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Donnie Darko: a piece of junk from the hipster scrap pile
Admittedly, I sometimes am a late-starter; particularly when it comes to ‘hot’ or ‘new’ fads. One of the fads which seemed to be peaking while I was in high school was the fad for the emos (really the hipsters of the time) to watch cult films like The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissor Hands, or […]
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Merantau
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 […]
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The Analytical Mind: Comparing Sherlock Holmes, Then and Now
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 […]
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Hot Tub Time Machine
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 […]
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Let There Be Light: Mankind’s Cosmic Journey Out of the Dark in Cyril Moog’s META_MORPHOSIS
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 […]
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Immigrant Song: Almanya as a Heartwarming Portrait of the Multicultural Germany of Today
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, […]
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Touch-Type: Valeri Todorovsky’s Katya Ismailova and the Post-Soviet Years
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 […]
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The Man Who Never Was
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 […]
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Rebels with a Cause: Valeri Todorovsky’s Russian Hipsters and the Postwar Jazz
Russians tend to love music. People who are familiar with the country’s cinema know that there are usually a couple of songs in the films produced in Russia, especially in those from the Soviet period. Actors often double as singers and vice versa. It is therefore surprising that the musical had been neglected by the […]
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The World Needs a Hero: Vadim Sokolovsky’s The Book Of Masters as a Modern Russian Fairy Tale
The Walt Disney Company has been really active in Russia in recent years. Last year, it bought 49% of the shares of 7TV and launched its own television channel in the country. Yet Disney’s attempts to enter the Russian market did not begin with that event. With The Book Of Masters, the company had already […]
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Back to the Roots: Recalling the Silent Age in Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist
The Hollywood industry has had a soft spot for nostalgia and its own past as of late. This has been an ongoing trend for a while now, as the example of Martin Scorsese’s 2004 movie The Aviator about the notorious multibillionaire, bon vivant, and film pioneer Howard Hughes demonstrates. But the latest awards season is […]
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Heart Is…
If you saw this film with friends you probably were embarrassed by the end, because this poignant tale leaves few with dry eyes. Heart is… is a melancholy tale about a wonderfully innocent pair of children, neglected by their mother, forced to live with relatives, who eventually move and are unable to support them any […]