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 Review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Review. Show all posts
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Japancore with Bells and Whistles - Brian Viglione, Elyas Khan, and Sxip Shirey at The Underworld, Camden
Thanks to my lovely sister I got the pleasure to see an exceptional concert at Camden yesterday. As I'm not so good in writing about music (and still drunk from the aftershow-party), I'll rely on pictures and short comments.
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.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Double day of departure (sadly / hopefully): Carine's Farewell at Ask Restaurant, The Cask, Marquis pubs (Pimlico)
Labels:
Exploring London,
Review
While the people of egypt are still hoping to overcome their opressive regime on this "day of departure" as it has been called, another day of farewell has come for me and my friends at work, albeit on a way smaller world-politic scale ;) Carine, one of my French collegues, is leaving for a great new job to Amsterdam this weekend, so we arranged a "dinner plus pub" evening yesterday to say goodbye appropriately.
We first went to an Italian chain restaurant, called "Ask" near Victoria. Thanks to a voucher Carine got from the Internet, we could get the half of the main dishes for free, which was perfect value for money, as my wine and calzone tasted well, but the amount would have been a bit mingy for the full price (and the food was arranged like a face, which I really hated :D). As the service was quite slow as well, I would not recommend the place, although waiters were friendly. But we still enjoyed our time a lot, and also Eric, whom we hadn't seen for one month, took time from flathunting with his wife to be there and there was also another new face, Gilles girlfriend Haruna, still a bit jet-lagged having just arrived a day ago from Washington D.C., where she studied.
So we took our time to "synchronize" and getting to know each other and of course presented Carine her farewell-present, a mug with some carefully selected and skillfully arranged portraits of important game industry representants on it (yes, that means Aurelie, Gilles and me, so she always remembers our beautiful faces between our visits in Amsterdam). We had a great time, so great we ended up as the only ones left and as eventually the waiters started to put up the chairs and "closing time" started to play we decided to grant the staff their evening rest.
Although it was around 11-ish by now, nobody really wanted to go home, so the map with the pubs of the area I printed out before came in handy. My favorite option was "The Cask", a smaller pub a bit off from the big tourist venues around Victoria station. Although a bit inconsiderable from the outside the interior did not let my expectations down. It had a nice atmosphere: a small room, not too bright light, felt very familial but still not to shabby, with cosy pillow-covered benches. The "menu" featured a selection of ales as well as the usual beer selection and as a special a range of Belgian and German beers. Just when I already had sat down and got ready to order my first ale, I discovered that there was only one problem about the place at this time: it had already had its last round.
Allthough there is no standard curfew in England anymore, still every pub which wants to serve alcohol has to buy a licence to do so. Up to that point, it's the same I knew from Germany (which is the reason why in German kiosks you're often not allowed to drink the beer you purchased there, but that only by the way). But to make things more complicated, in Britain there are different kinds of licences which enable pubs to serve alcohol until different hours - the more you pay the longer you serve. And as especially at small and local pubs the drinking crowd tends to go home early, an expensive licence often does not make any sense for them. So at those places last rounds tend to be served early, which is indicated by the typical bell ringing, followed by hectical business at the bar. Which is just what had happened at "The Cask", some time before we arrived.
So, wanting or not to, I waived goodbye to that warm place, not without promising to myself to come back some time for an earlier evening drink, and started to look out for alternatives. Fortunately the locals were happy to help, so in no time we found another pub in a side street which was by far not that great but at least left us time for one beer (les dames and Eric) / ale (me) / teeth-pulling sweet leechee liqueur with lemonade (Gilles). It was called something like "Marquis of ..." but I would not recommend it anyway, although having the local drunks suspiciously gazing upon us clear "outsiders" had its appeal :D
At twelve o'clock, with heavy hearts, we managed to say goodbye to Eric and Carine and embarked on our long journey to the Southwest, which for me should only end at half past one in my bed. How great that my alarm was only ringing at 7am this morning! Still, the evening was an adequate farewell to Carine and worth the tiredness I felt the whole day.
Ask Italian restaurant chain: http://www.askrestaurants.com/
The Cask Pub and kitchen, Pimlico: http://www.caskpubandkitchen.com/
We first went to an Italian chain restaurant, called "Ask" near Victoria. Thanks to a voucher Carine got from the Internet, we could get the half of the main dishes for free, which was perfect value for money, as my wine and calzone tasted well, but the amount would have been a bit mingy for the full price (and the food was arranged like a face, which I really hated :D). As the service was quite slow as well, I would not recommend the place, although waiters were friendly. But we still enjoyed our time a lot, and also Eric, whom we hadn't seen for one month, took time from flathunting with his wife to be there and there was also another new face, Gilles girlfriend Haruna, still a bit jet-lagged having just arrived a day ago from Washington D.C., where she studied.
So we took our time to "synchronize" and getting to know each other and of course presented Carine her farewell-present, a mug with some carefully selected and skillfully arranged portraits of important game industry representants on it (yes, that means Aurelie, Gilles and me, so she always remembers our beautiful faces between our visits in Amsterdam). We had a great time, so great we ended up as the only ones left and as eventually the waiters started to put up the chairs and "closing time" started to play we decided to grant the staff their evening rest.
Although it was around 11-ish by now, nobody really wanted to go home, so the map with the pubs of the area I printed out before came in handy. My favorite option was "The Cask", a smaller pub a bit off from the big tourist venues around Victoria station. Although a bit inconsiderable from the outside the interior did not let my expectations down. It had a nice atmosphere: a small room, not too bright light, felt very familial but still not to shabby, with cosy pillow-covered benches. The "menu" featured a selection of ales as well as the usual beer selection and as a special a range of Belgian and German beers. Just when I already had sat down and got ready to order my first ale, I discovered that there was only one problem about the place at this time: it had already had its last round.
Allthough there is no standard curfew in England anymore, still every pub which wants to serve alcohol has to buy a licence to do so. Up to that point, it's the same I knew from Germany (which is the reason why in German kiosks you're often not allowed to drink the beer you purchased there, but that only by the way). But to make things more complicated, in Britain there are different kinds of licences which enable pubs to serve alcohol until different hours - the more you pay the longer you serve. And as especially at small and local pubs the drinking crowd tends to go home early, an expensive licence often does not make any sense for them. So at those places last rounds tend to be served early, which is indicated by the typical bell ringing, followed by hectical business at the bar. Which is just what had happened at "The Cask", some time before we arrived.
So, wanting or not to, I waived goodbye to that warm place, not without promising to myself to come back some time for an earlier evening drink, and started to look out for alternatives. Fortunately the locals were happy to help, so in no time we found another pub in a side street which was by far not that great but at least left us time for one beer (les dames and Eric) / ale (me) / teeth-pulling sweet leechee liqueur with lemonade (Gilles). It was called something like "Marquis of ..." but I would not recommend it anyway, although having the local drunks suspiciously gazing upon us clear "outsiders" had its appeal :D
At twelve o'clock, with heavy hearts, we managed to say goodbye to Eric and Carine and embarked on our long journey to the Southwest, which for me should only end at half past one in my bed. How great that my alarm was only ringing at 7am this morning! Still, the evening was an adequate farewell to Carine and worth the tiredness I felt the whole day.
Ask Italian restaurant chain: http://www.askrestaurants.com/
The Cask Pub and kitchen, Pimlico: http://www.caskpubandkitchen.com/
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)