Enigma - Return to Innocence

Enigma is the musical project of Romanian born Michael Cretu which released its first album in 1990. It combines electronic music with Gregorian and Vedic chants. Return to Innocence is probably the most successful creation of the project from the year 1994. The music video was filmed in Spain, and it tells the life story of a man backwards, from his death until his birth, until his return to innocence. The song may as well be the first music file I downloaded from the internet and I still have it somewhere... It has a slow but powerful flow that never fails to carry me away...

Woody Allen's Die Hard

This is a MADtv parody of Woody Allen's style, and as some of it is based on Annie Hall, I thought it would make a nice follow up. If you are interested how Woody Allen would make a Die Hard movie then watch this flick. I love the scene with Arafat...

Annie Hall

The great thing about a Woody Allen movie is that it probes deep into life and yet it manages to remain light and easy with marvellous humour. "Annie Hall" (1977) is often considered Allen's best film, it excels in everything we love a Woody Allen movie for, from its vivid depiction of a relationship to its neurotic as well as romantic humour. Maybe Allen is the director to whom we can say that humour is romance with him, because it manages to mix the two together so that they strengthen rather than extinguish each other. Annie Hall is a stream-of-consciousness tale of a relationship, and how life is formed from these temporary building blocks that yet have such long term effects on the final construction. We jump from one memory to another, often the scenes are just connected by one minor detail that may often play a completely different role in the different contexts of subsequent scenes. Characters enter the thoughts and memories of their own and other characters, stay there and observe, and guide the viewers of the movie in the cavalcade of their personal world. All in all, we end up observing the lifespan of a relationship from different points of view, often breaking the fours wall while characters address viewers inviting them to join in. In many ways, Allen's work is Avant garde, as he extends reality to express himself, and does so in a very smooth and continuous manner. An example is a much quoted scene from the movie below; if I had to give a title to it, that would be "If life were only like this"...

Smith And Jones

After Not The Nine O'Clock News, two of the cast members, Mel Smith and Griffith Rhys Jones made their own sketch show, "Smith and Jones", closely following and extending the style of the successful predecessor. The show run in ten series between 1982 and 1998, and therefore it is extremely difficult to select. I have finally decided to include four of their many sketches. The Predictable Lighthouse Keepers is the first one, and I think no better summary than the title is possible for this one. Somehow this sketch reminds me of Ibsen, I am not sure why, but that was the first name that came to my mind when seeing it... Then a nice little sketch, Survival, about the circumstances of an aircraft accident. The next one shows you how far we can go to avenge ourselves over some "small" offence. And finally, you may participate in a frantic ceremony of a family dinner in Holy Satan... There are much more that I like and would like to include, but... let that be enough...

Steve Oedekerk

Steve Oedekerk is a comedy writer and director, among his most well known works is "Kung Pow" (2002), a parody of Chinese kung fu flicks. Above you will find the famous kung fu cow scene from that movie. The movie is a dubbing parody of a Jimmy Wang Yu film mixed with some extra footage to give it a plot of its own, and Oedekerk himself plays the main role. A sequel was announced but was never made. Oedekerk is perhaps most known after his thumb movies, one of which is "Thumb Wars: The Phantom Cuticle" (1999), which he also directed. In this parody of Star Wars, animated thumbs play the main role... See for yourself below.

Bara prata lite - Lukas Moodysson

Moodysson, Lukas - Talk (Bara prata lite) (1997)

Hochgeladen von lapuertadebabel. - Komplette Serien und ganze Episoden online.

"Bara prata lite" (Talk) is a short film from 1997, described by its director, Lukas Moodysson, as the Swedish Psycho. A tale of loneliness and isolation, in which a retired man seeks desperately to establish a connection to somebody, or indeed, anybody in his surroundings, talking to people whom he has no business with. Most people ignore his plea for human contact, until one day someone wants to talk to him by her own free will... What happens if you crave for a little talk for so long, and when you seem to get it, they suddenly want to cut it short never to start again?

Tim Burton

I think I have posted enough of his films already so that now I should post something about Tim Burton himself. I chose the funny "ten decades" interview with Burton and Depp about the production of "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" (2007). I think other than the fact that the interviewer's mistake is hopelessly funny, such occasions are to be treasured, as unexpected situations always reveal something more... It also illustrates well the humour that is always there in a Burton movie, inseparably fused together with the eerie bits. Sweeney Todd is a remake of Stephen Sondheim's musical about a homicidal barber, a Victorian urban legend who appeared in penny novels of the late nineteenth century and revived in the musical in 1979. As in so many Burton movies, Johnny Depp takes the lead role. I also included a trailer from Sweeney Todd here.

Other than the films already mentioned before some further titles I feel obliged to mention are "Batman" (1989) and "Batman Returns" (1992), "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) and more recently "Alice in Wonderland" (2010). I also anticipate his future "Dark Shadows", a vampire legend with Johnny Depp based on a BBC series, scheduled 2012. All these have that silverish dark Gothic environment, Burton so much excels in creating. I have also decided to include something from Batman to the end of this post. Now, that Nolan's series is out, this topic is even more interesting. I like both adaptations, as they show two different sides of the same story. One of my favourite characters, the Joker, the epitome of madness, is especially interesting for me in both adaptations, and I think I will come back to that in a later post. But here, I will just post a short scene of the fabulous Jack Nicholson playing the role of the Clown Prince of Crime. His performance fits into Burton's half humorous half sad gloom, and indeed in only forty seconds, you are convinced that Nicholson's Joker takes the fun of killing seriously...