Studies Suggest: Vol.8 — some studies

Mars Express

What an admirable feat in modern animation art, with great visuals and a captivating story. The Touring-Asimov AI-Ex-Machina sci-fi noir crime thriller is compelling, visually enthralling, and rich in detail. Akira, Blade Runner, Ghost In The Shell, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Saga, Ex Machina, Nowhere Men, and the classic sci-fi stories that have inspired the genre for decades. They are all in there and more. Mars Express distills those ingredients into something precise, enticing, and exciting. It doesn’t hold back either. Neither fully utopia nor dystopia, there is something brutally ruthless simmering beneath the shiny, smooth Jony Ive surface of the Martian technocracy depicted. And while the movie naturally asks all the big questions a film like this poses, it investigates them in a mature and nuanced tone. Without giving anything away about the great ending, there might be logic, but there are no easy answers.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

A deeply touching memoir on how tragedy and pain open the shell so that everything else can be felt and experienced for once. Hiding in writing about pop culture, navigating the seas of movie and music references with ease, trying to be “tapped in”. All just to distract oneself from genuine emotions and confronting one’s own shortcomings in terms of the ability to forge meaningful connections. The presciously rare exception of that one companion who changes everything and shifts your outlook on the whole thing. From the first page of Stay True, you feel a shadow looming, and once it falls over you, the anticipation doesn’t make the impact any less striking. A simultaneously quite mundane and improbable story chronicled in a way that makes it feel universally relatable. Stays with you. Magical.

Train Dreams

A whole adult life covered in just about 100 minutes. The promise, the dreams, the failure, the resilience, the pain of loss, the grief, and the rapid economic progress achieved within just a few decades through ruthless exploitation of human labour (and, even more drastically, of environmental resources) during the industrialization era. From a saw blade to a chainsaw, and everything lived in the meantime, Train Dreams is rich in emotion and even richer in beautiful photography. As an exemplary case of show-don’t-tell, it astonishingly delivers all the above, with no sense of rush and enough air to breathe for the visual poetry that is presented to us. As soon as the credits rolled, I ordered Denis Johnson’s novella, which this beauty of a movie was based on.

Being John Malkovich

Quite close in spirit to his refreshingly imaginative commercial and music video work, as in being based on a „what if“ idea, and building from there, Spike Jonze delivered a singular, obscure vision of fantastic realism to close out the last millennium with his first feature film. This is one of those movies you see and constantly ask yourself, “Are they really going for this?” and the answer is always a resounding “sure, why not?” In a world where everything seems to be possible, Being John Malkovich keeps you on your toes, excited to see what’s next. As an admirer of Spike Jonze’s directorial body of work, after it was over, I found myself asking, “Why haven‘t I seen this before?” Right then, a memory flashed in my mind of me, as a kid, flipping through the German equivalent of a TV guide and getting stuck on this weird-looking movie with a synopsis that my little synapses could not comprehend, at presumably about eight years old. I remember thinking, “That must be some strange documentary about this actor,” and being not interested at all. Just about a week after this inexplicably late first sighting, I had to rewatch Being John Malkovich again.

Blue Moon Safari by Vegyn & Air

As I’m generally not a fan of remixes, it was difficult to imagine that the iconic Air album could be any more moody. Still, this re-imagination, or whatever you might want to call it - the Vegyn treatment - does the trick. After being hooked on Vegyn’s Headache project for quite a while, I was almost expecting some absurdist poetry to come in, but was just as satisfied with Blue Moon Safari. It feels like a master painter was given his favorite palette of oils (or smooth melodies and hypnotizing drum loops) and ten canvases. While each Vegyn Version track can stand on its own, it is commendable that the “one sonic trip“ Air’s original album provided was honored in spirit in flawless execution.

Fully Flared

With Marc Johnson's passing, the skateboarding world has lost one of its greats and probably my personal favorite skater ever. As the saddening news settled in and hit me quite significantly, I was prompted to, once again, boot up Fully Flared. The legendary skate video shaped a generation of skaters and definitely my understanding of the art form, re-wiring my brain and raising the bar for any skate video that came after it. It had been a while since I had seen it. The DVD (and later the Blu-Ray) from the Final Flare box set has probably seen the most plays in my teenage bedroom of all discs I owned, barring my The Simpsons Movie DVD. Besides the explosive opening sequence, I was particularly impressed by Mike Mo Capaldi’s opening part, a young gun making his mark alongside a roster of (as I learned) established icons of the history of skating. I understood why Eric Koston was held in such high regard. I appreciated Rick Howard’s joyful movement on the board, with a big smile on his face. But the standout part, of course, was Marc Johnson’s. A monumental ending part of almost 14 minutes, spanning 3 songs. Such graceful, fluent, and uniquely creative skating. It left me in awe at 11 years old, and still does now. The Switch FS Noseblunt to BS Noseblunt ending his part, and the whole video is truly a core memory. The perfect frame for the perfect ledge, a more than perfect trick for the spot, executed perfectly. It pops into my head every few weeks and probably will for as long as my hippocampus functions, as surely is the case for almost anyone who has seen Fully Flared.