Movie: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

A jolly adventure based on the famous book by Roald Dahl, complete with talking foxes, beavers and badgers in an English countryside of the Wallace & Gromit variety. It is not all fun though, there is drama too and familiar family problems. Before you watch it: you should know that this is a movie by director Wes Anderson, and Wes Anderson has a very unique style.

The ingredients of an Anderson movie are a bit as follows. His characters are witty, quirky, and often recognizable as stereotypes. His movies are very quotable. Then there is the settings and atmosphere. Every cameramove, every little piece of background has been taken care of and is often colorful and elaborate. Sometimes he contructs enormous sets to make his camera float over it, such as a house where the wall is cut away. Finally, to top it all off, Anderson has a strange sense of humor. His movies balance in a confusing way between comedy and drama. All of this goes for Fantastic Mr Fox as well. Once you get used to his style, it can be quite entertaining, so try it out.

Some like that stuff, some don’t. But perhaps all his movies so far have had more in common in style with animation than live action, and now is the first time that Anderson really turns to animation. And what kind of animation does he chooses? Stop-motion. Thats the way clay dinosaurs were made from the 1930s King Kong movie. But he succeeds bravely with an enormous production of top quality. Anderson is still growing as an artist and Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of the best animations of the year.

IMDB: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Book: Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show On Earth (2009)

The Evidence For Evolution, as the second title goes. More than 30 years have passed since Richard Dawkins wrote the influential The Selfish Gene and followup books, and established himself as a brilliant scientist and educator. That was the start of his journey into popular science writing, ending up with the controversial The God Delusion. Any man changes over three decades and Dawkins’ journey is deeply reflected in his books.

Even though Dawkins explains that this book is not about The God Delusion but about science, The Greatest Show On Earth is hardly a return to the dense and high level The Selfish Gene. His stories have become simpler, using more words to explain less information, and sometimes are on the brink of being pedantic. Especially when the science he presents is interspersed with comments to and about creationists and the like (although, as a biologist, I must say that his chapter about Missing Links and likewise nonsense was very entertaining, yet also highly distressing that he needed to include it). His increasing passionate way of reasoning may have its origin in the tradition of British intellectials, but I am afraid it does not help Dawkins and instead impassionates the countermovement.

One could say that Richard Dawkins has “evolved” according to his environment during the last 30 years and is now conducting an “evolutionary arms race” with creationists. His clear reasoning is still there, and Dawkins remains one of the world’s foremost scientific minds and educators, but reading The Greatest Show On Earth is not unlike stepping into a crossfire where one is forced to pick a side. But I suppose that is what Dawkins set out to do.

Movie: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino is the kind of filmmaker that reveals the hidden complexities of cinema to the viewer. Technicalities such as pacing, use of color and screen composition, normally only meaningful to specialists and not visible for the untrained eye of the average moviegoer, have become Tarantino’s trademark. He shows the audience how movies can have style, and besides all that, gives us again a heck of an entertaining story.

Clearly, Tarantino enjoys to play with his audience. He is in complete control of the tension of every shot. Scenes are often drawn out by means of dialogue, while Tarantino lets the tensions between the actors rise and fall, rise and fall again, and then in a single moment everything comes to a climax in an unexpected way (and often involves a lot of bullets). It is the technique of suspense-master Alfred Hitchcock, but where Hitchcock’s thrillers were purely focused on terror, Tarantino gives it all a twist of dark humor. Prime examples are the opening scène with the sadistic officer Landa and the scène in the basement with the drinking games.

Inglourious Basterds is much more besides. It is a jumping board for unknown, promising actors. It is a darkly comic rewrite of history with a daring and original plot. It is delightfully over the top without being cartoony, and it is an ode to the war movies of old, most notably The Dirty Dozen. All in all, it is better than 90% of all that is out there and among Tarantino’s best work.

IMDB: Inglourious Basterds

Movie: Blade Runner (1982)

Those who do not know what to expect may leave Blade Runner in a bewildered state. It is science fiction, and Harrison Ford, but Blade Runner is definately no Star Wars-like action adventure. Instead, this movie is slow, deliberate and philosophical, with emphasis on heavy themes like consciousness, life and death. The story is an adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick, a writer notorious for his drugs-awakened paranoia and mindbending themes.

On the face Blade Runner is a detective story, where Ford hunts for escaped robots (Replicants) that are nearly similar to humans. As a detective story it is pretty straighforward and Ford himself doesn’t seem so eager to have some action and fun. In fact, the robots, when discovered, seem more alive than the humans. This is a very deliberate choice by director Ridley Scott (who, after Alien, apparently felt the need to handle something heavier).


The movies of the 80s are always extremely visual. It was the time that special effects were on the rise and directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were influential. So too Blade Runner. It is set in a gritty, chaotic film-noir environment in a future Los Angeles, where the skies are brown and the streets between enormous black buildings are sprawling bazars. It is a place of rampart biotechnology, where customized eyes are grown in backalleys and artists fill their houses with talking living puppets.

The film occasionally drops hits that the boundary between man and android have faded completely and that Ford’s job is useless (and that Ford himself, even, is possibly a Replicant). The ending is justly famous, and one of the most memorable endings of all times, when actor Rutger Hauer, playing a killer android, improvised sorrow for its own demise. See it, but be cautious with your expectations.

IMDB: Blade Runner

Movie: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

The only thing I ever saw about Sherlock Holmes was the Disney adaptation The Great Mouse Detective. I have never read the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I guess not many people have. Director Guy Ritchie has, and, him being such a fan of crime and comedy (and reaching his peak with Snatch), was the man for the job for a modern retelling.

Ritchie takes us back to the end of the 19th century, when science and superstition reigned together and the British Parliament was the center of the world. Sherlock Holmes is Doyle’s champion of science and deduction and, naturally, is pitted against an adversary with powers of black magic. What ensues is a great tale of action and adventure, a bit of love and a lot of humour in a gritty London (though not as over the top as, say, Tim Burton’s London from Sweeney Todd).

The success of Sherlock Holmes lies largely with the actors. The quirky Holmes (Downey Jr.), sober Dr. Watson and delightful femme fatale Adler (McAdams) remind me of another swashbuckling trio from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Sherlock Holmes almost turns into the Robert Downey Jr Show, as the Pirates movies almost turned into the Johnny Depp Show. Downey Jr shines in this role. Needless to say, I expect lots of Sherlock Holmes sequels and I would be more than happy to see them. Great Stuff!

IMDB: Sherlock Holmes

Movie: Collapse (2009)

Journalist Michael Ruppert is the guy that yells “don’t!” as the Trojans bring in the Wooden Horse. And no-one listens. At least, that is how he presents himself in the documentary Collapse. The film is not much more than an interview with Ruppert on oil, energy, money and food, shot over a period of five days and interspersed with archive footage of everything he talks about.

Here is the deal: Ruppert predicts the imminent collapse of the modern global industrial society. And he makes a pretty good statement. The whole world is based on oil, or, more precisely, finite resources. Not only electricity and fuel comes from oil, but products like cars itself come from oil. Oil is needed for all the plastic we use, from toothpaste to car tires. At the same time, our economy and our political ideologies are based on the false assumption of infinite growth. When infinite growth and finite resources meet eachother, collapse of society follows.


He might be a madman, he might also be a prophet. Collapse feels as a populist documentary but it presents a very clear story with no statistics, only the mention of trends that we are all already aware of. Ruppert is no scientist, and gets his opinions of what he finds out as a journalist, but his conclusions do not deviate much from the similar titled book Collapse by scientist Jared Diamond. Ruppert paints an even bleaker future than Diamond, but he might just be right. I haven’t decided yet.

At one point in the movie, after listing example after example of what is happening to our civilization, Ruppert collapses himself and starts to cry. Before the subtitles start, we are told that Ruppert has stopped writing and lecturing. He has given up, retired to his home, getting joy out of little things and holds on tight for the plunge.

Collapse is the ultimate feed-bad movie, but it is worth seeing.

IMDB: Collapse

Books: Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005)

Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist working for The New Yorker and he has the great talent of unearthing and tracking down unseen forces that have a big influence on our daily lives. A very useful skill for a journalist. Gladwell then transformed into a sort of pop sociologist after he started to bundle his articles into books. Very succesful books, I might add; number one international bestsellers and so on and so forth.

The Tipping Point (2000) is the story about hypes. Why do certain brands have sudden succes and other don’t? Why became Sesame Street so well-known? Why did the 80s crime epidemic of New York suddenly stop? Why is it so hard to stop teenage smoking? The Tipping Point is about that crucial moment in which the momentum of change passes a threshold and cannot be stopped. According to Gladwell, ideas and messages are contagious like a virus and spread or die out.

Gladwell talks to lots of social scientists, psychologists and specialists from all sorts of branches of research, but also to CEOs and advertisers and brings all his findings together to present a sort of rulebook on social epidemics. But his story is never boring; he presents every chapter with case studies and examples out of our daily lives. Gladwell’s books, both The Tipping Point and the next one, Blink, overflow with interesting examples and fascinating people.


Blink (2005) is also about the social effects of a psychological phenomenon. This time he dives into the mysterious world of the subconscious. How does our subconscious influence our judgement, and, just as important, how can we influence the subconscious of others? Gladwell shows that it happens all around us and our free will is not as free as we think it is.

Gladwell’s books are immensely popular and not without controversy. They make great coffeetable conversation and are passed on from person to person. And while the correlations he makes are a bit pseudoscientific now and then, he opens our minds to real and unseen worlds so we can understand these times just a little bit better.