Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1980s. Show all posts

Saturday, April 5, 2014

Big League Blogathon | Field of Dreams


What makes a life truly worth living? Few people living a privileged first world life - and I'm not talking about the top 10.000 - are satisfied by simply existing. Most of us, if not all of us, want to be remembered in some way, go down in history you may say. We want to be someone, to fulfill some sort of purpose in our life, a reason for a different future than one lacking a past that included us

Field of Dreams is a movie about this strange human struggle for validation and how people often have very different views on what makes a life worth living. In the middle of the attention, there's hippie-turned-farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) who has built up an idyllic existence with his born-and-bred country girl wife Annie (Amy Madigan) and their daughter Karin. One day he hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in his back yard, which he does - and as if things couldn't become stranger, the ghosts of old baseball players start appearing on the field. Confused, Ray goes on a quest to find his all-time favorite author Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) to help him understand the messages he's receiving and the purpose of his Field of Dreams. Terrence Mann was an activist writer back in the 60s and 70s and so certainly lived a life worth living in many ways, however he retreated from the public when he felt people weren't listening to him anymore.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

My Heroes: Ellen "Get-away-from-her-you-bitch" Ripley


A Bechdel test rating for movies has just been approved by the Swedish government, I finally have the chance the catch a screening of the hyped sci-fi epos Gravity tonight and Halloween is just around the corner - what better to write about these days than one of the coolest female characters that has ever kicked cinematic asses, first appearing in 1979s groundbreaking sci-fi/ horror flick Alien?

Monday, June 10, 2013

Mixtape Movies: Coming of Nostalgia


The awesomest of all awesome blogathon-creators, Andy from Fandango Groovers, once again saves me from thinking up ways to fit a lot of movies I want to write about into one post. His latest creation is the Mixtape Movies blogathon, where we can assemble 6 movies that have something in common - a theme - and write about that. One of the 6 movies is a wildcard, a movie that stands out from the rest in some way or another.

This blogathon just came out of nowhere into my blogroll and truly saved my day of blogging. I just don't find the time to write about all of the awesome things I'm watching and the moment, and find it incredibly difficult to fit them all into one post that's not just a series of mini-reviews. So here we have the perfect solution for my misery. I guess I'm sort of cheating in a way anyhow, since 5 of these movies are connected in a  very obvious way, but who cares - let's get started. Oh, and since my poor sister, who's in the hospital at the moment, borrowed my laptop, you're not going to get any photoshop in this post.

Mette's Movie Mixtape:
Coming of Nostalgia

My list is inspired by my several viewing of the ingenious 2010 teen-rom-com Easy A, a glorious weekend of watching (almost) all the movies mentioned in it and my chronic suffering from the Peter-Pan-Syndrome.

Monday, January 14, 2013

1001 Movies: Finishing Kubrick

185 - 187

Slowly, my Kubrick-film-feast is going to an end... Having watched all sixteen feature and short films of the late director, I feel full of knowledge and enlightenment. That doesn't mean I loved or even liked all of his films - but we'll dive further into that matter when I write my big, grand Kubrick Post with a capital P. All you're going to get for now is three short reviews of my last three Kubrick-adventures, one that disappointed me and two that are officially on the list of my favourite Kubrick-opuses.


Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

„THE COMPUTERS THAT TAKE THE SITUATION BEYOND HUMAN INTERVENTION HAVE ONLY BECOME MORE CAPABLE. BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID.“

Sunday, May 13, 2012

My Childhood Heroes, Part II: Ariel


Welcome back to the My Childhood Heroes feature, where I talk about the heroes and idols of my childhood. Some of you might remember the previous, first post in this series, highlighting Hermione Granger. This month's hero is a very different one. 
First of all, she's an animation. Secondly, she's a mermaid. And thirdly, she's a princess.

So what we have here is our typical Disney princess heroine who goes on a journey and gets the prince in the end. Or do we? Is Ariel really that shallow a character?
Not from my point-of-view. I wouldn't highlight her in this feature if this was the case anyhow - to me, Ariel is one of the most unique and inspiring characters that Disney has ever designed.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Thoughts on: "Tagore Stories on Film"

Biting the bullet: silent, black-and-white, Bengali.


On occasion of the 150th birthday of the acclaimed literature-nobelprice winner from India, Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian government published a filmset consisting of six films concerning the literary legend. This was done with the help of the National Film Development Corporation. 

There have been many filmatizations of the stories and novels that Tagore has written, but the government and NFDC have selected the following for the compilation:

Khudita Pashan (1960) - Tapan Sinha, Bengali
Teen Kanya (1961) - Satyajit Ray, Bengali
Kabuliwala (1961) - Hemen Gupta, Hindi
Ghare-Baire (1984) - Satyajit Ray, Bengali
Char Adhyay (1997) - Kumar Shahani, Hindi

BONUS DVD:
Natir Puja (1932) - Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali
Rabindranath Tagore (1961) - Satyajit Ray, Bengali


I promised you to write about the filmset by the time I'd be finished watching all seven films, so here I am, talking about three things I thought I would never fully be able to appreciate as much as I wanted:
  1. Silent films (Natir Puja)
  2. Black-and-white films (Natir Puja, Khudita Pashan, Teen Kanya, Rabindranath Tagore)
  3. Bengali films (Natir Puja, Khudita Pashan, Teen Kanya, Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare-Baire)
With the exception of the silent film, which I simply cannot truly adjust to, I've grown fonder of the latter two than I had excepted initially - but what am I rambling; let's start to dive deeper into the subject...

MY THOUGHTS ON THE FILMS
(including a few of those essential trying-to-be-objective remarks)