Easy Rider
Some have billed Easy Rider the mother of all road movies. Until the end, it is very difficult to figure out where this journey is leading to and what the whole point of the film it. It starts out in the American West. Two bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) set out to travel east after doing a drug deal in L A, which gives the cash to pay for it. The film covers beautiful landscape of the American Southwest and the hippy culture that started in the 1960s. (If you have never been to America, it would be a nice introduction to landscape.) On the journey the meet people from all walks of life. But there seems no purpose to the journey. Only at the end it becomes clear that the film wants is a philosophical meditation on what freedom really is. I will not give away the surprising final scene.
M. Jackson doctor convicted in star’s 2009 drug death
I would have been surprised if the doctor had not been convicted.
By LINDA DEUTSCH, AP Special Correspondent
LOS ANGELES - Michael Jackson’s doctor was convicted Monday of involuntary manslaughter after a trial that painted him as a reckless caregiver who administered a lethal dose of a powerful anesthetic that killed the pop star.
The verdict against Dr. Conrad Murray marked the latest chapter in one of pop culture’s most shocking tragedies—the death of the King of Pop on the eve of the singer’s heavily promoted comeback concerts.
Crazy Beautiful
There is a fine line between being a genius and being crazy, so a popular saying goes. It is difficult to know whether Vincent Van Gogh, one of whose paintings is a key feature of my homepage design, became insane only later in life after contracting syphilis or whether the roots of his mental illness lie much earlier in his life and paved the way for his creative genius. Cleary, Van Gogh is an example of the proverb that opened this review. At age 37 craziness fully took hold of him and he shot himself dead. When you take a look at his paintings you realize that, even if they depict something a bit crazy, they are beautiful. For the average mortal, however, craziness is generally not related to beauty but to ugliness and destruction. When we see someone act really crazy, we fear that the person will self-destruct sooner or later. This assumption is what the film Crazy Beautiful plays with.
Contagion—Nothing spreads like fear
Nothing spreads like fear is a great subtitle. Unfortunately, the film is a disappointment. After living through September 11, SARS, and most recently the Fukushima nuclear disaster, we all have a pretty good sense that our world could suddenly be turned upside down. Many of us might die because of a natural or manmade disaster. Steven Soderbergh is not up to the task of telling us something more about how ours fears than we already know. The movie feels fabricated and is a waste of time. Watching the footage from the March 2011 Fukushima disaster would give you much deeper insight into how fear spreads. The German public became so concerned about nuclear energy that the chancellor Angela Merkel made a full u-turn in her nuclear policy.
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