Bert Vandecasteele

Author: Bert

  • Bates Motel

    A gloomy laketown where people are lit on fire on a daily basis. A run-down motel where Asian sex slaves are sold. Fields upon fields of weed. And smack in the middle: The kid who will grow up to be Norman Bates – the killer from Psycho. Likes: Musicals, taxidermy, Mother.

    These are the ingredients to the weird cocktail that is Bates Motel, a show acting like a prequel to Hitchcock’s classic Psycho while also trying to be an earnest teen drama. It’s like one of those “What my parents think I do” memes, with Twin Peaks locked firmly under “what I think I do” and Dawson’s Creek under “what I actually do”.

    At times, it can be brilliantly creepy and produce wonderful moments like this:

     

    You’re on the edge of your seat, you’re intrigued, your heart is pounding in your chest and you’re dying to continue on…

    …Only then it does this:

     

    And you’re like “wtf”!?

    It’s the weirdest thing. One moment you have a dude killing another dude in cold blood, then you have a character trying out for a musical. The only thing keeping these trainwreck scripts together is the solid cast.  Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga perform wonderfully (especially Vera deserves a nod, there’s no end to the creepy slapstick she can pull off) – and more than that: They bounce off each other incestuously well.

    (I can’t believe I just typed that.)

    I know what you’re thinking – Bert, as a writer, shouldn’t you be a beacon of good taste? Why do you tell us about this bad show? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Don’t you want to crawl into a ditch and cower in shame!?

    Well, sure, but that is besides the point. The thing about Bates Motel is: It can be strangely honest sometimes. When Norma Bates tells her son (of all people) how she was brutally molested by her brother and hit on the leg with a red-hot iron, it’s so over the top it’s both tragic and hilarious. And somehow realistic. Yet nobody in their right mind would tell this to their 17 year-old son, especially knowing said son is probably a serial killer. Especially not with the iron cherry on the cake.

    But here’s the thing: No one on this show is in their right mind. There’s only one character who doesn’t have a therapeutic issue and, guess what, they gave her a deadly lung disease.

    So why do I watch Bates Motel? Because for all the schizophrenia this show is damn consistent.

  • Something that happened…

    …on the train.

    2014-05-27 05.30.50

    2014-05-27 05.30.54

  • The Hero Movie

    The internet is filled with movies. Thought I’d make watching them a bit easier by selecting the good ones. That way you can safely enjoy seventeen hundred three-second films of guys who get hit in the nuts without having to worry about accidently clicking on one about guy who gets hit in the butt.

    Anyway, without further ado, have every superhero movie ever:

  • This is Germany.

    Friedrichshain, Berlin
    Friedrichshain, Berlin

  • Well there’s no skin on it either.

    So yeah. If you look past the weird dude with the glasses – it’s Grim Fandango!

    (For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, I’ll probably do a write-up on this old game, because it’s only the greatest game ever made.)

  • Orphan Black

    Imagine you are waiting for the train. Suddenly, in front of you, you notice a person looking a little off. As the train rolls into the station this person turns around and looks at you. Shock sets on your face as you realize she looks exactly like you.

    And then she jumps in front of the train.

     

    That’s the premise to Orphan Black, a BBC america production starring Tatiana Maslany in half of its many roles as the woman who keeps discovering more and more of her own clones. She plays a con artist. A cop. A neurotic soccer mom. A biology nerd. A neurotic soccer mom posing as a con artist. A con artist posing as a cop. And a serial killer.

    It’s one of the absurdest pieces of sci-fi I’ve seen in a while, yet it’s also strangely relatable, largely due to a solid script that takes the absurdity of the premise with just the right amount of seriousness and a great performance by its entire cast – but most of all by Maslany, who is undoubtedly cast in the roles of a lifetime.

    Personally, I’m so happy to finally see another good sci-fi show, one that’s entertaining, geeky but still relatable and hella exciting. It’s got the absurd mystery of LOST but none of its bloated sense of self-importance. It’s got the weirdness of Fringe but none of its boring detective structure. And it’s got the complexity of Heroes but none of its terribly stupid and badly written characters. Orphan Black manages to back its characters into the craziest corners and then finds exciting ways to get them out of them – all while keeping true to the quirks and quips of the fascinating people inhabiting its world. Throughout the first season, it goes to outrageous lengths to surprise you – yet always grounds itself in its colourful characters.

    If you want the TV equivalent of a pageturner with crazy twists and some of the most awesome bait and switch scenes ever, you should give this a try. Or, you know, you could watch something boring instead.

  • Creep Street.

    Friedrichshain, Berlin.
    Friedrichshain, Berlin.

  • Dark Souls 2

    Remember those old point-and-click adventure games like Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle? There was one aspect I truly loved about those games: Discovery. As you solved their puzzles, their world would open up and expand, showing you the next trick up its sleeve.

    I remember playing Grim Fandango and ending up as a skeleton Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Or ending up at a Mardi Gras in Monkey Island 2. That blew my mind: Behind these games were completely thought-out worlds, worlds I could explore and discover!

    Nowadays, the only games that sometimes give me this giddy feeling of being an explorer are Japanese RPG’s. Unfortunately, the stories backing those up have been terrible at best – and when there’s no interesting story, the world-building falls flat. The Casablanca sequence in Grim Fandango only works because Manny essentially is Rick; the Mardi Gras only works because of the quirkiness of the Carribean setting in Monkey Island.

    My only problem with adventure games: I don’t like puzzles. I don’t like to combine things, solve absurd problems, think outside the box or whatever. I don’t have the patience for it. I’d rather punch a hole in a door than combine a chicken with a piece of gum to pry it open somehow.

    Enter Dark Souls 2.

    I didn’t play the first one – seriously, a game trying to sell itself by saying how supersadistically hard it is is not my beef. Or so I thought – turns out Dark Souls has the power to suck me in and spit me out.

    For those not in the know: Dark Souls is a series of games in which you and your sword explore a barren fantasy world. The game is ruthless but fair, killing you left and right, forcing you to be on your toes and deal with its many enemies, traps and pitfalls as puzzles. Find out how to deal with them and you’re golden.

    It’s like an adventure game, only instead of combining chickens and gum, you’re learning motor skills. Be killed by a certain enemy enough times and you’ll start to figure out their pattern. You understand their timing. And all of a sudden, you’re not struggling with them anymore! Then, the game throws two at you and you’re back at square one. But you’re confident: You tackled one, surely you can deal with two!

    Added to that, Dark Souls is one of the few game series with a consistent world to explore. There are no real levels, but a sense that everything is geographically connected. A village leads to a cave, which leads to an abandoned castle, which leads to a tower that in turn leads to a forest. From the tower, you can see the forest, and from the forest, you run alongside the wall of the castle.

    I cannot stress how much fun it is to run inside a world that does not feel like it was designed as a video game, but rather a living world with videogamey obstacles in it. Worlds like the ones in adventure games, where design and world influence puzzles and not the other way around.

  • Zombies, Run!

    I’ve always had a love-hate-relation towards running. In high school, I used to love to sprint, and I was actually quite good at it, too. Jogging, however, destroyed me. I didn’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t do it. No matter how hard I tried, after about a kilometer I just got so tired I had to stop.

    Only years later did I realize it wasn’t fatigue. It was boredom.

    Face it – jogging is the most boring thing there is. Sure, some people might find the whole “I am one with my breath” thing a zenlike meditative experience, but not me. Jogging leaves my brain unoccupied, and leaving my brain unoccupied is like switching the TV off on a five year-old during its favourite show. While in a porcelain store. Made out of crystal.

    Shame, really, because I am a writer, I sit on my ass all day and snack frustratedly while I stare at an empty sheet of virtual paper. My kind tends to expand horizontally. Jogging is something you can do on a whim – no planning required, no gym membership needed, just put on your running shoes and off you go.

    I was doomed.

    Or I wasn’t, because one day I got an App called Zombies, run! It tracks your runs and makes nifty spreadsheets and yaddayadda. But – and this is the ticker – it’s also an audiobook. In which you, slightly out of shape jogger, take on the role of Runner Five, whose job it is to go on supply runs for a British town after the zombie apocalypse happened.

    Yes. You read that right. This is a game in which you run. From zombies. It took me 10 months to admit to you, faithful reader, that I listen to this stuff every week. Because let me tell you, while the premise sounds silly, it is a well-written and well-produced story, performed by great actors. Some of the plot twists shocked me, one of the jokes made me laugh out loud while running and one episode moved me to bits.

    So here’s a little checklist:

    • Are you out of shape?
    • Do you have a pair of running shoes?
    • Do you have a two euros and a smartphone?
    • Are you ever-so-slightly geeky?

    Then try out this App. You might just get healthy and have fun at the same time.

  • Horowitzin’

    Oostende, Belgium
    Oostende, Belgium