Million Dollar Baby

There is an iron-law of film-making that every director should recognize: When the script is poor, it is impossible to create a good film. Million Dollar Baby has noble intentions. It wants to be deep. Towards the end, it surprisingly gains gravitas and you want to forget that three quarters of the movie were slow image image [Read More]

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly effect was coined by scientists who discovered that small changes can have dramatic consequences over long distances (both in space and time). A hurricane in the U.S. may have been set off by the flap of a butterfly wing in Honk Kong. The film applies this idea to the life of individual people. image [Read More]

The Knight “Georg Murmann”

Reading Don Quixote I learn great deal about the medieval literature about knights. Cervantes spoofs these stories in his famous novel. Apparently, there was also a “Murmann” knight, born in 1766. [Now I know why I am such a chivalrous kind of guy:) ] Georg Murmann entered the military in 1783 and spent all his image image [Read More]

Cast Away

I rented this movie because I heard that Tom Hank’s who plays an FedEx employee shipwrecked on a small island entertains you all by himself for an hour and a half. It is not true. The movie is painfully slow in large part because it has nothing significant to say.  I had so much time image [Read More]

Bad Education

After seeing Almodovar’s two recent movies Talk to Her and All about my Mother, I left the theatre deeply satisfied. Both films were extraordinary pieces of cinema. I felt different about Bad Education. It took me some time to figure out what made this a good film yet noticeable inferior to his two previous image [Read More]

Experiencing an Epiphany

It is so much fun to watch children because for them everything is new. Teenagers already know quite a lot about the world, but they are still willing to experiment with new identities and become someone entirely different from one day to the next. When people reach middle age, this all seems to stop. People image image [Read More]