In the seventh blog entry I wrote about the film Fargo (1996). In this second Fargo part, my intention is to direct your attention to the TV show which can easily compete with Breaking Bad (2008-2013), True Detective (2014-…) and Narcos (2015-…).

Fargo (TV Series)

Fargo is inspired by the movie directed and written by the Coen brothers, who also are a part of this project as executive producers.

The first season of Fargo premiered 2014, on [FX] Fox Extended (American Horror Story, Louie). FX also renewed Fargo for a second and third season (2015 and 2016), so it is a new and fresh TV show.

Every season has a new cast, new characters and a new story but they all are located in Minnesota. The audience can see a lot snow, listening to Minnesota accents, be part of the police work, and part of a crime gang.

The highlight of season one was Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne Malvo who passes through cities like Bemidji and Fargo and “influences the community with his malice, violence and deception“¹.

On the one side this character is great and interesting because he is not a generic villain, on the other side he is the villain of the first season, so it is a deadlock situation for the audience. There is no right, there is no wrong. This is acting.

Fargo also benefits from actors like Martin Freeman (Sherlock, The Hobbit), Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) and Bob Odenkirk (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) who are always impressive with their performances.

If you like TV shows with an intelligent screenplay without clichés and stereotypes, Fargo is on of the best in the crime/drama sector and you have to start to watch it as fast as possible.

Did you watched this TV Series or the movie already? What is your opinion about it?

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fargo_%28TV_series%29 (11/23/2015, 6:32 pm)

The next two blog entries I want to dedicate the movie Fargo (1996) and the related TV show Fargo (2014) because both are great in their category.

Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is a husband, father and works as a car salesman. Because of the awful relationship to his wealthy father-in-law (Harve Presnell), he decided to make his own money by investing, so that he is sovereign and unattached to his father-in-law.

Jerry travels to Fargo (North Dakota) and hires two guys to kidnap his own wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrück) and ransom her for one million dollar. Jerry knows that his father-in-law will pay this amount of money. Dividing the ransom money between Jerry and both kidnappers is the plan, but the kidnappers do not know about the real amount of ransom money, all they know is that they will have 40 thousand dollars in the end of this deal.

The kidnappers are bloody and messy on their way and because of that the local police start to investigating these events of crime.

I do not want to spoil you the following progress of this story or the ending, so you have to watch it on your own.

I had watched this movie several times and I was always fascinated by the work of Ethan and Joel Coen (both are writers and directors) who had produced this and other movies.

In Fargo all characters had spoken with an regional Minnesota accent and all characters were philanthropic and benevolent. Back then I had felt amused by this, because It had seemed like a parody of some hillbillies. Later I had respect for the acting that had created this great atmosphere of the city and movie Fargo.

In the second part, I will write about the TV show Fargo, so do not miss it.

Today, I want to hold a monologue about “remakes“ in Hollywood, and why they ruin my mood every time a studio proudly announces a remake of a movie already exists.
First of all: what does “remake” means in this Hollywood context and secondly, is every remake of a movie awful? In this context “remake” does mean to make a new and not a different version of a movie and of course there are good remakes like:

• The Thing (1982), directed by John Carpenter, is a horror movie which is much better than the original The Thing from Another World (1951). The original movie is Anti-Communism propaganda in a horror setting while the remake is a scary and dark horror movie about scientists in the antarctic including an appearance of  extraterrestrial life.

The problem is that film producers in Hollywood rather invest in a remake of a movie which was already successful in the past [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and the following remake Michael Bay’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)], or producers investing in a new version of non-English films because an international/English “copy” has the potential to reach a higher box office.

In the USA it is more common to watch the remake of a movie instead of watching a dubbed or a subbed version of the original. A Austrian film director named Michael Haneke had the success with the psychological thriller Funny Games (1997) in Austria. In 2007 Haneke remade his movie with a American crew in the USA. It was still the same story, the same plot and even the same title but it was necessarily for him to get the attention of the movie audience in North America. There are plenty of copies of films with a American cast, only produced to increase the box office with “the principle of least effort”.

“In 2005, 17% of top grossing films were Hollywood remakes but by 2014 it was just 5%.”
The new trend is to franchising projects like Marvel Studios with their superhero films or films like Fast and Furious (2001-2015) and Transformers (2007-2014) but it does not mean that there are not enough unnecessarily produced remakes in 2015.

To prevent this ongoing trends of recycling old movies with a new crew, the North American theaters have to screen the dubbed and subbed versions of the original films to show the audience that it does not hurt watching non-English movies. In countries like Sweden, Netherlands and Denmark it is standard.
“How can we create new worlds when we are trapped forever in old ones? “

What do you think about remakes? What remakes of films are better than the original?

 

 

 

My passion for the mafia, mobsters, and organized crime is a mystery to me but all I know is that I am trying to watch them all. It is a deep and also strong desire to be different, to ignore the laws, and do not pay any attention to authorities. These three movies allow me to spend time in another world, where I can be a part of organized crime.

3. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Quentin Tarantino has an appearance on this blog already, although this time with his most popular movie: Pulp Fiction. In this movie, there are many characters with their own story and problems:

• Two hit-men have to retrieve a mysterious suitcase
• Butch, a boxer runs away and tries to escape from a powerful underground boss
• A couple want easy money, and they decide to rob a restaurant

The storytelling has a nonlinear narrative structure and every chapter seems to be independently from the other characters, but in the end the audience realize the connection between them all.

2. Goodfellas (1990)

This film is actually based on a true story. With this film we are part of the life of Henry Hill and how he worked his way up through the hierarchy of the Lucchese crime family.

Henry Hill, the first person narrator in this movie, describes his rise and fall within this family.  After you saw his story, you do not want to be a member of the mafia and do illegal things in general.

Joe Pesci got the Oscar for Supporting Actor and he is clearly the highlight of Goodfellas because his character is a psychopath who is a “hothead“ and troublemaker without any patience. This scene is the best proof.

1. The Godfather (1972)

This is THE perfect movie with great acting, a great screenplay, great story, and a great atmosphere.

These ingredients were put together by the director and author Francis Ford Coppola, who is also known for his film Apocalypse Now (1979).

It is all about the business of the mafia of Don (Vito) Corleone (Marlon Brando) and the loyalty among the members of the family. The story take place in New York City, where five families have their own connections to the government, politicians, and labor unions. The families who control the city, respect each other and have their own rules to live in peace. All of a sudden the Tattaglia family try to increase their power by assassinate Don Corleone and the war breaks out among the five mafia families. From this moment every family fight for their influence in New York City.

To date, the cast of The Godfather is the elite of Hollywood actors and actresses: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton…

What is your opinion on my list? Which films are part of your top 3 or top 5 in this sector?

Terminator (1984), Total Recall (1990), True Lies (1994), and Twins (1988) are movies which have an enormous common ground: Arnold Schwarzenegger played the lead role.

When I was a kid he was my hero and I was trying to be cool like him.

Schwarzenegger was saving the world and the humanity in almost every movie and I wanted to be as important as him. While my mother was cooking, and my father was working, I spend my time with my friends to watch every Schwarzenegger movie we had on cassette tape.

Nowadays I am ashamed of Arnold Schwarzenegger as an actor. I still love the old movies but I have the feeling that he is stuck in the retro zone, and he is trying to act like he was acting 20 years ago. Newer films like Sabotage (2014) and the latest Terminator Genisys (2015) are nothing compared to his movie classics.

The main problem is that Schwarzenegger is using his old classic quotes to impress his elder audience instead of searching for a good screenplay to have a respectful comeback.

My hope is that he will changing his priorities to choose a role or give up the acting.

What do you thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger? Do you have heroes who became like a guilty pleasure to you?

Many people are afraid of spoilers of their favorite TV shows, new movies or newly released books and feeling the pressure to consume it as fast as possible to avoid being a victim of spoilers.

In particular the internet is the most dangerous place for spoilers because it can hit the consumer everywhere, not only on social media or YouTube but also on popular online magazines or online newspaper. I do not even know why it is important for a newspaper to write about a death in a TV show, but all I know is that they do it all the time and I am afraid to open my web browser.

When I was ten years old, my friends and I talked about every movie and every game we knew and did not have a problem with spoilers. Even if we knew the whole story, we watched it anyway and had fun. Now it is impossible for me to have a chat with people about new movies without waiting until they watch it because they do not want to hear anything about it.

In my opinion, there has to be a change in the way we think and do not be mad at internet trolls who try to spoil everything on purpose. We have to calm down and not take these things too seriously because the fictional story is not the major part of a film, game, book or TV show. There is also the plot, the acting, camera shots and unforgettable characters, and this composition creates a rememberable performance and production.

What is your opinion on spoilers? Do you like reading leaks any time you can get them or do you have to be always up to date on your favorite storyline?

The author and director Quentin Tarantino accepts the fact that he is mostly known for violent and bloody movies. Whenever a new movie from Tarantino comes out, there is only one subject important for the magazines and some morning shows to write or talk about: violence.

The casual consumer does not have another choice than associate Tarantino with this term. Apart from the fact that his movies are violent, there is great acting, memorable dialogues and an interesting story comes with outstanding screenplays within Hollywood. Actors like John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz become successful in this business, and the Tarantino movies have benefited from their performances.

His first movie Reservoir Dogs (1992) is about a gangster squad and their jewel robbery, but the concept is that the audience does not even see the actual heist. There are only dialogues and interactions between the characters because there is an undercover cop among them, and they try to uncover him. Before the heist, they have a conversation about Like a Virgin (Madonna) and have a conflict about the meaning of this song.

This conversation is five minutes long and hilarious. Actual action scenes show up in the last ten minutes, and of course, they are intensive, but they are also just a small part compared to the entire film. Movies like Lethal Weapon or Die Hard are filled with one-line jokes and try to impress their viewership with a hero who guns down a bunch of evil Russians or terrorists. Reservoir Dogs and the follow-up film Pulp Fiction (1994) became the blueprint for the following movies from Tarantino. His recent films like Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) have a few scenes which are 20 minutes long, and it is so interesting and entertaining that everybody forgets about the fact that there are just some people are having a conversation.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a director. To me, being a director was better than being President of the United States.

My name is Johann and I am a 19-year-old student from Erfurt (Germany). The first movie I ever saw was Terminator 2 when I was three years old and I fell in love with these pictures. Besides the story plot and the acting, I was blown away by the visual effects and the camera work by James Cameron who directed this great piece of movie history.
In my youth, I became passionate about movies, acting, directors and the history of Hollywood. Famous directors like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier became my idols because their movies inspired me and had a massive emotional influence on me. Instead of just watching a film like my friends or parents, I really did some research to have the full experience. Becoming a movie nerd was my fate, I guess.

I decided to create this blog to share my experience, my knowledge and my passion for motion pictures. Exploring this industry with you is what I want because there are countless excellent, strange and creepy films out there.

My hope is that you support me by giving your feedback to make this blog better for every new follower and reader.