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Sarah Shahi with co-actor Adam Demos in »Sex / Life«: And so the drama begins
Photo: Amanda Matlovich / Netflix
New to Netflix: neon lights and naked bodies
Am i still me Does my life suit me Does it make me happy These are the questions Billie (Sarah Shahi), once a party girl and now suburban mother and wife, grapples with in the new Netflix series "Sex / Life". All those who find themselves in a similar sensory crisis will be shown in the eight episodes how one shouldn't tackle these big questions in life. After Billie meets her ex-boyfriend Brad by chance, she starts a digital diary: In it she writes about her life in New York, the exciting sex with her ex, the longing for her previous life. She doesn't bother to hide the file, and one day her husband Cooper (Mike Vogel) finds out that his wife used to be pretty wild. She might have mentioned that in the years of marriage. Also,that she is dissatisfied in bed.
And so begins the drama in which both try to save their relationship.
"Sex / Life" could have been a clever treatise on the monotony of marriage, female lust, and motherhood.
But instead of Billie's current emotional state, it's mostly about her past sex adventures with Brad.
The creator of the series, Stacy Rukeyser, never misses an opportunity to show the naked body, which at some point loses its appeal despite neon lights and sex music.
More depth of character would not have hurt Shahi in particular in her role as a torn woman.
Danina Esau
New exhibition in Hamburg: Burnt out supermen
He looks a bit as if he is observing a mythical creature: In Adolph von Menzel's “Self-Portrait with a Worker at the Steam Hammer in the Rolling Mill”, the painter himself stands with a hat and a sketchbook at the edge of the picture. A strong guy can be seen in front, he is holding a pair of tongs in the blazing fire. The picture was taken in 1872. The German Empire had just been founded, its rise to the leading industrial nation of Europe was imminent. Menzel and his contemporaries showed industrial work as a heroic struggle with the elements - a bit very stylized. Quite different then are the many tired faces in Hans Balusek's painting »Workers«, created a quarter of a century later. The superman of the industrial age had long since burned out, and industrial painting had become disillusioned.
Both pictures can now be seen in Hamburg, in the Bucerius Kunst Forum, in the exhibition "Modern Times". The history of development that emerges from the tightly hung works is that of disillusionment: First the titanic upswing of the early factory culture, then the dream of the working class and finally the at least somehow still aesthetically exaggerated view of the world of mines and industrial plants in the Postwar black and white photography. In the end, however, the people disappeared from the pictures and automation has triumphed. Almost at least. If it weren't for Taslima Akhter's photo series »Death of a Thousand Dreams« towards the end of the exhibition. It shows parts of what was left after the collapse of a sweatshop in Bangladesh in 2013. Debris and over 1100 dead.There is still industrial work. It just moved out of our field of vision.
Sebastian Hammelehle
New literature: life of the bohemian
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"Dissonance.
An exchangeable year «by Max Dax, Merve Verlag;
376 pages;
28 euros.
It was part of the charm of the old Federal Republic that it was on the cultural edge. In the shadow of history and east of Paris, London or New York, the great metropolises that shaped the post-war era culturally. But with a good vantage point. That is probably why the influential music magazine »Spex« could only come into being in Cologne, at the beginning of the eighties, as the central organ of the brilliant and uncompromising know-it-all - and had to go under in Berlin, where the editorial team moved in 2007. The marginal position was lost. Max Dax was responsible for this move as editor-in-chief, and in his diary novel »Dissonance«, which takes place in 2009 and 2010, the struggle with this city can be observed. While Dax keeps his work in the editorial office almost completely out of the book,you can watch him staging an intellectual life: meet interesting people, eat out, talk, travel somewhere, meet even more interesting people, eat out, come back, eat out. Plane, taxi, train. Dax loves the semi-public of restaurants and airports - at the same time he feels a terrible emptiness. The »Spex« had to close in 2018, partly because it never succeeded in finding a suitable role in the center of the new European culture. In "Dissonance" you can read what it felt like to look for it.Dax loves the semi-public of restaurants and airports - at the same time he feels a terrible emptiness. The »Spex« had to close in 2018, partly because it never succeeded in finding a suitable role in the center of the new European culture. In "Dissonance" you can read what it felt like to look for it.Dax loves the semi-public of restaurants and airports - at the same time he feels a terrible emptiness. The »Spex« had to close in 2018, partly because it never succeeded in finding a suitable role in the center of the new European culture. In "Dissonance" you can read what it felt like to look for it.
Tobias Rapp
New in the cinema: sweat, sweat and tears
Let's not kid ourselves: Even without climate change, we would no longer have a cool, relaxed summer.
Because when the sun is not shining, debates about morality, sex, Corona and the Nazi past heat some minds to record temperatures.
The Romanian director Radu Jude captured the hottest summer so far in this regard, namely that of last year, in a wild satire - and won the Golden Bear at this year's Berlinale for it.
“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” is split into three parts.
The first follows teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu) as she tries to limit the damage a sex tape did of her and her husband.
All over Bucharest, it seems, parents and students are hanging on their smartphones to watch the accidentally released clip.
The excitement can hardly be stopped, after all, the nerves are already bare due to the pandemic.
As if to cool his audience down, in the second part the director sprinkles essayistic sprinkles on catchphrases such as »war« or »Ceaușescu«, only to heat things up again in the third part: Emi ends up in front of a tribunal in which indignant parents and concerned citizens mutually stir up collapse threatens.
The cinema summer could hardly begin more sweaty, but luckily also funnier than with the satire "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn".
Hannah Pilarczyk
New pop music: Weltschmerz voice
One morning the singer Chuala suddenly thought she knew what the chirping birds were mocking about in the backyard of her Kreuzberg apartment: about people, everyday stress and unreasonable demands on the environment. "I know I sound like I'm crazy, but I swear I was completely sober," she says. The 24-year-old Berliner by choice has just released two singles that make her one of the pop discoveries of the summer: "Good Morning World" is a spherical electro ballad with a dreamy guitar motif in which Chuala apologizes to the world how much humanity affects nature. The second song, "Wake up", plunges into the overwhelming demands of a working day with a driving house rhythm: "Wake up, go work till my brain stops," she sings in it,with a hangover-sounding Weltschmerz voice that reminds a little of Billie Eilish, but also transports a soul vibe.
Danceable, internationally compatible pop music beyond clear genre categories, in which climate awareness and criticism of capitalist optimization mania are formulated, is a new sound in the German music landscape. The daughter of a North German and a Cameroonian was discovered by major record companies as a 14-year-old teenager and has been writing songs for international chart acts ever since. "I would probably have been very successful long ago if I had also made commercial pop for myself," says Chuala, but she preferred something original. It was only in the loneliness of the shutdown and the grief over her deceased father, to whom she dedicated her debut EP last year, that she found the leisure to invent herself as a musician.
Andreas Borcholte
