become a household name as the man at the helm of the Iron Man trilogy. While he admittedly did a commendable job as the director of the first two movies from that franchise, he actually started out as an indie comedy filmmaker. Chef, a pet project of his, sees the jack of all trades return to his roots, while prominently involving him in several roles – as the leading man, director, writer, and producer. Does Jon Favreau succeed, as he did with the Iron Man blockbusters, or does carrying that much weight overwhelm even such an über-talented man?
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Le scaphandre et le papillon by the American artist and director Julian Schnabel is a good example of what cinema is able to accomplish. Based on a novel by Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, the movie is depicting his real and unique destiny.
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Despite the fact that most comedies involving Seth Rogen have generally been subject to debate, none of them has stirred as big a controversy as The Interview. A political comedy about real-life North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the film has been threatened by the Pyongyang regime for months, leading to Sony Pictures becoming the victim of the ‘Guardians of Peace’ hacker group and causing the studio to pull the movie from the theaters. That we are now able to watch The Interview anyway is owed to Sony doing a U-turn and releasing the comedy online instead.
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Although fans and critics alike haven’t been completely satisfied with the results, the first two parts of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy have been among the biggest-grossing movies in recent years. One of the chief criticisms about the film series has always been that the director made a 300-page children’s book by J.R.R. Tolkien stretch out over three (longish) movies, while including other material not found in the original story. Despite the controversy about The Hobbit, expectations for the last part of the trilogy have remained high. The finale The Return Of The King was probably the high point of Jackson’s previous The Lord Of The Rings series based on Tolkien’s works. Will The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies be able to the same?
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Who is Edward Snowden? Why even bother posing the question, you may ask, as the answer seems to be blatantly obvious: a world-famous whistleblower. The person who first appeared under the alias of Citizenfour to reveal the truth about the NSA, PRISM, and TEMPORA in 2013. We all know his name and face now, but we don’t really know the man and his motivations at all, at least not from a firsthand account. Is he a hero, as part of the internet community portrays him to be, or a villain, as most of the Western (and particularly) American officials paint him?
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Jeux d’enfants by French director Yann Samuell begins as a rather sad version of Amélie but develops a dynamic of its own which leads to catastrophe. The young Julien Janvier (Guillaume Canet), whose mother is on the brink of dying from cancer, meets Sophie Kowalsky (Marion Cotillard), a Polish classmate who is bullied. They become friends und develop a dares game which has only one rule: Whoever gets the musical box must do whatever he is asked.
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French novelist Pierre Boulle’s alternative universe in which apes rule the planet has long fascinated Hollywood. It spawned five movies between 1968 and 1974, a TV series, plus a remake in the early 2000s. Those releases have been a mixed bag. The original Planet Of The Apes starring Charlton Heston is universally considered a classic, while everything that followed fell far short of the bar it had set. Even the reimagining by Tim Burton didn’t really live up to the lofty expectations. Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 reboot Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes with James Franco, Freida Pinto, and Andy Serkis finally managed to reestablish the standard of the first film – but is its sequel, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, up to par?
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Heathers is maybe the first realistic high-school movie and – at the same time – the most sophisticated. Due to its highly intelligent script, this movie has the depth and the wit of a Shakespearean play.
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Everybody loves Godzilla, the world-famous Japanese monster. At least most people seem to like it enough so that Hollywood has decided to bring it back to the silver screen after a 16-year hiatus once more. Not that it’s the least bit surprising, given the American film industry’s recent penchant for remakes, reboots, and sequels. The dinosaur-like beast has been around for six decades since its first appearance now. In a way, the new Godzilla by director Gareth Edwards is therefore also a kind of birthday present for one of Japan’s favorite export goods.
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In 2009, the Star Trek reboot by J.J. Abrams clearly divided the devout ‘trekkies.’ The picture shed a different light on several beloved characters from the original television and movie series – including a new version of Spock who actually showed some emotions and an older ego of the same Vulcan contributing to the creation of an alternate universe. Some loved the new angle; others despised it. The film became a smashing box-office success regardless, so there was never much of debate about the sequel. Star Trek: Into Darkness comes with major expectations, especially by those fans who found the first reboot movie too big a deviation from Gene Roddenberry’s creation.
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The second act of Nymphomaniac isn’t the first sequel shot by notorious Danish director Lars von Trier; that honor belongs to the horror movie Epidemic. Yet his latest two-part film carries the distinction that it comes with the first cinematic cliffhanger in his storied career – one that works almost like a coitus interruptus in the context of a promiscuous woman. Whereas the first part of Nymphomaniac narrates the story of a young female sex addict, the second half finally reveals how she ended up in the hermit’s house.
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Lars von Trier has never run away from controversy. The Danish enfant terrible has rather made a career out of embracing it – whether by being banned from the Cannes Film Festival for fascist remarks or by tackling the lives of mentally challenged people in Idiots. Whereas his 2011 feature, Melancholia starring Kirsten Dunst, was a lugubrious ballad about the world’s end, Lars von Trier returns to his familiar stomping grounds of explicit sex and violence in his new double-dip Nymphomaniac with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Starsgård, and Shia LaBeouf.
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For half of a century, the Soviet Union was the one big enemy of all Western countries as well as a welcome antagonist in a myriad of books, movies, and television shows. Portraits of the socialist empire were usually fairly one-sided and sketchy. It was the time of the Cold War, after all, and the ‘Free World’ of capitalism was seen as the polar opposite of the Russian-led ‘Evil Empire’ from the East. The crime novel Gorky Park by American writer Martin Cruz Smith was probably one of the first serious attempts to craft a story set in the Soviet Union. A fine thriller making its way all to the top of the New York Times bestsellers, it came as no surprise that the book was soon adapted to the big screen by Hollywood. In light of the more recent global events, it’s perhaps also not a bad idea to revisit the movie.
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It’s that time of the year again. Hollywood appreciates itself by handing out prestigious golden trophies. 2013 was full of surprises, both in a positive and in a negative way. This year’s class trots out its fair share of favorites, ranging from a satire on capitalism and stockbrokers (The Wolf Of Wall Street) and a spy tragicomedy (American Hustle) to classic science-fiction (Gravity), historical drama (12 Years A Slave), and contemporary drama (Dallas Buyers Club).
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