Author Archives: Verena Kyratzes

The Losers

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by Verena Kyratzes

The CIA isn’t our friend. We have known this for a while, and in recent years Hollywood seems to have come to the same conclusion. The A-Team, RED and The Losers all basically deal with this topic. Bravo Hollywood, took you long enough.

We saw RED a while ago and thought that it was a good movie. Great, even. The A-Team wasn’t as good, but it was still a fun movie.

And then there’s The Losers. The thing about The Losers is that I kind of managed not to notice it at all. Didn’t see the trailer, didn’t read any reviews, didn’t see it mentioned on the IMDb. Which is remarkable, really, if you take into account that I think Chris Evans is one of the most promising and talented actors of his generation. If that’s just bad luck or a spectacular failure on the side of the movie’s PR department is for you to decide.

The bottom line is that I had no expectations. It could have been anything, from Shakespeare (a good adaptation, not something like O or Love’s Labours Lost) to the biggest trash since Super Troopers. Well… it turned out to be more on the Shakespeare side of things.

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Doctor Who 1.1: “Rose”

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by Verena Kyratzes

I’ve been aware of Doctor Who forever. Who hasn’t, really? The show is so old and so all-pervasive that it has become a solid part of our cultural history.

About a year ago I started watching the 2005 incarnation of Doctor Who, not having seen anything of the show before except for a few clips and having read a whole lot about TARDISes and Time Lords and Gallifrey. And I was amazed.

To be fair and also to get it out in the very beginning: Doctor Who isn’t my favourite show in the world. It isn’t my second favourite either. Third? We can talk about it, though I’m not sure what the outcome would be. Making lists is a tedious task and one I’d rather not engage in here and now. What I’d like to do now is write about the 2005 series of the show which I’m currently re-watching with Jonas… he’ll have a few things to say too, I’d wager.

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The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

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by Verena Kyratzes

Somehow, it seems to me, the news need people that they can hate. M. Night Shyamalan. Tom Cruise. And of course Nicolas Cage. All of them hated, and frankly all of them hated unjustly. Nicolas Cage is the most incomprehensible hate on that list. I see M. Night Shyamalan, although it is really not his fault that the studios decided to market every single one of his movies as horror flicks with twist endings. And I see Tom Cruise, although I think that whom he loves or what he believes has nothing to do with his work whatsoever. [I also think that Scientology is silly, but a) not much more silly than, say, Christianity and b) even if it's silly, it's none of my business who believes in it and who doesn't.]

Then there is Nicolas Cage, and here I really can’t figure out what he did wrong. Sure, he somehow managed to lose all those ridiculous millions that he made with movies such as National Treasure or Windtalkers or Gone in 60 Seconds, something that I find puzzling and strange, but then again he was hated long before his financial troubles began. Neither has he made one of those movies that really, really stink, like Gigli (allegedly – I haven’t seen it, and I have to wonder what came first: the movie or the hate?). So what is it that makes people hate Nick Cage so much?

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Going Postal

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by Verena Kyratzes

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are the staple food of most fantasy readers. Almost everyone has read at least a few of them, and those who haven’t will have heard of them. I personally love the Disc and the characters that inhabit it.

There have been many attempts to adapt Discworld for both television and the big screen. Soul Music and Weird Sisters, both from 1997, are unknown to me, but the reviews seem to be mostly favorable. Then Hogfather, in 2006, the first live-action adaptation. A true gem that manages to make up for a slow beginning by later being very funny and also on occasion very, very touching. The movie was produced for TV by Sky One and I can’t fault it either in terms of production values or casting. And the script wasn’t too shabby either. Hogfather is also one of my favorite Discworld novels, so I had reason to be pleased.

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Solomon Kane

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by Verena Kyratzes

James Purefoy is one of the most talented and at the same time underrated actors of his generation. If you’ve ever seen the disaster that is A Knight’s Tale, you’ll know what I mean. A lot of actors bled for that movie, and only he manages to shine.

I’ve been watching both his career and his movies ever since, and with the short, beautiful exception of playing Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome, the world’s casting agents haven’t been very kind to him. Resident Evil. George And The Dragon. Vanity Fair. He didn’t get Bond and the two TV shows that he was involved with either didn’t even go into production (The Saint) or got cancelled after one season (The Philanthropist). So all in all things didn’t look good for him at the closing of the first decade of the new millennium.

Then along came Solomon Kane. It sounded good, I’ll admit that. James Purefoy as Robert E. Howard’s puritan superhero. Okay, that sentence contains the word puritan and I don’t think that goes very well with superhero. Still, the initial reviews from France, Spain and the UK sounded good and I hoped, oh how I hoped, that Purefoy would for once star in a good movie, one with franchise hopes. But it was not to be.

(Warning: extensive spoilers for a bad movie!)

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Timer

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by Verena Kyratzes

Timer is a romantic comedy written and directed by Jac Schaeffer that is set in the not-too-distant future. A future in which a device has been developed that can tell anyone when he or she will meet their one true love. There are a few drawbacks to the technology, naturally, so for example your timer will remain blank if your significant other hasn’t been equipped with such a device yet. There is also no guarantee that the happy event, “zeroing out,” will happen soon, or indeed at all. And it costs 79.99 plus an additional 1.99/month, so happiness has a very precise price in this future. The question is: is it worth paying?

Timer answers that question, at least in this hypothetical other reality. Whether the answer is satisfying is another thing entirely…

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The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

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by Verena Kyratzes

The Twilight Saga is a phenomenon that holds some fascination for me. I don’t quite know how it started… hearing some friends talk about their experience with the books, I  guess, but it ended with me reading all four novels. Painful, but necessary, and now I know for sure just how good or bad the books are. Oh, and I also watched the movies, all three of them, including the latest one: Eclipse. If you want to know what I think of the novels, I suggest you take a look at my blog, where I’m currently in the process of writing an eight-part review of the entire series. If you want to know what I thought of Eclipse… well, just read on.

I’ve seen both Twilight and New Moon and my conclusion in both cases was that although they aren’t good movies by any measure they’re at least competently made. The sets look good, there are some truly amazing landscape shots, and even though I resent the hype around Robert Pattinson, his morose-looking counterpart Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner’s abs, I still have to admit that there’s some decent acting to be found among all the sparkle and shine. Now, if only the story was less asinine…

Unfortunately the same doesn’t go for Eclipse. As I sat down in the cinema the other day I was actually looking forward to the movie. The first two were, after all, enjoyable if you didn’t allow your brain to get in the way and David Slade had previously directed Hard Candy, which I really liked (and then there was 30 Days of Night… well, I’d been trying to overlook that).

The auditorium dims, the curtain rolls back, the hum of the projector fills the tiny cinema in which I’m sitting and I get lost. Unfortunately I don’t get lost in superb acting and poetic imagery – it’s the plot that loses me. After twenty minutes I feel very happy indeed that I have recently re-read the novel in preparation for writing a review of the darn thing. It’s like… well, it’s hard to describe, but I’d say the closest thing would be to write the individual parts of Eclipse down on domino tiles, then to throw said tiles into an opaque bag and draw them out at random (but not all of them!). Incoherent is too kind a word.

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Another Look at the Predator Movies

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by Verena Kyratzes

1987 was a good year for movies. The Untouchables, Full Metal Jacket and Good Morning, Vietnam are all masterpieces and nowadays regarded as classics. Spaceballs, The Princess Bride and Evil Dead 2 are classics too: cult classics. And then there was Dirty Dancing, a movie of questionable quality and intentions, but try to find a human female of between 25 and 50 years of age that hasn’t seen it. And Lethal Weapon and Innerspace and… I could go on for a while, but I think I have made my point: 1987 brought forth a lot of notable movies. Of course there was also Surf Nazis Must Die; not everything was glory and riches, you know. And then there was Predator.

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Futurama is back!

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by Verena Kyratzes

The time for rejoicing has come.

I never really liked cartoons. I treated the whole genre with some really ignorant form of benign neglect. I didn’t think the format was bad or stupid, I just couldn’t connect to most shows, whether they were SpongeBob SquarePants or Family Guy. Until Futurama came along.

Futurama was… multifaceted. Some episodes were outrageously funny, others dead serious. Some, the best ones, were both. Slurms McKenzie’s unexpected demise in “Fry and the Slurm Factory” is the earliest of those that I can think of right now, but the most surprising, the one that hits you over the head from seemingly nowhere, is “Jurassic Bark”.

Futurama went to places where many live-action series wouldn’t dare go in a thousand years. I’m chiefly thinking of “Amazon Women in the Mood” here, but there are many other episodes that are just as naughty… or, well, gross.

Futurama did another thing that few of its live-action brethren ever dared do: it had a serious, lasting love story that even got resolved at some point. In a world where lasting attachments between characters are considered something of a ratings-killer Futurama did the right thing and gave Fry and Leela a chance. Time and the sixth season will show where the story of Phillip J. Fry and Turanga Leela will go, but I for one do hope for the best.

Speaking of the sixth season: did I mention that Futurama is back? The show has been cancelled, renewed as a series of feature-length direct-to-DVD movies, lain dead for almost two years… and finally been resurrected again. The sixth season of twenty-six episodes (maybe, perhaps, might be less, no-one can or will actually say) started airing less than a week ago and the beginning is promising.

“Rebirth” isn’t the best episode of Futurama, but neither is it bad. One thing that it is is disgusting, but to explain that would entail too many spoilers, so I won’t. All I’ll say is that I shouldn’t have been disturbed by the scene in question, but I was. I was, as they say, really grossed out. And I think that wouldn’t have happened if the characters in Futurama were less real, less dear to me. Just something to think about.

One way or the other: Futurama is back. It’s still funny, still daring and still shamelessly self-referential. And we love it for it.

Trailerwatch: Super 8, Eclipse, Splice, Jonah Hex, Inception, Winter’s Bone, Ondine, Nowhere Boy, Secretariat

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by Verena Kyratzes

Super 8

The teaser trailer for the much-anticipated new offering by J.J. Abrams of Cloverfield and Star Trek fame. I didn’t like either movie and can already tell you that because of that Super 8 is going to have a hard time winning me over. The fact that Steven Spielberg is producing is only a small consolation. The teaser itself looks decent and is saying as little as any teaser I’ve ever seen. One can assume that the final product will look good, preferably without Cloverfield‘s shakycam style, and will have a lot of big booms. I’ll reserve my final judgement until I’ve seen a proper trailer, or even better, until we’ve seen the movie.

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