Archive for November, 2011

Habermas – Luhmann. The clash of the last titans.

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

This was the title of my trial lecture for the job interview at the department of sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. I really enjoyed to go back to my sociological roots and prepare this 45 minute lecture, which I built on the well-known conflict between Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. If you want to take a look at the slides, you can do so. I have prepared one set as a PDF document (including my commentaries that I used as cues for my talk) and another set as a QuickTime movie (you have to click into the movie to advance to the next slide – there is no audio track, however).

The Adventures of Tintin – entertainment with a weak finish.

Sunday, November 13th, 2011

A new town, a new cinema. Here in Notodden, deep in the Norwegian province, we might have only 12,000 inhabitants, but we also do have a 3D capable cinema that is only a short stroll away from home. So we can hope for a return to more regular film critiques – if the program allows that is… Still, we’ll have plenty Hollywood-style entertainment flicks and Tintin certainly belongs to this category. I do like the comics, and I found the movie to be an adequate conversion to the screen, 3D and all. The first half or even two thirds were actually very nice. Small episodes, chase scenes that were actually enjoyable, a bunch of likable if somewhat shallow characters and, of course, Captain Haddock and his addiction to alcohol as pretty much the only interesting character. However, the movie just went on like that: more chases, more adventure, no development, no conflict. I guess the same is true for the comics, so there is not much to complain about, but in the realm of animated movies, this is not nearly sufficient to even get close to Pixar’s productions. Too bad. But sadly, I do not really expect more from a Steven Spielberg movie, so I at least wasn’t disappointed. You can certainly go see it if you’re into Tintin.
IMDb entry | Trailer