Behind These Castle Walls, Part I: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

/
Behind These Castle Walls, Part I: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Ever since I read J. Zornado’s revolutionary important book Inventing the Child, in which he examines children’s fiction and its underlying messages, I looked at books and movies in a different way. Among all the brilliant things this book achieves, what spoke to me in a special way was how he dissected Disney movies, specifically The Young Mermaid and The Lion King. Uncovering their themes of parent authority, gender politics and identity manipulation was a big revelation to me. And ever since then I wanted to look at Disney movies, which are so beloved and popular until today, and see if I could figure out which ideas they sell to kids. So, today I’m starting a new series in which I’ll chronologically go through every major animated Disney movie and try to analyze it closely. I’m not the first one to do this, but I hope I have something new to say anyway. I have seen most of them already in the past, but I will watch them again with different eyes now.

Read More

You Belong on the Radio - German Music Charts (3)

/
You Belong on the Radio - German Music Charts (3)

I don’t know how I slipped into a weekly (instead of my intended bi-daily one) routine, but that’s what the holidays sometimes do. Anyway, before I linger more and contemplate what to write about, here’s some songs from the German charts again, because that always works.

Read More

Nightcrawler (2014)

/
Nightcrawler (2014)

(spoilers ahead)

Nightcrawler is a brilliantly intelligent movie, centered around an amazing performance by Jake Gyllenhaal following a very focused and clever screenplay and direction by Dan Gilroy. The movie knows exactly what it wants to do and what it wants to talk about. Every aspect of the movie caters to that goal, the captivating nighttime images by Robert Elswit, the beautiful score by James Newton Howard and John Gilroy’s editing. It’s an exceptional movie in the way it presents its story, its tone and in its protagonist. It warrants a deep analysis and while this will be long, it doesn't even come close to everything the movie offers.

Read More

10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 9: Subjects

/
10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 9: Subjects

We’re moving closer towards the finishing line and for the penultimate chapter we look at something that’s similar to the curriculum, the idea of dividing school in different subjects to be taught. Again, it’s something we consider to be natural and hard to imagine any other way, but if you break it down, it becomes somewhat problematic (as anything else, I guess).

Read More

I Still Want to Hear What You Have Got to Say (Even If You Don't Like Me)

/
I Still Want to Hear What You Have Got to Say (Even If You Don't Like Me)

It’s that time of the year again, the end of the school year, the summer seems so close and school is dragging as bad as the worst internet connection. I wrote about that time about a year ago (or, hold your hats, 203 posts ago!) and I thought it’s interesting to go back to that topic again. The topic being feedback.

Read More

Revolutionary Road (2008)

/
Revolutionary Road (2008)

(no real spoilers)

Revolutionary Road is the adaptation of a great novel by Richard Yates that I read many years ago and dearly loved as an amazingly early criticism of our culture.  The movie achieves to portray the problems from the novel in a very effective way. I don’t want to compare both of them too much, because I think the movie is its own thing that works well. It features great performances, especially by Kate Winslet and Michael Shannon, but really, all the actors are great. It’s beautifully directed and shot, with a great Thomas Newman score. Director Sam Mendes treads very similar territory as in his American Beauty, but the movies are very different in their tone.

Read More

10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 8: Age-Based Classes

/
10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 8: Age-Based Classes

Another aspect of school that seems so essential that you don’t even think about it, which is the fact that the different classes are based on age. What does that mean exactly? It means that normally kids in grade 7 are between 12 and 13, in grade 8 between 13 and 14 and so on. That is the natural order of things, it seems. When I see kids I don’t know, I’m pretty good at guessing which class there are in and then I can convert that into an age. Not the other way around. And it works because if you’re older or younger, you are an exception to the rule. Alright, you say, but where is the problem? Well, there is more than one.

Read More

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

/
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

(some minor spoilers)

Inside Llewyn Davis is a somewhat perfect movie for what it is doing. It stars Oscar Isaac in an amazing performance as Llewyn Davis, a musician, and his struggles. The Coen brother turn this story into something so bigger than this, with their talented eye for interesting and weird characters, their skill for filmmaking and, maybe most of all, their ability as great writers. Their dialogue is so brilliant here, so thought-out, the structure of the story seems so random but makes perfect sense if you think about for a little bit and that alone, their knack for activating your brain, is what makes a good Coen movie like this one so special. And Oscar Isaac is so very good, incredibly good. And Carey Mulligan in her unusual but too short role. Oh well, and everyone else.

Read More

Book Report - 2004 Edition: Building Temples, Cheering and Getting to the Final Sentence [2004 Week]

/
Book Report - 2004 Edition: Building Temples, Cheering and Getting to the Final Sentence [2004 Week]

I was tempted to write about music this week because the albums from this year were so important to me. But then I thought again about the books from 2004 and I wondered if I will ever have a year with at least three books that really mean a lot to me and that have something to say that fits here. So, welcome to the 2004 Book Report!

Read More

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) [2004 Week]

/
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) [2004 Week]

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is awkward, but not in the way it wants to be. It wants to be Tim Burton-awkward, with strange characters in a weird world full of unusual locations, visual effects and props. And it has all of those ingredients, but its tone is what is really strange about it. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but I personally didn’t think it was very funny. Jim Carrey is so over-the-top and so much of the movie focuses on him that it’s almost distracting, like a one-man-show. I can’t really put my finger on it, but the movie didn’t work for me. I’m not even sure what its intended audience is as many jokes are not for kids but overall the movie isn’t all that appealing to adults either.

Read More

Poster of a Girl - 2004 Edition: Hidden in Plain Sight

/
Poster of a Girl - 2004 Edition: Hidden in Plain Sight

You’re probably saying: “I know what’s coming now. Posters in 2004 were sexist, just like in 2012, 2015, 1988, 1980, 1973 and 1940, always the same.” Well, yes, that’s true but I wanted to try something slightly different this time. Slightly, because instead of focusing on sexism in general, I want to focus on one particular way of posters being sexist: by naming all of the actors on the posters except some female ones. Strangely, I found a lot of examples from 2004 posters for this, so here we go.

Read More

Man on Fire (2004) [2004 Week]

/
Man on Fire (2004) [2004 Week]

(spoilers ahead)

Man on Fire is a standard vigilante/revenge movie wrapped up in a redemption story coupled with a little girl likes killer story. Because it’s a Tony Scott film, all of it is mixed with nervous editing, shaky camera, color filters and a best of music cues from this and other movies (seriously, if you know film music, it’s really weird to see a big studio movie that simply uses music from other movies). It has a great and large cast and some interesting individual scenes, but overall it’s a bit of a mess. It seems unfair to say that because so much of it is simply Scott’s late-year style, but it works more for some movies than for others (Domino, for example, was slightly better). My main issue (besides the revenge aspect I’ll discuss in a second), is that the film is so off structurally. It’s too long and divided into two uneven halves. If you like these kinds of movies, it’s certainly okay, but the imbalance in tone and story really bothered me.

Read More

Saw (2004) [2004 Week]

/
Saw (2004) [2004 Week]

Saw is a movie that started another horror franchise that, in the spirit of these things, simply repeated the most basic concept over and over again. Looking at the original movie, you can only barely see the appeal of continuing it, which mostly comes from the fact that not much is explained in the end and that there is one central element that producers thought was worth repeating, which, again, as in other franchises, is mostly creative ways of killing victims. That’s what drove other series, like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Final Destination or Friday the 13th. The movie itself is nothing really special, it’s not well-made, its plot and structure is a mess and the acting is serviceable at best. Its central story, two guys trapped in a room, trying to find out what’s going on, is effective, but once the flashbacks starts and the connections are overflowing the movie loses a lot of momentum. There are some nice moments, but overall I wasn’t really interested in watching more of these movies, let alone six more of them.

 

Read More

One Plus One Is 2004 [2004 Week]

/
One Plus One Is 2004 [2004 Week]

It’s 2004 week! Since the last theme week we’re moving 64 years into the future (past) and it also feels that long ago since we actually had 1940 week. It’s been far too long but somehow I never found enough time to prepare a week full of seven posts. But now it’s here! I was 24 in 2004 and still at university. It was three years after 9/11 but apart from that I’m not really sure what to expect. The 2000s are still so hard to grasp for me, still too close but full of personal history that I’m probably also still digesting. But I look forward to this week because unlike 1940 this week will find some resonance among my readers (or I just have to remember to write a lot about spanking…). Ready, steady, 2004!

Read More

Once Upon a Time in the Projects (Yo)

/
Once Upon a Time in the Projects (Yo)

Back in part 2 of my ongoing Basic Principles series, I mentioned that I had some time for experiments in my two 8th grade classes. Today I want to talk about what those experiments became, how they worked and turned out, but also what battles I had to fight over them. It’s not quite Here’s Your Future but it’s not without its ups and downs.

Read More

An Education (2009)

/
An Education (2009)

An Education is a strangely unconventional film that feels more conventional than it is. It acts like a romance between two people that have to fight against conventions but turns out to be a bildungsfilm, the story of a girl growing up and becoming more mature than the adults around her. That makes it a much more powerful movie than it would have been as a tragic romance. Carey Mulligan is absolutely brilliant in the lead and after seeing her in six different movies in six wildly different roles in the last year, I believe she could play anyone. The movie is very entertaining, maybe a little slow in the middle, but especially the ending is powerful and effective.

Read More

10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 7: Class Size

/
10 Basic Principles of Our School System, Part 7: Class Size

The amount of students in a class is a constant discussion topic for teachers. “I don’t mind 5th graders, but 30 of them in one room…!” (you can replace 5th with 6th, 7th, 8th or 9th by the way). “I don’t mind correcting exams, but 30 of them…!” “I can remember students’ names, but 30 of them…!” It always comes back to the same thing. A little amount of it would be fine, but multiplied by 20 or 30 is just too much. If a teacher gets lucky and gets a small class of 15 or even less, other teachers will look at her with jealous or dreamy eyes, fantasizing  about how awesome that would be. Maybe this is the only thing almost any teacher would agree on when it comes to problems in our school system.

Read More

Superman Returns (2006)

/
Superman Returns (2006)

Superman Returns is a disaster I didn’t see coming. I read about the movie of course and I know people were disappointed. And after Man of Steel, I thought, well, I should watch this one too because even if it’s not great, it can’t be that bad. And it wasn’t, but only in the most objective perspective I can imagine. I hated Man of Steel, but it wasn’t boring and it had an emotional impact on me. True, that impact was mostly negative because it made me so angry for its content. But Superman Returns made me angry because it was such a waste of a movie, of talent, of ideas. It is one of the most boring movies I’ve seen in a long time, where absolutely nothing happens for the first thirty minutes and where even the action set pieces seem off, like it’s an accident if they actually excite you. The main problem is that it is almost impossible to care about any of the characters. This is also one of the most bland movies I have ever seen, a word I rarely use, but the only word I could think of (beside ‘boring’). None of the characters seem to be interested in anything, no real stakes are ever raised. How a great actor like Kevin Spacey can make a fascinating character like Lex Luthor so uninspired is beyond me. The attempts at recreating a feel for the original Superman movie made me cringe because it just didn’t work. Nothing really worked me. It just made me more angry the longer I had to suffer through all its incredible 154 minutes in which not much happens for 80% of the running time and the main character barely speaks.

Read More