Title may seem like hyperbole, but like we say in German: "Es fällt mir wie Schuppen von den Augen":

You may know that I live close to the border to a country that does not butcher films by dubbing them. I have only just realized that they have got cinemas over there that I could visit to watch movies in their original version. (I plead having a small kid and only rarely a babysitter available and being busy and all that as my excuse.)

Yes, The Hunger Games is on today at the convenient time of a quarter to eight. Guess what else I stumbled upon? Tomorrow on Friday 13th there's a pre-premiere showing of The Cabin in the Woods and another one on Saturday and Sunday. Sadly it's the late show at 11 - which is a little late for me...

Edited because I mangled CitW's title.

Well, not all of it, because I missed a couple of minutes of the beginning, but it's been forever since I managed to catch more than a 50 minute episode of television.

Twelve and Holding was a depressing movie though, about growing up in dysfunctional families in the United States.

( Vaguest spoilers )

Last night's visit to the cinema was enjoyable - we saw Burn After Reading. Lots of flawed human beings, lots of over-the-top plot developments, lots of laughs. Overall it worked for me, but I'm wondering whether Brad Pitt overdid the brainless fitness freak though I suspect a person just like that exists somewhere.

Tina Fey's Sarah Palin is so convincing that it fooled someone working for Swiss television - I saw a trailer for a news magazine today and it featured a short clip of Tina Fey's version of the Katie Couric interview - and the voice-over implied that we were seeing the real deal.

On a Sunday walk through the park I spotted this creature.

( Insect )

We watched Bend It Like Beckham in class.

When asked what they liked and didn't like about the film, one boy said that he didn't like that Tony turned out be gay. "Why?", I asked. "Gay is not good", he said. "It's disgusting. They should all be burned", interjected S getting all excited. She likes to say shocking things and her fervour seemed a bit put on. D had an explanation for all this: "You're only saying this because it's what your religion says." S, born in Bagdad nearly 18 years ago, retaliated: "You should know that I'm not a Muslim. And you say Foreigners go home because that's what your dad thinks."

Sometimes it's hard to tell how much of this is an act. They listen to their favourite rap artists and they know that most teachers get all flustery that there's sexism and homophobia in the lyrics. They know how to shock us. They like the power they feel when they say: "Bushido and his crew can gangbang me anytime."

Underlying all this is a lot of insecurity about (gender) identity mixed in with all the prejudices and stereotypes they're confronted with every day.

Last night I watched a television documentary about homosexuality in professional football in Germany. The interviews with fans and football officials contained among two or three sane voices an awful amount of crap.

There was the "But the kids need to be protected from a homosexual coach" outcry, but I'm guessing that Mr D has taken up his cocaine habit again and doesn't know what he's saying. Or the guy who wouldn't want to shower with a homosexual team-mate, presumably because he's afraid that he'd like what he sees. Then there was the opposite approach: "Some of my best friends are gay. You can have so much fun with them. And anyway, football isn't just brute force anymore, you need creativity and elegance and that's what they're good at, right?"

edited to add a NOT that had disappeared after I rephrased a sentence and again because that sentence was truly messed up

ETA: Here is a link to an article in English about the documentary and you can watch it on youtube here.

I'm sitting here and pondering what I want to write about in this post.

( small violence )

It's very humid here which makes breathing difficult and I can feel a headache coming on. In line with the weather things seem rather oppressive at the moment.
( big violence )

( Young Adam )

Remember that post from way back about entertainment as opposed to serious cultural offerings? That it might make Serenity a hard sell?

Well, it looks like the reviewers don't quite know how to classify this strange beast.

Serenity opened in Germany last Thursday. In my town they are currently only showing it in German. Their loss. I won't sit through it again in the dubbed version. There are trailers on television, but you have to be 16 to be able to see the film - I guess Mr Universe is responsible for that.

Yesterday afternoon I had a look at the first reviews.

( high and low )

Apart from that there was the usual bad research - where someone put Nathan Fillion in I, Robot and the stuff that was directly taken from the press releases as well as several interesting interviews with Joss Whedon.

I live in a rather colourful part of the city. Or you could call it multi-cultural, but this adjective has become so loaded with preconceptions and political implications that I don't want to use it anymore. Basically it once was a traditional workers' neighbourhood but when living standards rose and the Germans could afford to move to the suburbs, the relatively cheap housing attracted many immigrants - and later the students. A lot of the buildings were badly hit by bombs in the war and so we have a mix of early 20th century houses with lots of ornaments (some still with obvious war scars) combined with the more sober but often ugly architecture of the second half of the century. The parts of my city with more surviving examples of pre-WWI architecture have already become gentrified and there are first signs that it is happening here as well.
It will take time though and I guess I prefer my neighbourhood as it is.
There's the Turkish supermarket for example with the freshest vegetable and meat, the health-food shop run by a collective (its members can be seen and heard with their drums in the park in summer), the Catholic community walk-in centre, the slightly dodgy garages and shops selling car parts, the various ethnic fast food places, the Turkish barbers, the semi-legal betting shops and the cafés frequented by men hailing from the same country, the same village possibly.
Especially the Italian cafés are fascinating. Their visitors look like they've just stepped off the set of The Sopranos: There are the guys in shiny tracksuits standing guard outside the door with a mobile phone glued to their ear, smoking and ogling the passing girls. Then there are the middle-aged men, well-groomed, but slightly seedy, wearing elegant suits and parking their expensive and ostentatious cars on the sidewalk for everyone to admire. If the weather permits one or two of the older generation will abandon their card games, take their chairs and sit outside making jokes with the lads and discussing the football or Ferrari. You don't see women among them - there might be one behind the bar, but it's a very male club.
Are they aware of the stereotype they're presenting? Or am I responding to the stereotype? Do they behave and dress this way because they've seen it in the movies? Or is the other way around?
I guess it's a bit of both.
There's a new betting shop across the street; it's called The Italian Job.

I've spent most of the day smearing red ink all over my students' exam papers. For once I managed to keep my hands clean. That's quite funny as the exam text is an excerpt of Act 2, Scene 2 of Macbeth including these lines:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Now wasn't that a sneaky way of doing the Shakespeare meme?


I'm still processing Serenity. I've had some more thoughts about the film and I found a very helpful review that I will use to explain my feelings about the film. I'm not very good at coming up with original ideas, you see, so I need somebody else's words to help me state my opinion. And writing about it helps me see things more clearly. The writer mentions a couple of spoilers, so don't read the whole thing if you wish to remain unspoiled.
I don't wholeheartedly agree with him, but he makes several valid points.

( No spoilers. )

The sun has just come out. Before it was incredibly overcast - just white light. I don't like that kind of weather and I was terribly disappointed because I wanted to see the annular eclipse of the sun.

Here's my account of yesterday's pre-screening of Serenity; a review (with spoilers behind a cut) will follow in another post.

Okay, we arrived at the cinema with perfect timing before the big crowd arriving after the closing ceremony of the convention. There were a few guys in Mal outfits, there was a Blue Sun t-shirt and while the male-female ratio was reversed there were a few ladies who might have been at the James Marsters concert in London. The UPI folks had done a lot of advertising at the Star Trek convention, so there were also several Federation uniforms.
I'm now the proud owner of the aforementioned German flyer and the much better English version as well as a postcard version of the German poster (which makes more sense now that I've seen the film).
The other cinema goers gave us odd looks, especially when we had to queue to get into the screening rooms. Cameras and camera phones had to be handed in and I understand that, but having everyone subjected to a search with a hand-held metal detector seemed a bit like overkill. "Fascists", the boyfriend muttered.
We were too many for just one theatre, but not enough for two, so there were some empty seats. I didn't mind - more breathing space for me.
Some suit gave a short speech and he was booed when he announced we would get to see the German version. A Firefly DVD boxset plus Joss autograph were raffled (though the lucky person sat suspiciously close to the girl who announced the winning ticket). We got to hear Joss Whedon's pre-screening message, but they also showed trailers for Doom (which was beyond awful) and King Kong.

More later.