Let’s continue this strange trend of recent movies appearing on this blog. Today’s victim is Thoroughbreds, a 2017 film starring Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy. It is about two teenage girls, from rich families but deprived of both redeeming characters and natural speech inflections, who are plotting to kill the step-father of one of them. Before their plotting has gotten very far, they can be seen in the garden at a stone chessboard:
Today, we feature our first German television series. Abenteuer 1900 – Leben im Gutshaus, German for “adventure 1900 – live on a manor”, was shown in 2004 on ARD. It is about a bunch of people trying to live like people in 1900. I do not know whether they succeeded or not, but I can assure you all that there are enough quaint dresses and gnädige Frau‘s to give it a convincing impression. In the twelfth episode, there is the following genuine-looking scene:
Flemish people of a certain age might remember Nero from the newspapers, in which he featured for decades.1 Regular readers of this blog might know him from a previous post. Other people are just referred to that link for context. Last time, Nero’s grandfather was the centre of the plot, this time, the spotlights are on his son, Adhemar. Anyone familiar with the series knows that he is a perpetually six-years old wunderkind who is a professor at Oxford and a Nobel prize winner.
Is chess in terrible kids movies with talking pets a trend? First there was the horrendous Alvin and the chipmunks: The Squeakquel from 2009 and now there is the only marginally better Think like a dog from this very year. It is the story of a boy genius who wants to prevent his parents’ divorce by making them think more like a dog. Its most remarkable feature is that it manages to be both contrived beyond believe and, at the same time, as bland as McDonald’s fries.
A chess player’s biggest dream, a chess player’s worst fear: the battery. A well-crafted battery, pointing confidently to the opponent’s king, is a source of great joy. It makes you want to prolong the game just to bask in its glorious presence. It makes you want to spend the rest of the day trying and computing several sacrifices. On the other hand, a battery pointed in your direction by some perfidious opponent is enough to make you break out in cold sweat and rue the day you ever picked up our noble game.1 Of course, any move with such an impact is bound to be advertised and indeed, here is (part of) a still shot from an advertisement for a battery:
One upon a time, there were point-and-click adventure games. Sure, the genre still exists, but in the late eighties and the early nineties, when home computers became somewhat common, point-and-click adventure games were one of the most popular genres, probably because they don’t need advanced graphics or intricate control schemes. Many of the most acclaimed titles in the genre unsurprisingly stem from this time: the King’s Quest series, The secret of Monkey Island, The day of the tentacle, and so on. With its 1996 release, Broken sword: the shadow of the Templars came after the heyday of the point-and-clicker and perhaps it can be seen as the last big commercial success in its category.1
Over the last two blog posts about movies, there was a distinct rising theme in quality. Now, I will make it a crab canon by introducing the inverted theme in the posts about music videos. To help me in that design, there is Yoko Ono. Well-known for being married to one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century and producing a large amount of music-adjacent things herself. One of those things was Don’t count the waves, which was part of a double album titled Fly. It also appeared in the John Lennon/Yoko Ono film Imagine, which explains why there is a music video of sorts available so long before MTV.
Today we are delving deep in the archives of Belgian comics to bring to light one of the most obscure subjects yet for this blog: Timothey O. Wang. This character, a middle-aged Tibetan man with a fast car and superhuman powers, was a creation of Luc Warnent — who is now mainly known for his detective series Soda — and appeared for the first time in Robbedoes in 1981 under the names of Timotheus Octavius Wang. His first (untitled) adventure appeared in issues 2-4 of the 44th volume of the magazine. Near the end of the last instalment, the following scene appears:1
Ah! how marvellous it is to watch a decent movie again! Granted, whatever movie one watches after the disaster called Alvin and the chipmunks: The squeakquel would appear as a glistening beacon of new hope for cinema but I think that, even without this, Sleuth would have seemed a pretty good film. It is not perfect — in fact, I think it is a bit too clever for its own good and it is more a play than a movie — but it has an interesting plot and is well acted. So well acted that both lead actors, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, got an Oscar nomination for best actor in a leading role.1 In a major supporting role, but inexplicably not nominated, is a rather fancy-looking chess board:
It is remarkable how little commercial success correlates longevity. Nowadays, XTC is considered one of the quintessential British rock bands from the eighties, but back in the days their singles barely scratched the charts. Senses working overtime, perhaps their best known song, only reached place 31 in the Flemish pop chart. Their other songs, like Dear God and today’s subject The mayor of simpleton, didn’t even chart. On the other hand, have you listened to much Bros lately? Some Climie Fisher, perhaps? They both reached the Flemish end-of-the-year top 100 in 1988, the same year as The mayor of Simpleton, but they have completely vanished from the public eye.
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