The question of the power of free will and personal freedom vs. fate / prediction is the main topic of "The Adjustment bureau", a science fiction love thriller, new to the cinemas this week. To celebrate my last working week (another time), my dear yet-collegue Aurelie joined me to go watch it at "my" local cinema. Promised a lot by the trailer, we unfortunately were a bit disappointed by a movie which I could bet failed to come close to its litearal original by Phillip K. Dick.
Showing posts with label Movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Movie. Show all posts
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Never Let Me Go + Q&A @ Stratham East Picture House
"Never let me go" is the chorus of a fictional song in Kazuo Ishiguro's dramatic sci-fi love story novel, which was recently made into a movie by director Mark Romanek, so far not so well known for music videos for bands like the Red Hot Chili peppers or R.E.M. While Mr. Ishiguro himself being the co-producer seemed to guarantee a decent conversion I anyway liked the book a lot, so when my colleague Silke offered me the chance for a ticket to watch an exclusive preview including a live broadcast Q&A featuring director and producer, I gladly joined her.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
London Bridge pub crawl and short film festival
Labels:
Exploring London,
Movie
"Lose the winter blues with 10 days of noise and pictures" - the motto of the London short film festival instantly attracted my attention when Stefan sent me the link last week.
The last film festival I attended was some years ago, so I thought it couldn't hurt to go for the shorts again. The festival offers many different themed evenings on different themes, but we agreed on watching the documentary special, which took place on Tuesday. It was divided in two parts, the first one being an international special, the second one Britain-centred and from a more "personal perspective", what ever that was supposed to mean for a documentary. In spite of watching both with a total runtime of 200 minutes we chose to get tickets for the second part only and go for a pint first.
Of course, it didn't remain one. It's really impressive how many nice pubs there are to be found in this city and London Bridge area is of course no exception from this. We first stayed in a small one which was quite full already at six o'clock, so we only got bar stools. The good thing about it was however, that they were located right in front of the open fireplace, so we could take a look at the flames and warm ourselves while talking and of drinking ale. The second one was a bit bigger, brighter and stylisher and I forgot the name, although it had a very particular atmosphere, although a bit posh maybe. There was a staircase leading up to a gallery where you could sit and and take a sip, what we did.
So was there something more I wanted to write about? Ah, yes. The film festival! It took place in another nice venue, a small pub with two areas divided by a heavy brocade curtain. On the one side there was the "bar" area, on the other side the cinema, where the movies were shown.
The short films differed a bit in greatness, although most were quite good. The start was a bit unlucky with a 20-min-feature about people who restore old boats, but after that it got better with a non-documentary (some scenes were actually played by actors) which evolved around family members of prisoners. Another one told the stories of "good souls" in a poor area. The rest were about a woman who was into extreme sports and held her own wake before she was actually dead and two documentaries about buildings, one of which showed different personal viewpoints on a concrete "brutalist" living complex to be demolished soon. The other one an withered ruin on the Scottish coast which is used as a sort of gallery by a group of artists.
All in all, most movies were interesting and well-produced, although some did not earn the name "short movie" really. However, for the entry of 5 GBP it was a fun night and I'm thinking of visiting the ending celebrations on Sunday for another round of short movie pleasure :)
Links:
Shorts festival http://2011.shortfilms.org.uk/
The pub with the fireplace ;) http://www.lordclyde.com/index.php
The last film festival I attended was some years ago, so I thought it couldn't hurt to go for the shorts again. The festival offers many different themed evenings on different themes, but we agreed on watching the documentary special, which took place on Tuesday. It was divided in two parts, the first one being an international special, the second one Britain-centred and from a more "personal perspective", what ever that was supposed to mean for a documentary. In spite of watching both with a total runtime of 200 minutes we chose to get tickets for the second part only and go for a pint first.
Of course, it didn't remain one. It's really impressive how many nice pubs there are to be found in this city and London Bridge area is of course no exception from this. We first stayed in a small one which was quite full already at six o'clock, so we only got bar stools. The good thing about it was however, that they were located right in front of the open fireplace, so we could take a look at the flames and warm ourselves while talking and of drinking ale. The second one was a bit bigger, brighter and stylisher and I forgot the name, although it had a very particular atmosphere, although a bit posh maybe. There was a staircase leading up to a gallery where you could sit and and take a sip, what we did.
So was there something more I wanted to write about? Ah, yes. The film festival! It took place in another nice venue, a small pub with two areas divided by a heavy brocade curtain. On the one side there was the "bar" area, on the other side the cinema, where the movies were shown.
The short films differed a bit in greatness, although most were quite good. The start was a bit unlucky with a 20-min-feature about people who restore old boats, but after that it got better with a non-documentary (some scenes were actually played by actors) which evolved around family members of prisoners. Another one told the stories of "good souls" in a poor area. The rest were about a woman who was into extreme sports and held her own wake before she was actually dead and two documentaries about buildings, one of which showed different personal viewpoints on a concrete "brutalist" living complex to be demolished soon. The other one an withered ruin on the Scottish coast which is used as a sort of gallery by a group of artists.
All in all, most movies were interesting and well-produced, although some did not earn the name "short movie" really. However, for the entry of 5 GBP it was a fun night and I'm thinking of visiting the ending celebrations on Sunday for another round of short movie pleasure :)
Links:
Shorts festival http://2011.shortfilms.org.uk/
The pub with the fireplace ;) http://www.lordclyde.com/index.php
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The Social Network - Review
The Social Network is a mixture of teenie-movie and court-thriller which could change our view of the modern internet. Even though some actors stick out and the composition of pictures and music is amazingly well carried out, the story lacks the remarkability for a two-hour movie.
The film tells the story of facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, a person as peculiar as intelligent, marvellously enacted by Jesse Eisenberg. The character of Zuckerberg is well reflected from the first scenes onward, where viewers experience how the college student acquired a reputation for his programming skills when he - just ditched by his ex-girlfriend (Rooney Mara) - codes a page which allowed the judgement of female undergraduate students from different universities for their outer appearance, which is achieved facebook-style by writing an automated script to accumulate profile pics from university web pages.
The site is a big success, generating in just one night such a high number of web traffic that the network hub to which the site server is connected has to be shut down by university network security. Due to his following suspension and growing publicity, Eisenberg is approached by fraternity whippersnappers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer in a double role) who search for a programmer to realize their idea of an exclusive virtual network for elitary harvard university students, so they can get laid more easily. Zuckerberg falls for the appeal of the idea, realizing it with his own team and the rest is internet history.
While this story could have been told on merely one-page of script, the film develops the action in a two-hour mixture of a court thriller and teenie movie. Fraternity integration rituals take turns with conference room scenes where you experience whise guy character Zuckerberg disgracing his former fellows in their pre-court-meetings. Only a few scenes are really intrieguing, mostly notable the one in a club, where you - in Zuckerberg's first person perspective- get actually yourself tempted by the megalomaniac business model presented by co-founder of napster Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, who seems to play himself most of the time). The craftfulness of this passage is really impressing, being superiorily arranged both in perspectives and composition of dialogue and musical background (awesome score by former Nine Inch Nails-head Trent Reznor in general, but here it is another song, Sound of Violence by Dennis de Laat).
The other outstanding scene is the encounter of the newly rich and popular entrepreneur Zuckerberg with his ex-girlfriend who in a gorgeous dialogue shows him quite insistently that even being facebook-millionaire does not make you king of the world (I heard that Rooney Mara may be nominated for an academy award as best supporting actress, which would be no overstatement at all, concerning her performance in this scene).
Except from that, the storytelling mostly stays neither exiting nor boring but unremarkable, exept from one really annoying aspect, the sex-seperated picture of women and men, being either sex-symbols running around in hotpants after a one-night stands / dumb / drug addicted (women) or business apt, computer genius megalomaniacs driven by their urge for sex / money (men). The film definetily got its lenghts and fails in its attempt to transport dramatic in most scenes, the characters not being sympathic at all in their motives. On the one hand, I really appreciated the effort taken for not making it easy for the viewer to take sides or come to easy conclusions about who's right or wrong (except for Zuckerberg's only friends, ex-GF Monica Albright and ex-CFO Olsen, who get away quite well), on the other hand the archieved originality is also a disadvantage because it uncovers the unremarkability of the original events and the persons involved and so despite its superior way of storytelling the film fails to absorb.
Overall, the movie is a good image of our time, where the inspiration and ideals of the community of internet pioneers exploring digital possibilities of expression and creativity get more and more replaced by the greed and sex-drive of selfmade millionaire business men. In its ideas, its gorgeous technique and it's way of fluffing a small story up to something big the movie occured to me as a reflection of the "Web 2.0" and the changes it brings about on our society and view of the world. Although I still ask myself if the story of Zuckerberg himself was worth telling it in a full-featured hollywood movie, I got the feeling the film might contribute to a consciousness of responsible use of new communication technology if seen in a media (-business) critic perspective, which is a quite unusual effect despite all the popcorn-movie-aspects.
It might be a small hope, but I hope that people will discover this "greater" idea of the movie and appreciate this underlying effect more than the unremarkable story itself.
The film tells the story of facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, a person as peculiar as intelligent, marvellously enacted by Jesse Eisenberg. The character of Zuckerberg is well reflected from the first scenes onward, where viewers experience how the college student acquired a reputation for his programming skills when he - just ditched by his ex-girlfriend (Rooney Mara) - codes a page which allowed the judgement of female undergraduate students from different universities for their outer appearance, which is achieved facebook-style by writing an automated script to accumulate profile pics from university web pages.
The site is a big success, generating in just one night such a high number of web traffic that the network hub to which the site server is connected has to be shut down by university network security. Due to his following suspension and growing publicity, Eisenberg is approached by fraternity whippersnappers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer in a double role) who search for a programmer to realize their idea of an exclusive virtual network for elitary harvard university students, so they can get laid more easily. Zuckerberg falls for the appeal of the idea, realizing it with his own team and the rest is internet history.
While this story could have been told on merely one-page of script, the film develops the action in a two-hour mixture of a court thriller and teenie movie. Fraternity integration rituals take turns with conference room scenes where you experience whise guy character Zuckerberg disgracing his former fellows in their pre-court-meetings. Only a few scenes are really intrieguing, mostly notable the one in a club, where you - in Zuckerberg's first person perspective- get actually yourself tempted by the megalomaniac business model presented by co-founder of napster Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, who seems to play himself most of the time). The craftfulness of this passage is really impressing, being superiorily arranged both in perspectives and composition of dialogue and musical background (awesome score by former Nine Inch Nails-head Trent Reznor in general, but here it is another song, Sound of Violence by Dennis de Laat).
The other outstanding scene is the encounter of the newly rich and popular entrepreneur Zuckerberg with his ex-girlfriend who in a gorgeous dialogue shows him quite insistently that even being facebook-millionaire does not make you king of the world (I heard that Rooney Mara may be nominated for an academy award as best supporting actress, which would be no overstatement at all, concerning her performance in this scene).
Except from that, the storytelling mostly stays neither exiting nor boring but unremarkable, exept from one really annoying aspect, the sex-seperated picture of women and men, being either sex-symbols running around in hotpants after a one-night stands / dumb / drug addicted (women) or business apt, computer genius megalomaniacs driven by their urge for sex / money (men). The film definetily got its lenghts and fails in its attempt to transport dramatic in most scenes, the characters not being sympathic at all in their motives. On the one hand, I really appreciated the effort taken for not making it easy for the viewer to take sides or come to easy conclusions about who's right or wrong (except for Zuckerberg's only friends, ex-GF Monica Albright and ex-CFO Olsen, who get away quite well), on the other hand the archieved originality is also a disadvantage because it uncovers the unremarkability of the original events and the persons involved and so despite its superior way of storytelling the film fails to absorb.
Overall, the movie is a good image of our time, where the inspiration and ideals of the community of internet pioneers exploring digital possibilities of expression and creativity get more and more replaced by the greed and sex-drive of selfmade millionaire business men. In its ideas, its gorgeous technique and it's way of fluffing a small story up to something big the movie occured to me as a reflection of the "Web 2.0" and the changes it brings about on our society and view of the world. Although I still ask myself if the story of Zuckerberg himself was worth telling it in a full-featured hollywood movie, I got the feeling the film might contribute to a consciousness of responsible use of new communication technology if seen in a media (-business) critic perspective, which is a quite unusual effect despite all the popcorn-movie-aspects.
It might be a small hope, but I hope that people will discover this "greater" idea of the movie and appreciate this underlying effect more than the unremarkable story itself.
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