Movies, Drama, Music, The Rest
The premature death of Chadwick Boseman due to colon cancer led to an international outpouring of grief. I had never seen a film with Boseman but I remembered how sad I was when Heath Ledger died much too young. People who knew Boseman gave eulogies that I would have given about Ledger, whose talent I admired deeply. So I wanted to see a film with Boseman. I chose the film about the musician James Brown.Get on Up
Diary, Must Know, Movies, Drama
When I think about the Joker I always see the painted face of Heath Ledger who gave an amazing performance in the Batman movie Dark Knight that unfortunately became his last chance to act.
I decided to watch the film with the Joker now simply called Joker because Joaquin Phoenix won the Oscar for his performance. Make no mistake, his acting is an amazing feat. His portrayal of a mentally deranged person scarily convincing. But my heart was tied to Heath Ledger and I always thought about him while seeing the painted face of the new joker. There is a sense of violence at the center of the film that left me deeply unsettled, especially now that in many parts of the Western world right-wing nationalists seem to be ready to embrace violence to attack democratic institutions.Joker
Movies, Drama
Noah Baumbach recently came out with a new film, The Mariage Story. It seemed to have received good reviews and I wanted to see it. But I thought I should first see his earlier film, The Squid and the Whale, which also covered the topic of divorce. The Squid and the Whale is intense.The Squid and the Whale
Movies, Drama
The farewell is very simple yet it is able to trigger deep emotions in the viewer’s heart. As the title suggests, a family that immigrated from China returns to the homeland to say farewell to their mother who is diagnosed with an illness and will not allow her to live very long. One branch of the family returns from the USA and the 2nd one from Japan. The film does a wonderful job portraying the challenges of any immigrant family anywhere.The Farewell
Movies, Comedy
Imagine you know absolutely everything about another person, and you can fully predict what the person will think and do in the future. Would this help or hurt a relationship? This extreme form of knowing someone else does no exist but we all have a sense that we know some people much better than others. Some people we can trust and we can predict with high certainty that they will behave well toward us. Other people, by contrast, are complete wild cards and their unpredictability in thought and action can terrorize us. The perfect secret (Das perfekte Geheimnis)
Movies, Drama
The attentive reader of my blog will have noticed that I like movies very much. If I had a 2nd chance to start my work life over, I might put all my efforts into becoming a movie critic for a major newspaper. So when a film about Hollywood is made, the city where so much of the history of film has been written, I am obviously curious. Especially, when the director is Quentin Tarantino, who I boycotted for most of my life but warmed up in Django Unchained (here you find my 2012 review).Once upon a time in Hollywood
Movies, Drama, Phantasy
This is a fairy tale like no other I have seen before. It feels like a Beauty and the Beast inspired Sci-Fi film set during the Cold War USA of the early 1960s. There is real beauty in the love story between a mute woman and a male creature that comes across as a mixture between a mermaid and robot. He also cannot talk but clearly has intelligence and feelings. The film at times becomes rather annoying when the portrayal of the US government and its personnel becomes a caricature rather than a realistic portrayal what the USA military was like during the conflict with the Soviet Union.The Shape of Water