A few years ago, if you were walking down the street with your partner and you recognized Ron Jeremy and impulsively said “Hey that’s… erm… actually, never mind…”, you might go a little red in the face as it must mean you’d seen him in a movie and chances are that would have been a porn movie. Nowadays, it’s not embarassing to recognize Ron Jeremy anymore, as porn is now cool and acceptable, making Ron a cult icon and the undisputed king of adult entertainment.

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Where Der Untergang focuses on Hitler’s final days in 1945, Hitler: The Rise of Evil focuses solely on his life before the Second World War, from his birth in 1889 to his appointment as chancellor in 1933 which accelerated him to the position of dictator. Split into two 80 minute (TV) parts, it is an exhaustive account of his rise to power in post-WWI German politics which can get confusing at times, but that’s largely due to the complexity of German politics combined with Hitler’s ingenious tactics rather than bad filmmaking.

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Team America – World Police is a funny parody on shows such asThe Thunderbirds by the creators of South Park. Using the qualities of puppets with all their silly characteristics to extremes. Although it contains the type of humor you either love or hate, personally I thought it to be highly predictable yet very entertaining. No-one is spared, especially not America, many politically correct American actors and Michael Moore.
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Dogma is dead. The important 1995 Danish manifesto initiated by directors such as Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg had several sub-movements which led to really interesting titles such as The Idiots, Italian for Beginners and Festen. One of the last real (though rather blatant) Dogma titles, In Your Hands, proved the genre had worn out and Denmark needed to move on to a new era of cinema. Brothers (Brødre) provides a promising example of Danish film after Dogma, even though it has some typical Dogma elements such as the use of a hand-held camera and video.
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It is always a lot harder to see an old movie if you have only been, like me, a movie fanatic for the past ten years. It demands a certain surrendering and adjustment to really appreciate a classic movie, because the pace and standards are so different compared to modern day films. I decided to set aside all knowledge of modern films (say: films released in the past thirty years) and dive into the classics I heard so much about, without actually having seen them. In my quest, I shall concentrate (though some may call this a serious restriction) on classic American cinema. I will try to discuss one work of the rich classic American cinema pallet each month.
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In movies we have seen many actors lose and gain weight in order to physically transform into their character. Robert DeNiro gained weight and muscle in Raging Bull and Cape Fear. More recently, Tom Hanks lost 50 pounds to play the FedEx executive who gets stranded on a island in Cast Away, and Renée Zellweger gained some healthy looking fat for Bridget Jones’s Diary I&II. However, none of this compares to the gruelling feat Christian Bale performed to lose a staggering 63 pounds, turning him in a living skeleton.

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How do you announce a film that deals with the subject of reincarnation? To be more precise: with the subject of a woman who is confronted with a boy who claims to be the reincarnation of her dead husband, with a straight face? That was the dilemma I was faced with last week at my weekly speech at the art house cinema. I had a hard time not giggling when describing a plot that ridiculous. Birth, starring Nicole Kidman, is utterly unconvincing and that may be the reason it caused quite a controversy in the US and that’s why I HAD to see it…
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The ambiguity with 06/05 does not only lie within the subject matter, but also in the circumstances in which it was finished. It deals with the assassination of a Dutch politician in 2002, Pim Fortuyn: a practise few of us Dutchies held possible until recently. Besides that, it was also the last project of a Dutch film maker who was loaded with controversy. Both Fortuyn and Van Gogh were killed because of their pronounced opinions about Dutch society. The best way to watch 06/05 is by setting aside what you have on background info and just focus on the story and acting.
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Michael Moore’s movies and books were hard to miss these past few years, and one could even say that his star rose to stellar heights since the Bush administration came into power. Moore’s self-proclaimed archrival, George W. Bush, even brought him all the way to The Academy Awards, where he received an Oscar for Bowling For Columbine. Since then, criticism from all directions has steadily increased toward the prolific film maker. One of the people on the ‘anti-Moore bandwagon’ is Michael Wilson, a debuting film maker who made his own documentary in order to expose the horrible truth about Michael Moore: Michael Moore hates America!

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The latest release from Bend it like Beckham (2002) director, Gurinder Chadha, is a loose adaptation of Jane Austin’s book, Pride & Prejudice (1813). The traditional English country side is transposed into the vibrant colorful setting of Amritza in India. Bollywood attempts to enter the western market, but does it translate well? On offer is the lure of exotic India and the promise of extravagant dance numbers. The language barriers are down opting for English spoken (like it or not, the language of popular culture in most of the world) and everything has been adjusted ever so slightly, as to be made digestible for the western market. The break through doesn’t really happen as Bride & Prejudice seems neither here nor there.
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