A whole new year to be filled with micro-reviews (and links to full-scale reviews) for concerts, plays, exhibitions, and movies, the latter also crossposted on my Letterboxd account.
Enjoy!
Reviews from bygone years on this blog:
• All 2024 reviews
• All 2023 movie reviews
• All 2023 music & theater reviews
• All 2023 art event & exhibition reviews
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Movie
FEB 07, 2025, CineStar Theater
Drew Hancock’s 2025 Companion
I went to watch Drew Hancock’s 2025 Companion partly because it was—advertised? insinuated?—to be a horror movie, partly because I was curious as exactly that somehow didn’t seem likely. It’s great! (Up-front advice: the less you know about the movie before you watch it, the better.) While the cinematography, the music, the sound design, and the actors—particularly Thatcher and Quaid are killing it—really shine, what makes them shine is Hancock’s script. Its Chinese firecrackers-style twists and reveals are both clever and rewarding, and you can certainly interpret a lot into it. Which I do! One of it being that the movie brilliantly portraits the experience women had in 2014 and after (either you instantly get the reference or you don’t, sorry about that). It also touches upon a slew of other things in good ways, all of which make me think. It’s one of these movies I instantly want to rewatch, but it might be better to wait and let it breathe.
FEB 06, 2025, CineStar Theater
Chen Sicheng’s 2025 唐探1900 aka China Detective 1900
Happy to have watched this year’s second Lunar New Year blockbuster, Chen Sicheng’s 2025 唐探1900 aka China Detective(s) 1900*, with actual (Chinese and English) subtitles! And this time, it wouldn’t have worked without subtitles at all. The movie, a reboot of Chen’s outrageously successful China Detective franchise, is advertised as a “comedy mystery buddy” movie, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a lot more than that, and each beat of its 135 minutes running time is packed. Yes, it’s a comedy, with the most juvenile (non-sexual) humor you can imagine, and a buddy movie, and a Sherlock Homes-style mystery movie. But it’s also a gang warfare action movie, a slapstick movie, a period drama, a multi-generational family drama, a wuxia movie with plenty of bloodshed and severed limbs, a serial killer movie with gruesome Jack the Ripper-style murders, and a political (revolutionary) movie to boot. (The intrepid editor who tried to summarize all this on Wikipedia spectacularly dropped the ball.) Sure, the true reason I wanted to watch this movie was to see Chow Yun-fat, who—not the lead, but a major role—is indeed as gorgeous as ever, and especially the juvenile humor was headache-inducing at first. But then China Detective(s) 1900 became a highly enjoyable romp through almost all genres known to humankind. Some Western reviews had misgivings about the finale’s political message, but hoo boy, if you knew both Chinese and American history, then you would know how terrible everything was for the Chinese in 1900 on both sides of the Pacific, and that the ending qualifies rather as “mildly put” in its historical context.
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* My knowledge of Standard Guānhuà (“Standard Mandarin”) Chinese is nil, but if the secondary meanings of the first hanzi character 唐 are comparable to those of its Japanese kanji counterpart, a wordplay might be involved where “China Detective(s)” also means “Bogus Detective(s),” which would fit the bill perfectly.
FEB 02, 2025, Metropol Theater
Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2009 A Serious Man
JAN 30, 2025, CineStar Theater
Tsui Hark’s 2025 射鵰英雄傳:俠之大者 (The Story of the Bird of Prey-Shooting Hero: The Greatest Hero)
Tsui Hark’s 2025 射鵰英雄傳:俠之大者 aka The Story of the Bird of Prey-Shooting Hero: The Greatest Hero (lit. The Most Noble/Chivalrous Man)* is based on only the final seven parts from the original newspaper serialization of the first book of Louis Cha Leung-yung aka Lin Yong’s famous Bird of Prey-Shooting Trilogy (射鵰三部曲), but it’s epic enough to be overwhelming at times. What’s more, the movie adds contextual depth through a lengthy introduction, numerous flashbacks, and rapid-fire flash-forwards during the end credits, and not everything is crystal clear even with some basic knowledge of the trilogy. What certainly didn’t help was that the local CineStar multiplex in Düsseldorf, Germany, messed up—except for the occasional diegetic Hanzi script and non-diegetic song lyrics, the promised subtitles were entirely missing. I didn’t complain, though. It was this year’s most prominent Lunar New Year movie, so the theater was sold out and the audience almost entirely Chinese, and they were certainly happy to watch the movie without distracting subtitles. However, when the movie began to switch to Mongolian time and again for an estimated 20–30% of its running time, they had to rely on their knowledge of the trilogy too, so we could call it even :D Anyway, the lead actors are so wonderful that I fell in love with their characters right away, especially with Huang Rong (Zhuang Da Fei) and later Hua Zheng (Zhang Wen Xin), both of whom are, courtesy of the script, substantially upgraded from their treatment in the novel. The wuxia spectacles are spectacular, as they should be. And even if the script’s dramatic structure is a bit wobbly at times, the movie has more than enough funny, sad, romantic, and dramatic moments to keep one spellbound and let its two and a half hours running time go by in a blink.
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* All garbled for the title’s English translation to a remarkable degree, from the ridiculous “condor” to “gallants” to twisting what clearly represents a singular—the bird of prey-shooting refers to a biographical detail of the protagonist—into a plural. Well done. Good job.
JAN 22, 2025, CineStar Theater
Clint Eastwood’s 2024 Juror #2
Clint Eastwood’s 2024 Juror #2 is an old-school, old-fashioned (legal) thriller/drama without any fuss or frills, where everything from camera to foley to score to acting is just there to present and develop the story. In other words, a typical Clint Eastwood movie the kind of which, once mainstream fare, the studios nowadays seem incapable of handling. (The movie almost didn’t make it into theaters, and it’s absolutely enraging. As Bilge Ebiri put it in his Vulture review: “To the modern studio executive, [Eastwood] must look like a glitch in the matrix—not an artist to be protected, but an error to be corrected.”) What I love most about the movie is its dramatic structure that steers clear from any black & white or good & bad schemes, be it the characters or the system. Just like in Greek Tragedy, everybody is trying their best, and the conflict arises from irreconcilable intentions; human character flaws and missteps; plausible biases from life experiences on the individual level; and a flawed legal system that isn’t perfect and can never be perfect—all of which the characters and the script neither cynically reject nor zealously endorse.
JAN 21, 2025, Bambi Theater
David Cronenberg’s 1991 Naked Lunch
Peter Weller and Judy Davis are great, and so are Scheider and Holm, and I really like David Cronenberg’s 1991 The Naked Lunch as a movie. But as an adaption of William S. Burroughs’s eponymous novel, it feels slightly disappointing. Maybe it’s because I have a much more complex picture in my head of the novel that I read a long time ago, maybe because there’s a lot of biographical stuff Cronenberg threw into the script that you have to know—particularly the recurring Tell/Writer motif—if you want to make sense of several core beats. (And I usually don’t know or care about artists’ biographical details, except in cases where I engage the litcrit afterburner when a text appears to be saying something that the writer didn’t want to or even tried to suppress.) But yeah, apart from that, it’s a terrific movie. And while there is a vigorous thread of misogyny that runs through it, partly picked up from the novel, partly from Burroughs’s biography, it’s not altogether clear what the movie’s doing with it. But given its overall aloof tone—in sync with Weller’s uncannily aloof performance—which appears to neither criticize nor endorse anything in situ, it seems legit that it leaves any judgment about this too to the viewer.
JAN 12, 2025, CineStar Theater
Błażej Jankowiak’s 2024 Diabeł
Błażej Jankowiak’s 2024 Diabeł is a thoroughly enjoyable not-fast-paced-in-good-ways suspense action thriller with a decent script that employs tons of tropes from several genres but keeps close to the characters and is always good for some relatable, idiosyncratic, or just plain funny moments. Toward the end, I more or less lost the plot among multilayered reveals, courtesy of the script putting too many of them into dialog instead of into action on the one hand, and my entirely untrained memory for Polish names on the other. Also, the one-on-one finale feels contrived. But then I do like the denouement, and appreciate the closing title cards about the conditions for veterans in the U.S. and Poland. I’ve never engaged in learning Polish, or any Slavic language, but the (English) subtitles seemed solid. Also, not to forget, a co-starring doggie! And she’s definitely a good girl.
JAN 11, 2025, Metropol Theater
Magnus von Horn’s 2024 Pigen med nålen (The Girl with the Needle)
JAN 09, 2025, Bambi Theater
Scott Beck & Bryan Woods’s 2024 Heretic
The less you know about Scott Beck & Bryan Woods 2024 Heretic before you watch it, the better. I wasn’t interested at first and wanted to watch a different movie, but then there was a heavy snowfall in the area that night, and the theater that showed Heretic was easier to get to. From the trailer I’d seen I’d thought it would be less like a genuine horror movie than a psychological thriller in form of a three-hander chamber play, and that is true for a very good while. Until the midpoint. Then, uh boy. The movie slams both feet on the gas and shows its true face, among other things. Yet it never ceases to be a fiendishly plotted mind game around existential questions, which keeps it both interesting and enjoyable the whole way through. Cinematography and set design do a really good job, and shining on top of it are the script, the sound design, and the three lead actors, which are particularly terrific.
JAN 07, 2025, Metropol Theater
David Fincher’s Se7en
David Fincher’s 1995 Se7en should count among the most stylish serial killer police procedure neo noir thrillers ever made, a masterpiece with tons of innovative stuff from its title cards down to its grizzly ending. Everything from Khondji’s cinematography (shot, besides Panavision cameras, with an Aaton 35-III so no wonder some dialogs had to be overdubbed; lots of clever underexposure trickery; ingenious claustrophobic establishing shots that aren’t), Francis-Bruce’s cut, Shore’s score, the soundtrack, the sound and set designs, to the action choreography showed at the time what was possible, and it had an enormous influence on later movies. But reviews left all that more or less underappreciated at the time of its release, not unlike they did for Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner or Proyas’s 1998 Dark City. Walker’s script is stellar, from its high concept premise up to dialog refinements after casting and touch-ups during filming, with career-defining performances by the principle actors. What’s somewhat disconcerting is that so many improbable things had to happen for this movie to see the light of day, against the odds and the sensibilities of studio executives as a species (who had already fucked up Fincher’s 1992 Alien 3), so that one is left to wonder how many movies that could have been great never happened or were managed into mediocrity.
Music
Soon!
Theater
JAN 06, 2025, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, Australia 2019
Suzie Miller’s 2019 one-woman play Prima Facie is terrific, even with some minor script weaknesses and an ending that comes across a bit too didactic, where in-play performance gives way to addressing the audience—instead of transforming its matter too into action—as if the play doesn’t trust its own strength. Which it can and should. It is strong throughout both on the surface and under the hood, which includes touching on the nature of processes and procedures in interesting ways that make me want to read Luhmann again. For a first in decades, as friends had invited me to join, I saw a performance not in its original language; but the German translation seemed solidly plausible and Tessa Ensler’s performance was excellent.
Art
JAN 23, 2025, Kai 10 | Arthena Foundation
Talk: “A Painted Picture Is First and Foremost a Painted Picture”
Great conversation, moderated by Ludwig Seyfarth, with Karin Kneffel and René Wirths, some of whose works are part of the group exhibition Frozen Mirrors (running until April 26, 2025, at Kai 10 | Arthena Foundation). It revolved around the challenge of finding motifs for painting that, while art history marches on, are neither illustrative nor a pastime affectation; how “observation layers” as part of the artistic process puts painting closer to sculpture than to photography; and the peculiar “come in to look out” dynamic where a painting can be either a window or a mirror or both (or neither). The audience was unexpectedly packed, and the conversation made the visit absolutely worthwhile.
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If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!