When you are young and you still have a whole life ahead of you, there are many goals you want to reach. Get a degree, find a partner, a place to call your own, start a family etc. But as you grow older and realize these goals, it can be difficult to decide what will be the next step. There is a reason that a midlife crisis exists. Even though the protagonist in The Kindergarten Teacher might not be aware, she’s also suffering from one. Continue reading
Twice a year one of the biggest cinema chains in the Netherlands organizes the PAC-festival (Pathé Alternative Cinema). A day during which five (usually) arthouse movies are shown. It’s something I always look forward to. Not only because they are movies that still have to be released, but also because in general the quality is high and the atmosphere in the cinema is great (you meet people from previous vistis and you share this room from 10 in the morning to almost midnight). This year the festival started with Loro, directed by Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Youth). Was it a good start? Continue reading
Life is filled which strange momenten, which sometimes make you wonder if coincidence really exists. The simplest of decisions could decide the rest of your life, without you even realising. That is the message Life Itself want you to feel in your heart, but in order to do so it uses a butchers knife instead of a scalpel to get there. Continue reading
Every year there are only a few films in which there are shots that amaze me. Moments where I wonder how they are made or that overwhelms me visually (but that might be a subject for a separate article). When you watch a lot of movies it’s much more difficult to get wowed and you hope to see inventive imagery that feel fresh/new. Initially, I had no idea that Upgrade would be a title that had such characteristics. It starts as a fairly average science fiction story, but from the moment above I could not wait to see what else the film had in store. Continue reading
How much time do you spend behind a screen every day? If you had an app that would keep track, you might be shocked. We know the interfaces that we use in detail. Nevertheless, in many cases, films and series often choose to present us with an interface that is unfamiliar to us, even if it takes place in the present. A screen that has been specially designed for a film and should look sleek. As a result, as a viewer you have no strong connection with what you see. Searching is an exception. It is a film that takes place completely in operating systems that we know: Windows and Mac OS. Continue reading
Although most of us can’t live without our phones anymore and spend many hours on social media, society (on a global scale) seems to become less social in the real world. Tolerance towards others seems to continue to decline. People more and more seem to be only interested in something when it is shocking or when someone is talked down to. Maybe it is because I am getting older, but I have the feeling that people complain more easily and are able to be heard (even go viral with it). Negativity seems to dominate. When you keep that in the back of your mind when watching the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, this might be something to inspire. Continue reading
If it wasn’t clear before, the moment Jason Statham (playing an expert in saving people from the deepest parts of the ocean) swims towards an enormous prehistoric shark singing Dory’s “Just keep swimming”, you know that this is a movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously. And it shouldn’t, because this is a monster movie that has a ridiculous idea behind it. A billionaire has invested a lot of money to find out if the Marianas trench is even deeper than we thought. The first mission doesn’t go as planned and Jonas Taylor (Statham) is called to save the people from the bottom of the ocean. There they find the biggest shark that ever lived, a megalodon, which escapes from the deep and starts terrorizing people. It’s up to Taylor and the group he is working to kill it. Continue reading
Because of the quickly expanding content offered by Netflix it is really hard to keep up what is being added. Especially the last couple of months I haven’t been very active when it comes to movies and blogging in general. I do listen to a lot of podcasts and a couple where mentioning the title of this Netflix-special. As show by an Australian stand-up comedian which is supposed to be more than just entertainment, but also a deconstruction of the genre and which makes you think. I really wasn’t prepared on how much this artist would move and impress me. A show which you simply can’t miss. Continue reading
When an specific event takes place that was witnessed by many people, you could ask all of them to tell them what happened and you will get different stories. Some will not only tell you the facts, but others might add extra layers explaining their feelings, the atmosphere and small details that make it come alive. Although documentaries are about real events, it is the way you tell them that can make or break a documentary. Just like any other movie it needs to be edited in the right way in order to make the viewer care about what you are seeing. A director like Werner Herzog is almost poetic in his voicovers for his documentaries and that really adds a lot. Zion, this short documentary now available on Netflix, unfortunately lacks a proper story. Continue reading