cinema, German Politics

Mission Impossible.

It may sound a little prejudiced, but it’s true. Ethan Hunt, aka Tom Cruise, finally found an impossible mission – in Germany, of course.

Wolfgang Thierse, President of the German Bundestag made it clear that it will indeed be impossible to shoot some action scenes for the next Tom Cruise star vehicle, Mission Impossible 3, in the glass dome of the Bundestag. After Cruise had visited the dome in April, the studio’s location manager had asked for permission to shoot there but was turned down because of concerns regarding the “dignity” of Parliament.

Dignity? On which planet do Mr Thierse and his advisors live (although I have a hunch this was Thierse’s decision. It sounds just like him…)? Turning down such a huge PR opportunity for German Democracy with the alleged “dignity” of the Bundestag is beyond me. What’s undignified about visualing the new Reichstag, a symbol of German Democracy, to a billion people, many of whom will probably have only seen images of the building with Hitler or the Kaiser parading in front of it. What’s undignified about raising people’s interest in Berlin? What’s undignified about shooting a movie? It’s certainly inconvenient, but I am rather sure overlapping schedules were not a fundamental problem. Sure, most films set in, say, The White House, aren’t actually shot there – but does that matter for the “dignity of the institution”? Besides, what was more undignified – Denzel Washington’s “Murder at 1600” or the questionable election procedures and results in Florida?

To be at least a little balanced here, I haven’t read the screenplay – and if I had, I would not tell you for free. So maybe it is indeed objectionable with respect to some concept of dignity. But I don’t think so. Quite honestly, I have a feeling the decision to keep Cruise out of the Bundestag is telling more about the way representative Democrcacy is understood by senior German politicians – including Wolfgang Thierse – than anything else. Must dignity always mean distance? Remember cosy Bonn? And would Thierse have declined the request to use the dome for a Yo-Yo Ma documentary? A video for Herbert Groenemeyer? I’m sure there’s a line somewhere, but does it exclude action movies?

The rejection is a little reminiscent of the extremely embarrassing debate preceding Christo and Jean Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995, which was later hailed as impressive art and an opportunity for Germans to re-embrace the Reichstag building as a cornerstone of their Democracy.

But at least some politicians seem to have learned this lesson. Walter Momper, former Mayor of Berlin, and currently President of Berlin’s state Parliament has offered his chamber as an alternative to the producers. His bid might be successful as the film will be shot in the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin, where – suddenly – more and more “Hollywood” movies are being shot – predominantly because studios in Los Angeles are far more expensive.

Mr Momper therefore rightly grasped the opportunity to benefit from supporting this kind of “reverse outsourcing” without undignified excuses. But then, he doesn’t have a dome…

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media, oddly enough

Technology?

The world is full of strange people. Sometimes even stranger ones. And then some who have no moral standards at all, like, say, Mr Dutroux, currently on trial in Belgium for the kidnapping, raping, and killing of several young girls.

Sad as this is, I think it is important to realize that the word in-human is actually an oxymoron when it comes to malice – for every human beauty there is a human beast, for every Dr. Jekyll, a Mr Hyde lurks behind the corner.

But however much a realistic view of humanity can help deal with the usually sad reality – how on earth could CNN classify a report about the seemingly serious attempt by an evidently as ill-natured as stupid German couple to sell the woman’s eight year old daughter as a ‘technology’ story simply because the man put a photograph of the child on ebay?

In my book, that in itself is so strange it warrants a report.

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almost a diary

Me – a Grammar God?

I’m not sure this English grammar test is using appropriate categories. But who would be a better judge than you, my gentle readers. And as it’s always nice to be complemented, I had to post this here…

Grammar God!
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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almost a diary, Economics, web 2.0

Blogging the GDR.

About two weeks ago I had dinner with my parents and one of their oldest friends who was in town for a day. Like my mother, he hails from the eastern part of Germany, the part formerly known as German Democratic Republic. Unlike my mother, he stayed there until the bitter end.

I was inclined to think that someone like him would be most confident when it comes to Schumpeterian processes, the creative destruction and recreation of social and economic governance mechanisms. Well, I was wrong.
Weiterlesen →

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Allgemein

A Most Handy Little Tool.

Gentle readers, I would like to tell you about a most handy little information management tool that I found by chance – it’s called iMarkup. Completely integrated into IE, it allows to highlight and annotate any webpage – on that very page. And it remembers the highlighted parts and annotations when you return to the page later on. If it is really as usable as I think it will be, the days of printing web pages simply for the added benefits of active reading will be gone.

But there’s always room for improvement. So in case someone at iMarkup reads this – here’s some client input! What I’d really like is a highlighting and annotation tool integrated in a content organiser like Onfolio – and I want it to be able to handle large amounts of information (like my two million bookmarks) without any perceptible delay… OK?

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almost a diary

Only 20%…

Hmm… maybe this Inner Geek Test is more culture-bound than I thought, or maybe – I am really only 20.31558% – Geek (despite the fact that I have indeed read an Amiga OS manual cover to cover when I was twelve).

The odd thing is, I suspect that had I taken some “Inner Coolness Test”, I had also scored in this percentage range (despite the fact that I once rapped in German in front of a club in New York City and later convinced some Carioca friends I could dance Samba when I in fact I don’t know a single step).

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advertisement, almost a diary, self-referential

My two cents.

Last week, I read somewhere that google-ad clickthrough rates are to increase significantly if the ads are placed between the posts as opposed to being placed alongside.

Well, from my experience, whoever claimed this correlation was probably just lucky. Personally, I can’t really see any change in the clickthrough rates – it’s still in the 0.1 % range, although other google ad users claim to have far better rates.

So I can confidently announce that this is not a money making blog, as opposed to the ones mentioned in this cyberjournalist report. But then again, it is also true that my little proto-diary has not yet shredded the career of any prominent politician…

For the moment, the average daily “turnover” of this blog reflects what it means to me – my very own two cents (well, Dollar cents…).

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Iraq, US Politics

Colin Powell. The Sad Truth.

Colin Powell seems to be a man whose pride apparently gets in the way of seeing the world as it is. Recently, he contested a statement by the likely democratic nominee for President, J.F. Kerry, that he had been marginalised in the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Yet as a list compiled by Brad DeLong amply demonstrates, this is exactly what happened.

But there is an item missing on the list that I find particularly telling about the way in which Mr Powell has been treated by his colleagues, and, in particular, by the President. Last May, when the White House tried to slowly improve relations with the allies it had seriously alienated with its pre-war behavior, Colin Powell was sent to Berlin for the first meeting with the German administration after the heydey of conflict in the UN security council in February 2003.

But while Colin Powell met with the Chancellor, the President had nothing better to do than embarrass the German government, but even more so his own Secretary of State, by “accidentally” running into a meeting of VP Cheney with Roland Koch, the truly conservative Primeminister of the German state of Hessen. Here is what I wrote about their meeting last May.

Of course, everybody got the message… as did Colin Powell.

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