Tag Archives: Netflix

Oktoberfest Beer and Blood Serves Up German Debauchery in Six Episodes

By Raul Quinque

 

My Tent is My Cas­tle, or, How a Volks­fest Out­grew its Roots. Cred­it: Okto­ber­fest 2013 — Munich Ger­many by Shut­ter­bug Fotos

What would Ger­many be with­out the Okto­ber­fest? Def­i­nite­ly not worse off, I’d say. Under most cir­cum­stances, I couldn’t be tempt­ed to watch a his­tor­i­cal dra­ma series with the Okto­ber­fest as a back­drop, but the Munich Wiesn innkeep­ers’ irate respons­es to the series have piqued my inter­est. Appar­ent­ly, they feel that the Wiesn is hal­lowed ground and that its past and present virtue must not be dis­graced. So lo and behold and with­out fur­ther ado, I present Okto­ber­fest Beer and Blood.

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A Story Beyond Words: The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson

By Hannah Quinque

Pho­to Cred­it: “No Pride With­out Black Trans Lives” by Janine and Jim Eden

LGBTQ+ Pride is usu­al­ly a cause for cel­e­bra­tion. It is meant to express the joy of being alive and being seen in a soci­ety where an iden­ti­ty that diverges from the norm eas­i­ly leads to exclu­sion, iso­la­tion, and fear. Some­how, it makes sense, then, that the idea of Pride is born from suf­fer­ing, tragedy, and anger, too. The 2017 Net­flix doc­u­men­tary The Death and Life of Mar­sha P. John­son presents a stir­ring tes­ta­ment to a life and death that are uni­ver­sal­ly mean­ing­ful in the strug­gle for LGBTQ+ exis­tence, then and now.

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The Reviews Are In: Babylon Berlin Sets the Scene for Unusually Visionary Television, Intercontinentally

By Hannah Quinque

CC BY-SA 4.0, Lear 21

Grant­ed, Baby­lon Berlin has at its dis­po­si­tion all the means nec­es­sary to become a true block­buster. But it isn’t every day the view­er gets to expe­ri­ence just how phe­nom­e­nal­ly a big bud­get can be spent on a TV series – with­out com­pro­mis­es between bom­bas­tic mon­tages and cin­e­matog­ra­phy for lovers, between fast-paced sto­ry devel­op­ment and cred­i­bly com­plex char­ac­ters, that is.

For Baby­lon Berlin, pro­duced in Ger­many by Ger­man pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies, the com­mit­ment to an unflinch­ing and unre­served depic­tion of a nation on the verge of fas­cism pays off. As a bit of an inside tip, the show’s spec­tac­u­lar efforts are appre­ci­at­ed far beyond its coun­try of ori­gin, as demon­strat­ed by almost exclu­sive­ly glow­ing U.S. reviews.

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So much to stream, so little time? Netflix has a solution.

By Kai-Arne Zimny

Whether it’s the mo(u)rning rou­tine of hav­ing to leave your beloved bed, or the devi­ous­ly bril­liant book that won’t let you stop turn­ing pages while the dig­its relent­less­ly move towards 3 a.m. – there are quite a few occa­sions where hav­ing more time would come in handy.

I’ll spare you any more time-con­sum­ing pas­sages of intro­duc­tion and cut right to the chase:

Net­flix is test­ing a fea­ture that lets users accel­er­ate play­back speed up to 1.5 times the nor­mal speed. Ever since the news went viral, Net­flix was hit hard with back­lash­es from a num­ber of moviemak­ers and actors. Net­flix defend­ed the choice by stat­ing it’s been a “heav­i­ly request­ed fea­ture from subscribers.”

It’s impos­si­ble for me to val­i­date whether that’s true or not; what we do know is that as of now, Net­flix is only test­ing the fea­ture on a small frac­tion of their cus­tomers and only on Android devices. And even if this were to become a reg­u­lar fea­ture, as long as Net­flix doesn’t force cus­tomers to indulge in stream­ing-quick­ies, it’s all fine, isn’t it?

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