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Millie Bobby Brown in "Enola Holmes": The Patriarchy in Sight
Photo:
LEGENDARY © 2020 / Alex Bailey / Netflix
"Enola Holmes," Netflix
Time budget:
two hours
for fans of:
"Sherlock Holmes", "Dickinson"
It is said that women are better than men when it comes to communication, moderation and balance.
Whereby, stop: You say that?
Didn't we want to get in the habit of stopping generalizations?
So, in concrete terms: Enola Holmes is definitely a better communicator than her clever, but hypothermic brother Sherlock, whom the whole world knows as a brilliant detective.
While he mumbles incomprehensible stuff to himself while collecting clues, Enola in the form of actress Millie Bobby Brown turns to us viewers in a refreshing candor and takes us on this adventure.
Enola is 20 years younger than her famous brother, educated, unconventional and convinced that as a woman, she does not have to submit to any man in ridiculous suits.
Which irritates them here and there in Victorian England.
This Enola is an invention of the US author Nancy Springer, who borrowed and thwarted the staff from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories for six novels.
The first film version in which Enola goes in search of her missing mother is now so conventional that it squeaks.
But the special effect, borrowed from "Fleabag", of the main character communicating with the audience compensates for the annoying fiddling violins of the sound rack.
Millie Bobby Brown, known as the battered telekinesis teen eleven from "Stranger Things", shines here in an incredible number of shades and with dazzling charm.
It should only be a matter of time before Netflix announces the sequel.
Oliver Kaever
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Jonas Nay in "Deutschland 89": Lost between the worlds of espionage
Photo:
Anika Molnar / Amazon
"Germany 89", Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
eight episodes of 50 minutes each
for fans of:
"Finale in Berlin", "Dame, König, Ace, Spion"
Euphoria and paranoia are sometimes close together.
As in this scene in "Deutschland 89": The young hero of the series (Jonas Nay), an agent of the Headquarters Enlightenment (HVA) in East Berlin, is filled with hallucinogenic mushrooms shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall so that he reveals his secret knowledge .
Afterwards you can see him dancing pogo against the chaos in his head and that in the world.
The secret services of the Russians, French and Americans are after him, a terrorist cell of the RAF wants to abuse him for their purposes - but the agent bung makes stage diving in a Berlin backyard into a pack of punks.
Contemporary history as a psychoactive drug trip?
In the third and final season of the East-West espionage spectacle, with which new German series television was perceived abroad for the first time as satisfactory from 2015 onwards, the series creators Anna and Jörg Winger put a lot of pressure on poetry and compression.
An attempted murder by the HVA on Egon Krenz, joint attacks by the Stasi and RAF, Eastern spies in the management of Deutsche Bank: The guaranteed events and connections are correctly presented, but the gray areas and empty spaces are embellished all the more glaringly and lustfully.
The turn as a chaos thriller, a successful conclusion to the series.
Christian Buss
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Muddling through as a motto in life: Michael Fritz Schumacher as serial hero "Mo" (r.)
Photo:
Amazon
"For Umme", Amazon Prime Video
Time budget:
eleven episodes of 15 minutes each
for fans of:
"Jerks"
And another German series from Prime Video: In "For Umme", the Berlin metropolitan world is almost exclusively populated with idiots who, for example, tear off their masks during robberies, or in a sausage stand in Baden dialect the hottest sauce in the universe advertise.
Even the hero of the series, the actor Moritz "Mo" Mikkelsen, who at the age of 33 desperately hungry for the great career opportunity, is not the smartest.
But he stumbles from one mess to the next in a pretty funny way.
Oliver Korritke and Gisa Flake are among the many comic actors who help the series hero "Mo", played by Michael Fritz Schumacher with a panicked look and lanky charm, while muddling through the mostly art-remote and sometimes criminal everyday situations of an actor's struggle for survival.
In "Für Umme" one indulges a little in daydreams, which then burst again.
And sometimes the series seems as if its makers (among whom the most important is apparently Vlady Oszkiel) laughed extensively at Fahri Yardim and Christian Ulmen in "Jerks" during the breaks during their script-tinkering work.
But on the one hand there are much worse role models and on the other hand many of the embarrassments that stumble through the staff of this series are extremely lovingly staged.
One of the most absurd scenes is the one in which "Mo" is in a roast chicken costume because of an advertising job and greets a young woman wearing a pork costume - with the words, of course, absolutely incorrect in terms of gender politics: "Hey, you hot ham!"
Wolfgang Höbel
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Ewan McGregor in "Long Way Up": On electric bikes towards the future through South America
Photo: Apple TV +
"Long Way Up", Apple TV +
Time budget:
ten trips of 45 minutes each
for fans of:
"Easy Rider", "Der Wilde", "Mad Max"
When actor Ewan McGregor isn't making "Star Wars" films, he seems to enjoy sitting on a motorcycle and exploring the world.
Two documentaries jumped out, after "Long Way Around" and "Long Way Down" comes now, you can already guess: "Long Way Up".
Why do you need cinematic travel diaries of this kind?
Now that your own travel is still severely restricted, you get more urgency than before Corona: You feed the wanderlust and make you painfully aware of how much the feeling of departure is missing.
In addition, McGregor's documentary shows how electric mobility will soon work: This time he and his best friend set off from Patagonia to Los Angeles, once through South and Central America - on specially made electric motorcycles.
With that, the two are way ahead, but on the other hand, the team prepares the filming in parallel from London and LA, including constant flying back and forth.
That already seems anachronistic today.
As we have learned from the pandemic, you can actually save yourself a lot of business trips - and instead concentrate on the really important ones.
Oliver Kaever
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