5 Dinge, die Rock of Ages nicht hat

Tom Cruise als Stacee Jaxx in Rock of Ages

Bild: Warner Bros.

Rock. Man möchte meinen, mit einem Soundtrack von Bon Jovi bis Foreigner und dem Wort “Rock” im Titel, habe Adam Shankmans 80er-Jahre-Revival genug Fels um die Pyramiden von Gizeh in Lebensgröße neu aufzuschütten. Doch neu arrangiert im bombastischen “Night of the Proms”-Stil, überschüttet mit Synthesizern und Kompression, dargeboten von Stimmen der Castingshow-Generation, scheint jede noch so kleine Scharte der Originalsongs abgewetzt. “Wanted: Dead or Alive” ist damit eindeutig nur noch eins: dead.

Musical-Feeling. Gar nicht so dumm wäre es, zu hoffen, dass dieser zuckrige Überzug wenigstens für eine ordentliche Portion Broadway-Glamour sorgt. Aber irgendwann muss jemand mal festgestellt haben, dass man selbst auf ein Mashup von “I love Rock and Roll” und “Hit me with your best shot” nur schwer tanzen kann. Die Folge: Lahme bis nicht vorhandene Choreografien, die im Schnittchaos verdient untergehen. Wenn Busby Berkeley das noch erleben könnte …

Sex. Regelmäßig fällt dieses Wort in “Rock of Ages”. Als Anklagepunkt der von Catherine Zeta-Jones angeführten Protesttruppe, als Essenz seines Erfolgs aus dem Mund von Tom Cruises Tyler-Rose-Jovi-Amalgam Stacee Jaxx.* Doch selbst in der explizitesten Beischlafszene des Films muss die von Malin Akerman gespielte Rockjournalistin ihren BH anlassen. Das Spießertum, das Shankman noch im John-Waters-Musical Hairspray so treffend wie komisch anprangerte, hat in Rock of Ages obsiegt. Mothers, no need to hide your daughters, es ist nur eine weitere, mit Retropaste überzogene Franchisefolge von High School Musical. Typisch dafür, wie wenig ernst der Film Sex überhaupt nimmt, auch dieser Dialog: “Ich arbeite als Stripperin in einer Bar.” – “Ich bin Mitglied einer Boyband.” – “Okay, du hast gewonnen.”

Nostalgie. Die Haare, die Klamotten, die backsteingroßen Telefone, die Songs: Wie Archäologen, die versuchen, eine untergegangene Zivilisation aus deren Artefakten zu rekonstruieren, haben die Filmemacher alles zusammengetragen, was vermeintlich die Ära ausmachte, in deren überhöhter Version ihre Geschichte spielt. Die Aura dieser Ära jedoch – dreckiger, düsterer und dennnoch irgendwie schöner – haben sie irgendwo am Wegesrand vergessen. Übrig bleibt nur das übliche Zeichen ohne Bezeichnetes und ein ebenso leeres Gefühl in den limbischen Systemen der Zuschauer.

Eine Seele. Journeys “Don’t stop believing” ist gewissermaßen Drehbuchgrundlage (“Just a small town girl …”) und zentrale Hymne dieses Films, der sich anschickt, die wahre Religion des Rock vor den dunklen Mächten des Pop zu bewahren. Doch woran soll man noch glauben, wenn die selbsternannten Priester längst selbst einen Deal mit dem vermeintlichen Teufel geschlossen haben und eine unverhohlene filmische Manifestation von “The Man” als Neues Testament darreichen. Dann lieber zum zehnten Mal This is Spinal Tap gucken. Dort wird der bizarre Pomp und Circumstance jener Spätauswüchse des Rock ‘n’ Roll auch lächerlich gemacht, aber er wird wenigstens ernst genommen. Wie heißt es in “Don’t stop believing”? “Some were born to sing the blues.” Ja, und andere halt nicht.

*Cruise, der als reale Persönlichkeit mindestens genauso umstritten ist wie seine Filmfigur Stacee Jaxx, ist das einzig Sehenswerte an Rock of Ages. In seinen Szenen schillert manchmal für Sekundenbruchteile etwas von der Hassliebe durch, die man zu 80s-Bombastorock gefälligst zu pflegen hat.

Work in Progress: Wie digital ist der deutsche Film?

Hell

Hell, gedreht mit der Red One MX Kamera – Bild: Paramount

Mein Kollege und Freund Bernd Zywietz (Blog) hat mich angeheuert, um einen längeren Beitrag für ein Projekt zum aktuellen deutschen Film zu schreiben, das demnächst das Licht der Welt erblicken soll (Details nenne ich sicherheitshalber hier vorerst nicht).

Mein Thema wurde mir grob mit “Digitalisierung” umrissen. Wie genau ich an dieses Thema herantreten will, ist mir überlassen. Da ich hauptsächlich wegen des erwarteten Ruhms zugesagt habe, habe ich mich entschieden, diesmal einen etwas anderen Weg zu gehen, als den gewohnten.

Ich bevorzuge es in der Regel, Struktur und Inhalt eines Artikels gänzlich mit mir selbst auszumachen und daran im stillen Kämmerlein meines Köpfchens so lange herumzuschrauben, bis das Werk “fertig” ist, also bereit ist, in Buchstaben gegossen zu werden.

Herausgefordert durch Menschen wie Jeff Jarvis will ich dieses Mal einen etwas offeneren Prozess versuchen, in dem ich meine Ideen und meinen Fortschritt in diesem Blog offenlege und zur Diskussion freigebe.

Mir ist klar, dass – mit den wenigen Lesern, die mein Blog hat – und angesichts der 90-9-1-Pyramide, das Feedback wahrscheinlich eher klein ausfallen wird, aber man kann es ja mal versuchen. Wer weiß, was passiert. Vielleicht passiert auch nichts.

Mein momentanter Stand ist, dass ich mir überlegt habe, den Weg eines Films von der Produktion bis zur Kinoauswertung zu verfolgen und auf jedem Schritt des Weges zu überprüfen, wie stark die digitale Technik dort bereits dominiert (oder nicht) – in einer Mischung aus Interviewstatements und Fakten, die ich aus anderen Veröffentlichungen zum Thema ziehen will. Als sehr inspirierend empfand ich in dieser Hinsicht David Bordwells Blogserie Pandora’s Digital Box, die einen ähnlichen Weg wählt.

Ich fange mit der Produktionsseite an. Heute habe ich mehrere Filmschulen, die deutsche Produzentenallianz und zwei Dokumentarfilmer angeschrieben und um Interviews gebeten. Diese Woche nehme ich mir die letzten zwei Jahrgänge des “Filmecho” vor und suche Artikel zum Thema. Wenn ich mich auf dem Produktionsterrain sicher fühle, ist die Postproduktion und Auswertung dran.

Klingt das sinnvoll? Ich werde (hoffentlich) in Blogeinträgen von meinem Fortschritt berichten, gesammelte Ideen in den Raum werfen und auf Feedback hoffen (das dann später im Artikel durch Nennung gedankt wird). Wenn jemand jetzt schon etwas beitragen will, immer her damit. Was immer hilft ist auch: weitererzählen, vielleicht landet das work in progress so bei jemandem, der etwas dazu beitragen möchte.

Ihr Blutbad ist angerichtet, Sir

Immer wieder fallen mir in der eingeschliffenen deutschen Journalistensprache Redewendungen auf, bei denen ich mir ein Stirnrunzeln nicht verkneifen kann. Gestern war es das Wort “Blutbad” in der Berichterstattung über die grausamen Morde an der Zivilbevölkerung in Syrien.

Ich habe noch nie zuvor die Gelegenheit genutzt, mich mit dem Wortfeld Massenmord etwas genauer auseinanderzusetzen, also habe ich das kurz getan. Die engste Assoziation, die wir Menschen zu massenhafter Tötung anderer Lebewesen haben, scheint das Schlachten zu sein. Also kommen die meisten Begriffe zur Beschreibung massenhafter und wahlloser Morde aus diesem Bereich: “Massaker” stammt (laut Wikipedia) vom altfranzösischen maçacre, „Schlachthaus“; auch “metzeln” ist ein mittelhochdeutscher Begriff für “schlachten”. Irgendwie nachvollziehbar, und zumindest ist bei dem Wort “Massaker” inzwischen jeder Bezug zu seinem Ursprung verschwunden.

Warum aber “Blutbad”? Was erscheint sinnvoll oder wünschenswert an dem sprachlichen Bild, dass die Morde so zahlreich waren, dass jemand – wenn er nur wollte – im Blut der Opfer hätte baden können? Noch schlimmer, Formulierungen wie “das Assad-Regime [hat] in der syrischen Provinz Homs ein furchtbares Blutbad an Zivilisten angerichtet” legen nahe, dass die Massenmorde exakt zu diesem Zweck verübt wurden.

Das Wort ist keine Erfindung der deutschen Sensationspresse, es ist alt (biblisch gar), existiert quasi in allen Sprachen und hat überall auch nur diese Bedeutung: großes Vergießen von Menschenblut durch Mord. Vielleicht hat das Wort mit der zweiten Bedeutung von baden zu tun, “zu viel von etwas haben”. Wahrscheinlich ist es aber auch nur eine uralte poetische Umschreibung einer grausamen Situation, die im Laufe der Jahrhunderte ihre wörtliche Bedeutung eingebüßt hat – wie es bei vielen anderen Wörtern auch der Fall ist.

Trotzdem würde ich in letzterem Fall dafür plädieren, das Wort in Presseberichten über Massenmorde nicht weiter zu verwenden, auch wenn man damit ein Synonym verliert. Das Wort mag so in den Sprachgebrauch übergegangen sein, dass außer Menschen mit einer so bildlichen Vorstellung wie mir, niemand mehr dabei an ein tatsächliches Bad in Blut denkt. Den Opfern gegenüber ist es trotzdem respektlos, ihr Leid durch einen so geschmackloses Sprachbild zu trivialisieren. Und es ist ein klassisches Beispiel dafür, wie der routinierte Journalismus sprachliche Klarheit gerne mal zugunsten von wohlkingenden Bildern hinter sich lässt.

Dass es übrigens auch ohne Blutbad geht, zeigt etwa der Artikel auf tagesschau.de, was nicht heißt, dass die ARD vor dem Gebrauch gefeit ist.

Why Bilingual Blogging Sucks

bi-linguality

Image: Kuli, CC0

This is a rant. And a whiny one at that. With the internet so free and international as it is, there is one problem it hasn’t solved: the language barrier. Sure, computer translators like Google Translate do an okay job at translating the gist of foreign websites, but they will never give you the real experience of reading something in a language you actually understand. They still produce too much gibberish for someone to actually enjoy an article written by someone in a language that’s foreign to the reader.

Which puts people like me in a strange predicament: What language should I use for publishing on the internet?

I can only work from my own example here, because I have not heard anyone else complain about the topic so far, but I am sure there must be others that feel the same way. Having studied the language in college and spending some time abroad, I think that I speak and write English well enough for others to understand me and for me to be able to express even slightly complex thoughts in it. Since English is the language understood by most people around the world, the logical conclusion should be to keep my writings in English. This way, I will reach more people, right?

However, my native language is German, and I know that not only can I express myself better in German, I also have a different style in each language. When I write in English, I can also never be absolutely sure that what I am writing sounds “natural” and not like a foreigner who is trying to impress native speakers with his English. (I recall giving one of my essay papers for proofreading to my English flatmate in Edinburgh. He started reading it and then stopped, unnerved. “I don’t know what to say”, he said, “nothing you wrote is actually wrong, but it just doesn’t feel like something a native speaker would write.”)

While I have been writing mostly about films recently, I started this blog while I was still working full-time as a media journalist. And there’s a lot of topics where I just doesn’t make sense to write in English, because they concern the German media landscape or debates going on in the German blogosphere which concerns itself a lot with developments in media and the internet (and not much else).

Okay, you might say, write in German, then. Do what you do best, link to the rest.

Really? But Germany has no real movieblogging scene to speak of. Most of the people blogging about movies in Germany either just review what they last watched, link to the newest trailers or translate news from English movieblogs. Almost no one in Germany just writes about the stuff that interests them in that half-academic, half-nerdy way that is so popular (and often so good) on British and American blogs. Why would I want to alienate these people that I admire and miss the opportunity to enter into a dialogue with them. “Great post, here’s my thoughts on the topic translated into English by Google. Nevermind that most of it doesn’t make any sense this way.”

Right, then. Blog in both English and German, depending on the topic.

That’s what I am doing at the moment. Stuff that concerns only Germany, I write in German. Everything else, I write in English (although sometimes, I wish I could just write it in German because it’s so much less of an effort [told you, I’d be whining]). I’ve also switched my Twitter account to be (almost) exclusively English, because most of the people I follow speak English.

This solution, however, is adequate at best, neither fish nor fowl at its worst. If what you read is true, a personal Internet “brand” is at its strongest when it is at its most recognizable. Bilinguality does not help. If I was a reader of, say, a blog written by a Spaniard, I would regret every post she writes in Spanish, because I don’t understand Spanish. On Twitter, there is some German topics I would really like to write about sometimes, but I would feel silly writing them in English (especially when replying to a German tweet) and I don’t want to “break character” by writing in German.

The only “real” solution, I guess, would be to split my online persona, have an English blog and a German blog, an English Twitter and a German Twitter. But with my output as irregular as it is, I feel it would be very stupid to not put everything in one place. I could also code this blog into parallel sites in English and German, but with only 25 hits a day, I don’t think it would be worth the effort. And it still wouldn’t solve the Twitter problem, because unlike Facebook or Google+, Twitter doesn’t allow you to sort your followers into groups or circles and broadcast only to some of them.

Whichever way you look at it, one thing or another always looks askew. I have no solution. Which is probably why I am so frustrated. If you have a solution, or a comment, please post it in the comments. In any language you choose.

In eigener Sache: Onlineredaktion des Katholikentags in Mannheim

Die kommende Woche werde ich zu großen Teilen in Mannheim verbringen. Basierend auf meiner Erfahrung als Leiter der Onlineredaktion des evangelischen Kirchentags in Dresden letztes Jahr hat mich die kleinere (dafür aber ältere) Schwesterveranstaltung der Katholiken gefragt, ob ich nicht auch dieses Jahr in der Onlineredaktion mithelfen möchte. Ich habe gerne zugesagt.

Seit dem evangelischen Kirchentag in Bremen 2009 und erst recht seit dem ökumenischen Kirchentag 2010 in München hat sich in den Onlineredaktionen der Veranstaltungen eine angenehme, ökumenische Kontinuität ergeben, von denen alle Beteiligten profitieren. Stipendiaten und Volontäre des katholischen IFP waren, nach den guten Erfahrungen in München, im vergangenen Jahr Teil der Redaktion des evangelischen Kirchentages. Und dieses Jahr in Mannheim halten ich und meine Kollegin vom nächsten Kirchentag in Hamburg in Mannheim die ökumenische Flagge hoch. Der traditionelle Kooperationspartner des Kirchentages, die evangelische Journalistenschule in Berlin, hat es leider nicht nach Mannheim geschafft. Dafür ist das Medienkolleg Innsbruck wieder mit von der Partie.

Ich freue mich darauf, wieder in einer multimedialen Desk-Redaktion mit netten Kollegen zu arbeiten und bin gespannt auf die Ergebnisse. Die kann man dann ab Mittwoch auf katholikentag.de sehen.

Review: The Avengers – The astounding culmination of an extraordinary venture

Walt Disney Pictures

(This is a sort of summary of all the thoughts I’ve had about the Avengers movie in the last year or so, some of which I’ve already blogged about. The actual review starts about halfway through the post.)

Universal Studios’ Missed Opportunity

The year is 1940. Imagine you are J. Cheever Cowdin, President of Universal Studios, and you have an idea. Universal has built large parts of its reputation on a slate of genre movies based on gothic novel characters from the last century. “Hang on a minute”, you might say, “all the actors from these iconic roles are still alive, we have them under contract. Why don’t we assemble them in a large-scale gothic ensemble movie and let them have a big adventure together?”

Sadly, Cowdin didn’t have this idea at the time. The best classical Hollywood cinema could come up with, in terms of character crossovers, was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It took the medium of comic books, both to realize a pan-gothic tale of high adventure (Alan Moore’s “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”) and to lay the tracks for what would become one of the most ambitious projects in recent film history: Marvel Studios’ The Avengers.

When it comes to high-end production values, TV has definitely caught up with movies in recent years. At the same time, though, movies have taken a step towards TV’s more ambitious modes of storytelling. Film franchises, nowadays, are no longer content with telling a single story over a single film. Instead, they lean more and more towards building a cinematic universe that can be filled with stories from several films communicating with each other, as well as other media like games and novels that can run alongside.

Supergroup Mechanics

One of the driving forces behind this development was, once again, comics, and the movies based on their characters, which hit their third big stride (after the Superman films of the 80s and the Batman flicks of the 90s) with the Spider-Man films in the early noughties. Comics had proven over several decades that the characters called into action every week in the serial medium could meet, fight each other and help each other out, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in gigantic climactic battles. These characters were owned by the same company, ergo: they inhabited a universe generally governed by the same rules. A crossover would draw together fans from each of the series, in the same way a musical supergroup can bet on devotees from each of their members’ regular bands showing up at a concert – and later on checking out those other regular bands as well. You don’t need Professor Xavier to see how this concept, in reasonable doses of course, lends itself if not to artistic success then at least to financial gain.

When “The Avengers” first assembled in 1963, they weren’t the first superhero supergroup. Rival comic book company DC’s “Justice League of America” had already crossed over Batman, Superman and other characters several years before. I have read only a few of the “Avengers” comics, but let’s just say that, like many of Marvel’s characters, the team members were mired in all-too-human and superhuman problems, and the actual “Avengers” troupe saw more lineup changes in its fifty years of existence than a badly organized rock festival. Members married, fought, went to war, made up, quarreled and fell in love more often than you want to know. However, they were all still part of one giant narrative called “The Avengers” and overseen by Marvel Comics. (For a brilliant (albeit German) assessment of superhero team dynamics, I recommend Sabine Horst’s article in the upcoming issue of epd film, which she kindly let me read in advance).

Walt Disney Pictures

Hinged on a Promise

Movies of course, are a different breed from comics. Making them costs a lot more and they are dependent not only on the imagination of artists and writers but also on the schedules and egos of actors and directors. And it’s very rare to make a movie that starts to tell a story and then hope that the audience comes back next week to buy the next issue (even though Peter Jackson is doing it again at the moment).

Enter Kevin Feige, President of Production of Marvel Studios, who – at least in the media version of reality – is the mastermind behind the astounding feat that is The Avengers. When Feige took over the reins in 2007, the studio had already prepared the road for him. They had their $500 Million deal with Merrill Lynch set up and they had just bought back the rights for Hulk and Thor.

But it took Feige’s post-credit stinger in Iron Man in 2008, in which Samuel L. Jackson (who signed an unusual nine-movie-deal with the studio) first mentioned the “Avengers Initative” to Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, for the transformation of comic book mechanics to big budget filmmaking to suddenly seem palpable. Everything that happened since then was no more than a gigantic buildup of expectations towards The Avengers.

Introducing characters in Iron Man 2 that were rather unnecessary to the film’s central narrative; releasing Thor and Captain America only several months apart; actually making Captain America (a film about a character which should have worried at least some executives about its limited potential in overseas markets); ending Captain America with the hero’s love interest lost and many questions unanswered; all these hinged on the promise of an as-yet-unmade movie to be directed by geek god Joss Whedon, which would be released in Spring 2012. One thing was sure: Even if The Avengers sucked, you would at least have to admire the effort.

When Fury Calls

Fortunately, it doesn’t suck. What could have turned into a huge clusterfrog of incompatible story lines, star personas battling for screen time and superhero technobabble, instead was gracefully crafted into one of the most enjoyable, clever, action packed pieces of big budget genre filmmaking in recent years. And at its centre rests, amazingly enough, a remarkable ensemble performance by mostly marquee-worthy actors not seen in this field since The Lord of the Rings.

To see the ensemble in action, however, you first have to put it together. The Avengers takes its time doing so, first introducing its main villain Loki and his attack on the headquarters of SHIELD, where he steals the energy-laden cube called the tesseract introduced in Captain America, turns several of SHIELD’s employees into his minions and plans to unleash an alien army to conquer Earth for him. SHIELD, with Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury at the helm, is the smartly-constructed glue that holds the story together. It’s the Avengers‘ MI5, which monitors the superhero universe and calls upon its inhabitants as needed.

This time, Fury decides, the situation is so severe that it justifies a tryout of his masterplan – the superhero supergroup, which so far he has only discussed with the most visible of the future Avengers’ team members, Tony Stark aka Iron Man. So it’s Fury who sends word to Stark and the recently thawed Steve “Captain America” Rogers, and who sends Scarlett Johannsson’s Black Widow to charm Bruce Banner into returning from India – strictly for non-Hulk purposes of course. Thor finds his brother’s mischief on his own.

Walt Disney Pictures

Group Therapy

It will take another hour and a half until Earth’s Mightiest Heroes actually get to fight against Loki in the streets of New York. Until then, the team has to discuss among themselves, ulterior motives have to be revealed, a first test of their collaborative spirit has to pretty much go haywire. Someone, in true Joss Whedon fashion, even has to die. Most of the action takes place on SHIELD’s mobile headquarters, an airborne aircraft carrier outfitted with a command centre that would make the USS Enterprise hide in shame. While the action setpieces that dot the first two acts of the movie are well thought out and keep the suspense alive, they are really just an accompaniment to a number of well-choreographed dialogue scenes between the groups’ members.

Lover’s of bare-bones-narratives might find these first two acts of The Avengers a bit lacking in momentum, but I think Whedon plays his cards exactly right. As a viewer, you need this array of quieter moments for the individual characters and their relationships with each other, to get a sense later on that there really is something at stake in this story, both with respect to external threats and internal morale. There is a scene in which Stark, who is obviously fascinated with the possibility of unleashing the Hulk, and Banner discuss their situation as one scientist to another, except that one of them is a loudmouthed playboy and the other one a soft spoken lost soul with what is repeatedly called “anger management issues” in the film. Another moment pits Thor (“You are all so puny!”) against Captain America’s superhuman righteousness, which simply knocks the arrogant norse god out cold. The situation is a little less clear with both Hawkeye and Black Widow, who are given back stories but cannot help but remain fighting ciphers, even referred to by Tony Stark at one point simply as “a couple of master assassins”.

Walt Disney Pictures

Despite this maybe somewhat wordy first part of the film, however, the story is still rather lean. Whedon never goes for cheap inside jokes unless they serve to push the narrative forward in some meaningful way. When the group finally stands in a circle in full costume, collects their orders from Cap and then sets out to put Loki’s cats back into their intergalactic bag, the audience has a clear feeling for each character’s motivation and roots for every single one of them. Loki as a villain, of course, makes for a great mirror image of the superhero team, borrowing some traits from each of them – from Thor’s arrogance and Stark’s cunning to Hulk’s uncontrollable wrath. That he still has to be a typical comic book villain with no real motive except a hunger for power stemming from a bad childhood, is a conceit that comes with the genre.

Who is the love interest?

In short: I really liked The Avengers. It’s a spectacular thrill ride for everyone who spent the last couple of years yearning for this moment and should be an entertaining ensemble action flick for everyone else, with a cast of colourful characters to match forebears like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven. It delivers on all promises made, it’s tightly written and cool enough to look at, featuring a star-studded cast in which the performances of Samuel L. Jackson and especially Mark Ruffalo probably stand out as most memorable. Ruffalo as Banner, the only member of the team who doesn’t wear his superhero guise on his sleeves, gives the film an emotional centre otherwise often occupied by the female love interest.

One last thing though. The Avengers is exhausting and after all that climax it makes you wonder what will happen next. Kevin Feige has already commented on how he plans to avoid sequel-itis in the following years. We shall see if he manages to pull it off a second time. I wouldn’t want to bet against it.

The Avengers Fan-Screening in Berlin

Wie bereits erwähnt habe ich durch einen glücklichen Zufall – und Hulk sei dank – überraschend zwei Karten für das deutsche Avengers-Fanscreening in Berlin gewonnen. Wenn man schon gewinnt, muss man das auch durchziehen, dachte ich mir. Ich bin also gestern spontan in Mainz in einen Zug nach Berlin gestiegen.

Das Screening fand im UCI Kinowelt auf der Landsberger Allee statt und die Wahl dieses nicht besonders glamourösen Kinos irgendwo im Niemandsland zwischen Friedrichshain und Prenzlauer Berg spricht eigentlich Bände für die Gesamtgestaltung des Abends. Abgesehen von einem armen Willi im Iron-Man-Kostüm, ein paar Kamerateams und jeder Menge Vorab-Kriminalisierung der Zuschauer, die sogar ihre Handys abgeben mussten, wurde sich wenig Mühe gegeben, der Veranstaltung irgendwie einen besonderen Anstrich zu geben. Nicht einmal eine offizielle Begrüßung vonseiten Disneys, Marvels oder deren PR-Vertreter war drin. Nur eine freundliche, amüsierte Kinomitarbeiterin wies uns vor Beginn des Films noch einmal darauf hin, dass wir zu Werbezwecken gefilmt werden und uns doch ducken sollen, wenn wir nicht im Bild erscheinen wollen.

Einem geschenkten Gaul soll man natürlich, wie Pferdehalter weltweit wissen, nicht ins Maul schauen. Und zum Glück war der eigentliche Film alle Strapazen wert. Das Publikum war ein weiterer Pluspunkt – hier wurde an den richtigen Stellen gejubelt, geklatscht und gelacht und die positive Stimmung hing in einer Denkblase über den Kinoreihen, deren Größe jeden Comiczeichner stolz machen sollte. Dass der Film ihnen (wie mir übrigens auch – mehr dazu bald an dieser Stelle) gefiel, sagten mir einige Fans hinterher sogar noch einmal ins Mikrofon:

Ein paar Lektionen zur medialen Begleitung eines solchen Ereignisses habe ich übrigens auch noch gelernt. Vor allem, dass es sich gelohnt hätte, deutlich früher vor Ort zu sein, um vor dem Einlass in Ruhe ein paar Fotos zu machen und gezielt einige Fans anzusprechen. So war ich (nicht zuletzt dank des wie immer chaotischen Berliner S-Bahn-Verkehrs) knapp eine Stunde vor Vorstellungsbeginn am Kino, musste noch für meine eigenen Karten anstehen, meine Gerätschaften abgeben und mir schließlich auch noch einen ordentlichen Platz sichern. Etwas zu hektisch, wie man leider vor allem an der Fotoqualität sehen kann. Wenn also das nächste Mal ein Filmereignis dieser Größe über Deutschland hereinbricht, werde ich vorbereitet sein.

Blogging the Avengers Fan-Screening in Berlin

I can’t believe I got so lucky. I actually won two tickets for the fan screening of The Avengers tomorrow in Berlin. So I will actually see my most anticipated film of the year a week and a half before the rest of Germany! Thanks so much.

I will try my best to capture the experience in this blog, as much as I am allowed to. I’ll bring my camera and audio recorder and use the train ride back to Mainz to write/edit/post something for this blog.

If you are also at the screening and would like to meet up for a chat about the film afterwards, tweet me!

UPDATE: The post about the screening is in German and it’s here.

“Film Weekly” – An Obituary

When I visited my first real film festival as a professional writer, the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2008, I saw Oscar Nominee Richard Jenkins a few feet away from me and couldn’t have cared less. I was looking for someone else and when I finally spotted him, I was so star-struck that I didn’t dare to talk to him. Good thing I ran into him a second time – and this time I managed to chat with him for a bit. The man was Jason Solomons, a film journalist for “The Guardian” and he had been in my ear for over a year, every week.

Jason was the host of the Guardian’s podcast “Film Weekly”, the first podcast I listened to regularly, and one of the best film podcasts around, as far as I am concerned. In an internet world, where the geeks – and the loud films they like – have increasingly taken over power, “Film Weekly”, Solomons and later co-host Xan Brooks gave off a cushy scent of old film journalism gentry and art house sensitivity. I first discovered the show in an episode on Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (via the now defunct blog “Cinematical”) and was immediately hooked.

I almost never agreed with Jason’s and Xan’s assessment of more mainstream films, especially animation, and I found the way Jason conducted some of his interviews to be rather unnerving (witness, for example, how he almost drives David Cronenberg mad, by insisting on discovering what’s “cronenbergian” about him). On the other hand, here were journalists who had the power of a publication like the “Guardian” behind them, who could be autonomous and irreverent without too much press junket fanboy-ism.

They led me to art house gems I would hardly have discovered without them, featured big stars as well as small indie newcomers and had English accents that were easy on the ear. At about 30 minutes, the show was exactly the right length, and not as long-drawn and chatty as some of the other efforts on the net (like Filmspotting and the /filmcast).

It’s really too bad, that Solomons and Brooks hosted their last show a week and a half ago. Their company gave no real reason for the cancellation except “limited resources & belts being tightened, as well as the desire to push the Guardian’s multimedia in new directions”. A video show will follow later this year. While video might generate more clicks in this day and age, it’s also hard to enjoy it while you’re going for your weekend run and takes a lot more active commitment to watch regularly. I, for one, will probably stop consuming the “Guardian”‘s film coverage now. I hope I will have the opportunity to run into Jason or Xan at a film festival again to tell them how much I miss their show.

Navel Gazing – Part 4: Social Networks

Image: Wikimedia Commons

I’m not usually an early adopter. I am too stingy for it. Spending large amounts of money on a new thing that hasn’t proven it will catch on yet and whose subsequent generations will fix all the faults the first one had? Lunacy! But there is one thing about which I can still tell the tale that I was there before most everyone else I know – and that’s Facebook.

I got lucky, though. In the fall of 2005, I moved from Germany to Edinburgh to spend a semester abroad. Conveniently, this was after Facebook had expanded to UK universities but before it opened up to everyone everywhere, one year later. So, while everyone in Germany was still connecting on the German Facebook Clone StudiVZ, I was already using the Next Big Thing to hit Germany. And that’s my claim to early adopter fame.

Facebook

It’s true what they say, Facebook is creating a sort of second, parallel internet. If you are using it, you notice stuff that you don’t notice when you are not using it. I have basically stopped using e-mail for communicating with people I know on Facebook. Instead of sending out invites to communal activities, I just create an event. And the sort of private blogging that I used to do before I started this “serious” blog (on Livejournal, I dare you to find my blog, it’s still up) has migrated to Facebook as well. Mostly in short status updates, of course, but sometimes I also still use Notes, the almost-forgotten Facebook blogging app.

Don’t listen to the haters. For me, Facebook has gotten better with every update. Now, with the introduction of Timeline and the revamping of Groups, it is finally a real “best of both worlds” experience. Before, I politely declined friend requests from people I didn’t know too well, because I am still using Facebook for lots of pretty personal stuff. Now, I’m fine with friending colleagues and distant acquaintances, because I simply move them too the appropriate list. Lists also helped me cope with my internet bilinguality (more on that next episode). I can finally write updates in German and not spam my English-speaking friends’ news feeds with them. At the same time, timeline now finally has become a reliable archive of my life and online activity and will probably come in handy some day – if only they added a good search function soon.

What does Facebook do for me, newswise? I sometimes pick up stories from there that I missed elsewhere. My friends’s status updates sometimes alert me to topics, blogs, etc. I wouldn’t have caught without them. I follow several bands, which is great for not missing when they go on tour, and movie projects (although most of them don’t really do that good of a job). Mostly, though, it still connects me with personal friends on a personal level. The few times that I have actually entered into discussions with people didn’t go so well.

If you want to discuss stuff with me, feel free to do so. Some of my profile is actually public and I allow subscriptions. The fact that I haven’t enabled public search, however, shows that Facebook is still more of a private medium for me.

Twitter

While Alex and Facebook were a natural fit, it took Twitter and me a while to become friends. I needed to read about it for a long time before I decided to try my luck there. As you might tell from this blog, expressing thoughts in 140 characters is not really my forte and I am witty only very occasionally (terrible, terrible puns are more my specialty). I also have a really old smartphone that takes ages to even load the Twitter app (I had a newer one but it got stolen – the difference on my Twitter behaviour is palpable). So I don’t tweet too often and I have few followers and even less who follow me because of what I tweet (I guess). Even though this scratches my ego somewhat, I have since found that you don’t need a lot of followers to use Twitter as an awesome cherry on the media cake.

Twitter is my serendipity machine. In its own very limited way it breaks through my filter bubble and points me to things I wouldn’t have noticed without it. Even though I follow mostly people who are either famous or from my field or both, there are enough of them and the connection with them is weak enough to transcend the feedback loop of social networking. Whenever I feel like finding something new or leftfield, I head to Twitter.

I also love to use Twitter as a running commentary on current events. The best experience I have probably had was watching the Oscars this year (always a very lonely affair in Germany because of the time difference). I had my Twitter feed running the whole time, tweeted myself and somehow felt like I was watching the ceremony with a circle of cool friends.

Twitter is not an essential part of my media diet. I also think it is a much better tool for freelancers than for regular employees – I’m not allowed to tweet about most of the interesting stuff that happens to me – and I have found that I am simply more of a blogger than a microblogger. But I wouldn’t want to miss Twitter in there. It makes for some very interesting flavouring.

The Rest

I registered on StudiVZ, the dying German copycat-cousin of Facebook, with an e-mail-address that has since been deactivated. I can’t remember my password so I haven’t been able to log in and see the devastation for some years now.

I try to use Xing, the German copycat-cousin of LinkedIn, as a business profile, giving people who don’t know me personally an alternative to Facebook. I hardly ever use it and I wouldn’t know why I should start, especially since Facebook made the list feature more prominent.

I have a Google+ profile, but I have yet to use it. Why the heck should I hang around two sites with almost the exact same functionalities? I hear people say the conversations on Google+ are better. I was never unhappy with the conversations on Facebook.

That’s about it for my media diet, but I have one more topic left to cover, so there will be a part 5 about the pain in the ass that bilinguality can be.

Navel Gazing is a multi-part blog series about my personal media consumption habits, meant as a case study and a moment of self-reflection on account of Real Virtuality’s third birthday.