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Seeing Stuff in Context

Drive – The Scorpion Man

Movies
June 24, 2012
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Drive - The Scorpion Man

I have to confess, at first I had my difficulties with Drive. Not that I had any doubt to just have seen an excellent movie: The production design, especially the soundtrack and the opening credits are extrordinary, the Cast – especially the quiet Ryan Gosling as the nameless Driver, whose rage is visibly building up inside – is marvelous. The story is definitely working and all the characters are of an interesting depth. What then, could have possibly bothered me? After some introspection, I came to the conclusion that it must be the nature of the characters. They are uneducated, dumb and violent – short: very off-putting. That, to me, is harder to digest than the violence their nature translates into.   I agree with Florian that this movie is essentially about freedom of choice and the consequences that arise from one’s actions. There is one important specification to be made though: Initially, Drive is about how the social climate can influence the actions of a person. What we see is the actions Read the Rest…

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Worst. Meme. Ever.

Internets
June 10, 2012
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Worst. Meme. Ever.

Memes seem to have become increasingly popular in the last few months. I think every single person that roughly belongs to my generation has seen an internet meme now. I don’t know what this will lead to, but meme creation seems to lack a bit of creativity nowadays. Here I want to talk about what I deem the worst of all of them, how it works and why it’s so bad.   The “You don’t say!” rageface is a stylized screenshot of Nicolas Cage in the 1988 movie “Vampire’s Kiss”. It is usually taken to comment on unnecessarily obvious statements. Let me delve into what “obvious” means in this context, with the help of Immanuel Kant.   Kant’s famous (and also fiercly contested, mind you) distinction between analytical and synthetic judgement can help us understand. It distinguishes all judgements in two types. Judgement here means a statement attributing a certain predicate to a certain subject in the form of “x is an y”, e.g. “Nicolas Cage is a ridiculously bad Read the Rest…

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The Dark Knight – A Greek Tragedy

Movies
June 4, 2012
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The Dark Knight - A Greek Tragedy

  One and a half months left until the final chapter of Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman-Trilogy. High time to rewatch “The Dark Knight” for somebody with expectations as high as mine. Upon rewatching it becomes apparent how important the character of Harvey Dent/Two-Face is for the structure of the film. Nolan has in fact structured his entire movie around the origin story of the super-villain. Luckily enough, this doesn’t result in a complete disinterest towards the character Bruce Wayne/Batman, that Tim Burton showed twenty years ago (think of Batman Returns: Two origin stories for Catwoman and the Penguin, barely any screen time for Michael Keaton’s Batman). It must be remarked, however, that the fall of Batman in The Dark Knight is construed as merely being the logical consequence of the fall of Harvey  Dent. The nascency of Two-Face uses typical motifs of the classical Greek tragedy: The individual and the circumstances with which it is confronted, guilt and atonement, and especially the inevitable Destiny of a person: Dent lines up with the best intentions to fight against Read the Rest…

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