The original Stepford Wives is one of the scariest movies I ever saw. Now the remake is being made as a dark comedy with musical elements. Reminds me of good old Marx.

The Stepford Wives (2004) Movie Trailers
Quicktime
Real and Windows Media

Après 24, Carnivàle?
Sandrine en est convaincue.

Following in the footsteps of JS, I also propose an image quiz.

Update:

So Sunday's finale was an answered prayer for viewers who, as the big day approached, had rooted for Carrie to choose Big over Aleksandr, the self-involved artist who enticed her to leave her beloved New York and move with him to Paris.

HBO Site:

Carrie's Parisian adventure begins - Read about the latest episode of Sex and the City here... and don't miss the series finale of Sex and the City, airing Sunday, February 22 at 9PM EST.

So this means, Sex and the City, after six seasons finishes today.

I just discovered today the HBO site of Sex and the City. Maybe that is because until recently, I watched it only occasionally.

But the site is definitely worth a visit. Check out the Scrapbook for example:
With the synopsis comes also the "Story Highlights", a "Dating Diary", "The Look", "Girls Talk" (video excerpt) and an "Address Book".

VIDEO, 25 JAHRE VIDEOÄSTHETIK
An exhibiton with video-clips, art videos, spots from the last 25 years.
Curated by Ulf Poschardt, in collaboration with Axel Wirths (art video), Hermann Vaske (advertisement) and Thomas Sabel (music-clip).

In yesterday's Tages-Anzeiger, Tobi Müller who wrote about the exhibition also mentioned the latestet two clips from Outkast, Hey Ya!(André 3000) and I like the way you move(Big Boi)

See also:
Hey Ya! controversy because of the sentence: "Shake it, shake it, shake it like a polaroid picture".

Jean-Sebastien just started an experiment which could be very interesting to follow. Right now, it looks like a sort of quiz: Do you know that image? Where does it come from?

This alone is already quite interesting, but maybe by doing it, one could also go one step further and try to define these images in their specificity which would then somehow bring us to an Archeology of Images.


See also (all german):
Historiographie der Bilder
Archäologie der Medien, von S. Zielinski
Foucaults Archäologie und der Diskurs der Literatur

Jean-Sébastien writes in his post about the paranoiac fiction series 24 as well as about Sex and the City.

Reading it, I thought about the two basic narration types in TV series:
There are the ones which have an evolution from episode to episode like
24, Twin Peaks, The Kingdom, Berlin-Alexanderplatz and there are the others - the majority - which kind of start at zero with every episode. Sex and the City is certainly of the latter, although - as Jean-Sébastien points out - there is some kind of ongoing story with Mr Big. What about Dallas? I think it had some kind of ongoing story as well, but it was a very loose one.

Personnally I am more inclined to the former, as some sort of super-cinema experience. Naturally, it's much harder to keep an audience over several episodes without giving them the chance to miss an episode.

The "start-at-zero"-type has therefore always a bigger chance to be successfull. It is also comparable to a "real live experience": we all somehow miss some of the episodes of our acquaintances (unless they have a weblog and tell us everything;).

Enter Jean-Sébastien:

C'est un principe où tout le monde peut être actif, à plus ou moins grande échelle, avec plus ou moins de charisme, sur la carte du jeu-de-rôle grandeur nature de la politique internationale.

This makes me think a lot about weblogs and what Joi Ito calls "Emergent Democracy". I am absolutely convinced that there is something going on right now which will change our view of the world: weblogs, the TV series, as described by Jean-Sébastien, are just the premises of something more vast and more important.

I already made a post about Zatoichi before seeing the film. Kitano said about his film:

Zatoichi is "about a guy who comes into town and cuts down everybody in sight and then leaves."

I don't think so - as there are a least three other character-couples equally important - there is Tadanobu Asano playing a tormented ronin with his ill-and-remorse-suffering wife, there are the two women (of which one is a man) which are looking for the murderers of their family, there is the peasant woman and her gambler son. Zatochi himself is almost the personae which is the most absent of the film, unless he is cutting off some of his opponents.

The film reminded me a lot of the Baby Cart series (although I have never seen the original Zatoichi series) with a zest of Gohatto (which had both Kitano and Tadanobu Asano in it).

Another thing: The music score is - as always with Kitano -very present, sometimes giving the images the aspect of a puppet theatre (the peasants on the field), sometimes being in dissonance with the music in the film (the geisha playing at the woman peasant's home) and especially in the final dancing scenes.

It must be more than a year, that I haven't been in a cinema theatre...