Whatever Works

In my eternal, yet-not-completed quest of watching all Woody Allen films, I couldn’t skip his latest: Whatever Works [IMDB]. It stars Seinfeld mastermind Larry David in a totally Woody Allen-esque role as weirdo physicist genius Boris who also enjoys commenting to the viewer on what’s going on in the film.

Melody, a naïve young girl who just ran away from the American south and is unfamiliar with Boris’ clever and ironic way of communicating runs into Boris, ends up living at his place and marrying him. This shouldn’t work but, strangely, it does. Whatever works… Melody’s puritan mother arrives soon after and ends up living as an artist with two guys and finally her father also arrives, and soon falls for a guy. I.e. the film’s motto »Whatever Works« is taken very seriously, and gives us a fun bit of entertainment which is too obviously un-subtle in many places.

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She, a Chinese

She, a chinese [IMDB] by Guo Xiaolu portrays a chinese girl, Li Mei, who grows up in the Chinese countryside. Rather than being keen on a life there, she dreams of living in the city and leaving the country for the West. And she lives up to those dreams by actually moving there. First to a nearby city where she fails to work in a clothing factory, starts working in a ‘massage’ parlour and then to London where her work is horrible until she gets to know old widower Mr Hunt who eventually marries her, greatly simplifying her life in the UK that way. But she can’t stand that he still loves his deceased wife and starts making out with a fast food worker who treats her badly instead.

It’s an impressive film. Particularly because it keeps tearing you back and forth between thinking that Li Mei is lucky in how things are working out for her and unlucky for the same reasons as she never reaches the better life she had dreamt of. Likewise you keep thinking that she’s relying on her luck a bit too much and voluntarily exposes herself to additional risks all the time. She tolerates the consequence of that without complaints, but she doesn’t seem overly happy with her life either.

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Metropolis

Without doubt the big cinematic event of the season was the presentation of the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [IMDB, Wikipedia] which is pretty close to the 1927 original thanks to the ‘lost’ scenes that were found in Argentinia two years ago. The film was presented at the Berlinale film festival this month and accompanied by a whole orchestra. Even better, the whole show was broadcast live on arte, creating the ultra-rare occasion for a bunch of us to sit together and watch TV [eek!].

What can I say, the film is great. And the missing scenes helped it make a lot more sense – although I suspect that all the documentary material I read about it helped as well. The difference in quality between the proper ‘original’ and the copy of an original which was in use for decades and from which the missing scenes are supplied now is also baffling.

Even though Metropolis may have been a box-office flop back in the days and even though it’s inconveniently long, it’s still very much worth seeing because it’s amazingly modern and – one suspects – its picture of the modern world influenced many, if not most, other films made since then.

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Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. [IMDB] is a ‘documentary’ about the corporatisation of the food supply in the United States. In a way it summarises what is already written in recent books on the same topic, particularly Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma whose authors also appear in the film. Things are taken beyond the facts by a mother who lost her son due to e. coli in food.

The film does contain some interesting facts on how food is made today and how these methods are hidden from the people who pay for them. It also tries to highlight how poorly politics work in this area where big business meets the basic needs of the people and how this leads to unhealthy food, horrible living conditions for the animals involved, ecological problems and even social problems due to all the manual work having been relegated to the easily exploited poor. A brief detour also discusses how it’s creepy but to a certain extent helpful that big business is getting on the ‘organic’ bandwagon.

As the facts alone are depressing and condemning enough, I thought it was pretty superfluous to try to catch the viewer with the emotional bits as well. But I suppose that’s for the American market.

I wonder how the German food industry fares in comparison. On the one hand I suspect it’s just not as huge and corporate as it’s American equivalent (but trying to get there) and there should be more regulation, less GM stuff and so on. On the other hand, Germans are the people who’ll eat any kind of shit as long as it’s dirt-cheap, so perhaps that gives us a little head-start here…

See also: We feed the world, Unser täglich Brot.

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I Hired a Contract Killer

In Aki Kaurismäki’s 1990 film I hired a contract killer [IMDB] French clerk Henri who’s working in the UK loses his job as his department is closed down. He decides to kill himself and, failing to do so, hires a contract killer to do the job for him. Then he gets drunk, falls in love and changes his mind. But, shock-horror he can’t find the guy to cancel the job. We still see a happy end.

It seemes strange to me that a Frenchman should play a role in London, but the guy really looks (and is) French. And it’s amazing how the city looks generally dark and bleak as you’d expect in a Kaurismäki film. Not too many smiles there - but a short scene with Joe Strummer!

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A Fistful of Dollars / For a Few Dollars More

Ages ago, a colleague recommended Sergio Leone’s films to me. It was the kind of recommendation that sounds like an order. One that isn’t to be messed with. And one that should’ve been followed years ago. And many months later I actually ran across the classic A Fistful of Dollars [IMDB, Wikipedia]. I’m not a huge Western fan but its story about the loner, or rather the cool loner, who plays the powers that are against each other and doesn’t miss a shot was rather cool. The film also looked very stylish and possibly I can understand why people think Clint Eastwood is a cool guy (although I wouldn’t claim I’d have recognised him in the film).

Likewise, the ‘sequel’ For a Few Dollars More [IMDB, Wikipedia], was as cool if not cooler as it sees the man without a name but with a fast gun meet an equally competent colleague played by Lee Van Cleef whom he has to get along with. Both of them are in for the same bounty, neither of them wants to be killed, together they’re more than twice as cool. Seeing Klaus Kinski play a psychologically ‘challenged’ role in such a film was curiously funny as well. Can’t wait to top this trilogy off with The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

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Teorema

I was split on the film Teorema [IMDB, Wikipedia]. On the one hand I would have watched it for its mathematical sounding title alone (the German subtitle is even Geometrie der Liebe, Geometry of Love). On the other hand, the film is directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the director of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom which is the most disgusting cinema experience I sat through (I can tolerate disgusting in a great film, but it seemed gratuitous in this not-great one), so I was a bit reluctant to watch it.

Luckily there was no need for this fear. Apparently the film was quite controversial when it was released in 1968. It plays in a rich family of a factory owner. One day a stranger announces his visit - he shows up, stays and is charming. During his stay he seduces mother, father, daughter, son and housemaid. They all love it and it will change their lives. Each of those stages is shown in a little episode for each person. Finally the guy vanishes again.

Is he a great guy because he changed people’s lives, possibly for better, like that? Or is he devious in the way he turns honest people into ‘sinners’? Certainly questions that pop up and which make the film so charming. The fact that there’s very little speaking in the film also helps that.

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Other

When staying with my parents for xmas I had the ‘opportunity’ to watch a few more ‘seasonal’ classics like Sissi [IMDB, Wikipedia] the film that made Romy Schneider famous (obviously totally not my cup of tea). There was also Die Hard [IMDB, Wikipedia] which I keep finding embarrassingly entertaining.

Continuing my the enjoyable ‘quest’ of watching films by Michael Glawogger, I saw his 2003 work Slumming [IMDB]. It features the ever charming August Diel as rich twentysomething Sebastian. He lives in Vienna, sharing a flat with student Alex and enjoys spending the days driving around town in his posh car and meeting dozens of girls he got to know through dating sites, being mainly interested in secretly taking photos of them beneath the table while they’re chatting to him (let’s just say girls in Vienna seem to reliable wear skirts…)

Sebastian and Alex also enjoy a fair bit of twisted humour, enjoying to go ‘slumming’ and witnessing/enjoying the lifestyle of the underclasses. One of these excursions goes too far and they end up putting a drunk into their car at the railway station, driving over to the Czech republic and putting him back on a bench in front of the railway station there.

It’s interesting how this sounds like a rather funny thing to do, but is rather cruel once you spent a split-second thinking about it. Even the guys realise that and it’s driven home by Pia, the only girl Sebastian got to know on his dating sprees he actually liked, becoming very upset and immediately driving over to the Czech republic, putting up ‘Missing’ posters and starting a search for the guy. The manually added caron accents on the poster just make it feel more real.

In the end the guy manages to find his way back home by himself, wandering through the cold, breaking into some holiday home on the way an sneaking a ride on a football team’s bus. He doesn’t seem to mind. But still the wrongness of what happens remains.

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Verfolgt

In Verfolgt [a.k.a. Hounded, a.k.a. Punish Me, IMDB, Wikipedia], 16 year old Jan is released from prison and starts off with a crush on Elsa who is three times his age and his parole officer.

He doesn’t have much else to do and she’s trying to do her job properly taking care that he doesn’t get off the track again. Her plan to achieve both that and killing his crush by getting him a job in her husband’s car repair shop fails as Jan almost become part of the family because of that. After her husband and her boss fail to take the situation seriously, she starts giving in.

Giving in to a sadomasochistic relationship with Jan, that his. He wants to be punished. She does just that. And eventually he’s in tears. For Elsa the only moments she’s seeing openness from him, but also coming from a situation which she realised she enjoys quite a bit and which is likely illegal.

Of course this doesn’t lead to a tremendously happy end but it throws up a bunch of questions when watching it. How much harm is done? Should anybody be told off or punished? How would you perceive the film if the genders were the other way round?

The whole film less than 90 minutes long and in nice-looking black and white, by the way. Hence enjoyable to watch for that alone.

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The Postman always rings twice

Sticking with the black and white, 1946’s classic The Postman always rings twice [IMDB] has the nice and clean story with a twist which movies seem to have lost in the 1960s. Frank, a guy who is wandering between places, starts working at a petrol station. The owner, Nick, is a drunkard, his wife, Cora, is pretty, they fall in love and start considering to kill Nick.

Their first attempt at doing that fails due to an accident almost killing Nick at the same time. But the tension is there, suspicions arise and the idea of killing him cannot be un-thought. After returning from the hospital he announces to sell the petrol station to move back to his family and look after them. Cora considers the petrol station her carreer and her chance to a good life and hence the killing takes place anyway in a faux car accident which arises all sorts of suspicions.

This takes the affair to court with a sneaky lawyer starting to play his game, staging a conflict between Frank and Cora but managing to get them both out it free. Unfortunately Cora dies a bit later in yet another car crash and this time they ‘get’ Frank for it, even though he didn’t crash the car on purpose.

Of course the whole ‘moral’ aspect of the story is a bit lame but the way they build the story is quite cool.

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Black Cat, White Cat

Also continuing to watch Emir Kustirica films, I indulged in his 1998 Black Cat, White Cat (somehow the distinct cat genders are lost in the English version of the name…) [a.k.a. Schwarze Katze, weißer Kater, a.k.a. Crna mačka, beli mačkor, IMDB, Wikipedia].

Just like his other films it’s a wild and complex tale from south-eastern Europe. Everybody is at least a part-time criminal, dealing with other criminals all the time, some of them being considerably better than others. The less successful ones, try cheating and lying, making themselves even bigger victims of their more successful neighbours because they ‘owe’ them even more than they did before.

To pay off one of those debts Matko’s son Zare has to marry the midget daughter Afrodita of the successful and exuberant Dadan. It will be a big party and it will not be postponed by such details as Matko’s father dying. Hence there’s a feast with a couple who don’t want to marry one another, loads of presents, a dead guy on the attic, and the obligatory brass band playing. And somehow in the chaos they still manage to find to a happy end, real love and all that.

While this film may not be as refined as Underground, it’s still amazing how many stories it keeps going (and messing up) and how many sweet little details it manages to set up and revisit. Even at a length of two hours, it isn’t boring at any time.

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Star Trek

I have watched my fair share of Star Trek episodes and probably seen most of the films. But I won’t consider myself ‘trekkie’ in any way and suspect trekkie people would laugh at my feeble skills at distinguishing aliens and so on. I thought the latest Star Trek film was nice in that it picked up the first Star Trek TV series and it characters. Somehow their unsophisticated attitude and the simple idea that you could just go out and beat up some aliens while others comment ‘fascinating’ made entertaining television.

Some of these aspects were cleverly inserted in the latest Star Trek film [IMDB], but I found all the gloss of it - particularly the constant fake lens flare - rather unnerving. Yes, they probably did everything ‘right’ in someone’s book. No, that doesn’t make it a good film.

And don’t even get me started about all the alternate timeline rubbish. Some people seem to consider it ‘clever’, to me it mostly seems too dumb to come up with an actual story, particularly in the ‘sci-fi’ genre.

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Praxis Dr. Hasenbein

File this one as absurd theatre. Helge Schneider is a German comedian. But I’m hesitant to use that word because he’s not that ‘funny’ in the way that comedians are supposed to be ‘fun’ today. He’s smarter with a taste for the absurd - and allegedly when doing shows and not liking the audience he tried submitting them to two hours of ‘Strafjazz’ instead of being funny.

His 1997 film Praxis Dr. Hasenbein [IMDB, Wikipedia] has him as a doctor in a small town neighbourhood, indulging in the absurdities of his life and that of his neighbours. He cares for his grown up retarded son, deals with the orphanage in the neighbourhood with its mean caretaking lady and mischievous kids and indulges in chatting to the owner of the local cigar store, taking joy in buying a ‘goodie bag for guys’ with useless toys in it for himself.

Of course he’s also a quack doctor, giving useless advice to his patients and trying to find a good nurse. Queue some fairly Monty Python-esque scenes when dismissing an applicant for the job. — In the danger of spoiling things for everyone I also have to remark that I thought it was a hilarious that Dr. Hasenbein killed the rabbit of the kids in the orphanage by jumping on it and they decided to get their revenge by putting razor-blades between the keys of the piano he was to play for their ‘mother”s birthday. When doing so, he just laughs, pulls the blades from the keyboard and tell them it’s the oldest trick in the book. (What do you mean this doesn’t sound funny? It is.)

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Das weiße Band

Michael Haneke has a fantastic track record of dire films he directed. Funny Games is his mind-boggling classic on human evil, Der siebte Kontinent may be an even greater collection of personal devastation, presented in an orderly fashion and with Caché he took the theme of a guy’s past catching up with him in a freaky way to broader audiences. His latest film Das weiße Band - eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The white ribbon - a German children’s story) [Homepage, IMDB, Wikipedia] moves on to portray a whole community and their broken characters.

The community is a cold one in Northern Germany. As is typical in the region, the people are joyless protestants with the most powerful people in town being the baron, the doctor and the priest. One day the doctor is injured in a riding accident - a wire had been put up for his horse to fall over. Other incidents happen, a shed burns down, the baron’s kid is tied up, the nurse’s handicapped son is in danger, and nobody can figure out what’s going on. Being so busy with their righteous lives, people don’t particularly care either, just the teacher, who also narrates the story, starts asking questions and suspecting the village’s kids, some of whom seem strange from the first scene in the film, to perhaps know something or even be involved. Needless to say that such suspicions don’t go down particularly well.

While not as personally devastating as Haneke’s other films, the picture he draws of the community is an unpleasant one. The self-righteousness of the community, fuelled by their beliefs, directs their behaviour. While they are doing everything ‘right’, they seem to do everything wrong. They don’t talk and their kids inherit that. Being from Northern Germany myself, this portrait of the people as joyless protestants seems correct in its essence and what may make life unpleasant there (and I’d say that if there is an ‘American problem’, it may have similar roots, not quite as joyless but even more self-righteous perhaps).

Great scenes in the film include the priest punishing his kids by sending the whole family to bed without dinner because of their ‘wrongdoing’, the cruelty of letting them know they’re in for a hiding the next evening while making clear how cruel they are to force him into that action. They are also decorated with a white ribbon, the namesake of the film (written in hard-to-read Sütterlin on the posters [not that I have any knowledge of old-style German handwriting, but Wikipedia suggests that the film plays in 1913 and Sütterlin was only introduced in schools from 1915 onwards]) later on to be reminded of their innocence.

In another rather funny scene we see the baron’s wife who just came back from Italy with their son tell her husband that she’ll go back. She tells him that she got to know some friendly guy down there and then spends a minute or to explaining how people’s minds in this region are fucked up and that she doesn’t want to expose her son to the resulting abuse anymore. Of course her husband stopped listing after the first sentence, completely ignores the only insightful analysis in the film and can ask nothing but did you sleep with him afterwards. Genius. Or amusing at least.

One impression I keep having about Haneke is that he has some of the great tragedies and tensions of the human psyche and behaviour nailed and knows to exhibit them in a clear form. But visually his films have a made-for-television taste. That was clear in his older films, particularly those playing mostly indoors but I was also left with it after seeing the landscapes and faux-black and white in Das weiße Band. Perhaps it’s just a ‘personal style’.

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Coco, avant Chanel

The film Coco, avant Chanel [IMDB] gives the story of Coco Chanel’s youth in the first two decades of the twentieth century. She worked as a seamstress and dreamt of singing, an endeavour which led her to got to know some rich people, become a mistress, baffle the high-society with her ideas for ‘less ridiculous’ hats and clothing and somehow end up with her own fashion shop in Paris.

The film shows the life of the young Coco before becoming a fashion icon, founding the popular No. 5 fragrance, being a bit too friendly with the Nazi occupants and rising to popularity again with the American middle class, quite likely founding a business empire in the process.

Unfortunately the film restrains itself from commenting or giving more background. It shows Coco Chanel as a person who has her own mind, initially isn’t too self confident and learns that being some rich guy’s mistress has its benefits. Not exactly heroic. But, hey, Audrey Tautou!

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Die Märchenbraut

Unexpectedly, I got to enjoy the children’s TV series Die Märchenbraut (a.k.a. Arabela) again. It’s a Czecheslovakian TV production (strangely in co-operation with West German television) from the 1970s. And it’s amazingly good. We didn’t get to watch much TV when I was little, but this was among the stuff we could see.

Over thirteen episodes a fun story evolves: There’s the normal world as well as the fairy tale world. They also have magic rings which can be used to turn wishes into reality. People are careless with those and they tend to become stolen. So somehow the fairy tale world princess Arabela ends up in the real world with the Majer family - falling in love with their son Peter in the process -, some criminals try to steal the magic rings, some kids from the real world end up in the fairy tale world where Arabela’s sister wreaks havoc by forcing Peter to turn it into a ‘modern’ industrial place. Many many more things happen, from teachers being turned into Mickey Mouse, to red riding hood failing to be eaten by a case of mechanical wolf FAIL, to Fantomas saving the day.

The amazing thing is how well the series manages to be for kids and start off with standard fairy tales but still manages to poke fun at both the fairy tales and the ‘real’ world, trusting the young viewers to understand what’s going on much more than today’s children’s programmes seem to. [I’d say that if modern children’s programmes poke fun they are more likely to do it in a way that appeals to grown-ups only, so they can feel ‘smarter than the kids’ and have an excuse to watch the show.]

I also have to note that DVD versions of such series are dangerous. What used to last through a whole summer of weekly screenings is now consumed in a few sessions of people agreeing to go for ‘just one more’ episode. Next we’ll have to get Pan Tau which was made by the same studio and which I remember fondly as well.

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U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha

The idea for U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha [IMDB Wikipedia] seems a bit crazy: Use Bizet’s Carmen and have it played out in the Khayelitsha township/suburb of Cape Town. As a result we get plenty of people running around Khayelitsha, working in a cigarette factory or as policemen and hanging out in the local shebeen and playing out the drama which also involves drug dealing, one of their friends who has become a famous opera singer and, of course, eventual death. While doing that they speak and sing, both African music and Bizet’s in Xhosa.

The setup is a bit exotic and may take a bit of getting used to and I am not entirely convinced this is working well in all places throughout the film. But it’s a rather cool idea and for opera non-lovers like myself it’s nice to see the formal frame of an opera broken up so freely.

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La graine et le mulet

La Graine et le mulet (a.k.a. Couscous) is a French film that’s at the same time hopeful and quite sad. It tells the story of dock worker Slimane. He’s becoming old and the chances for him to work and earn money shrink. He’s also living away from his family in a guest house whose owner and her family are like a second family to him.

Back at his family’s place his wife almost makes big family dinners during which everybody enjoys her fantastic couscous dishes and is bound to be in a good mood, no matter what is going on. Looking for new perspectives, Slimane wants to open a couscous restaurant on a boat. But it’s hard to do that and get the necessary permissions for that. Particulalry if you have neither experience nor money and are a foreigner. Eventually he manages to set up a ‘demo’ of his restaurant, successfully inviting many of the ‘officials’ whose approval he could need. His family supports him with this and even his ‘second family’ appears. But things go wrong, the couscous vanishes and while the guests become impatient, Slimane tries to figure out and solve that problem, only discovering deeper messes on the way. It’s heartbreaking.

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Nacktschnecken

Michael Glawogger’s 2004 film Nacktschnecken (Slugs) tells a ‘uh, let’s make some money by making a porn film’ story with Austrian accents. The film is quite entertaining and some of the characters in the film are the same as in Contact High but Nacktschnecken doesn’t manage to match the humour or form of Contact High.

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District 9

District 9 was highly lauded, but as with all films containing aliens I remained rather sceptical about. Eventually seeing it anyway with a friend was a good thing as the film is far from the typical sci-fi clichés and focuses more on human behaviour. While the film is not particularly subtle in doing that, it still manages to drive home the message and keep you at a reasonable level of uneasiness while watching it.

An alien spaceship is stranded above Johannesburg, of all places, and eventually humans get into the ship and ‘rescue’ loads of sick looking aliens from there. They get to live in shacks, speak a bleepy-clicky language, love cat food and seem a bit messy. Their human neighbours don’t like them and they are about to be ‘relocated’ to another provisional settlement further away. This relocation is to be executed by the not-so-subtly named corporation MNU, Multinational United, and the story is told by Wikus van der Merwe who is to run the operation and just happens to be the son-in-law of one of the higher executives in the company. He documents his work on video for corporate propaganda, which makes up a good part of the film.

Wikus, an office worker who loves his wife, strangely isn’t scared to walk into the alien’s shacks, making them sign eviction notices, a somewhat silly bureacratic ploy to make things look ‘legitimate’. He’s proud to point out the mess, weapons or other transgressions he finds in the shacks to the camera and just has a single scene ‘cut’ which sees him covered in a strange fluid. Of course that fluid starts turning him into a semi-alien which changes his life completely as all of a sudden not only is he growing strange alien features but he’s also highly valuable to many people as apparently the aliens have very powerful weapons which can only be triggered by people with alien DNA. The big corporation becomes more evil as the value of his body becomes obvious. Wikus starts cooperating with some aliens, hoping to get out of the situation and there’s some fun with weapons and weapons dealers as well. Dire and entertaining.

The film is quite shakily filmed with a fair share of it being made up of ‘corporate’ videos or TV news reports, mocking their style a little. It also points at a number of issues such as the ease with which ‘different’ people end up locked away or being hated by their neighbours, the uncontrolled power of corporations and the eagerness of governments to use it, the apparent cluelessness with which people ‘do their job’, being complete assholes or killers on the way. And of course, with the film playing in South Africa, the parallel to the way black people were treated is obvious.

In fact, I found the film hit the South African aspect quite well. Not just in the District Six reference of the film’s title, in names and accents or the odd voetsek thrown into dialogues - luckily we managed to see one of the rare screenings with the original soundtrack (while the film’s graphics and text had actually been localised to German) - but also Wikus’ character seemed quite fitting as well. A guy who loves his wife, loves building her little presents, and who is proud of his job and takes joy in explaining what he is doing there and isn’t scared to go out and deal with some aliens - which he derogatively calls ‘prawns’ as everybody does - without realising that what he is doing could be wrong. In addition the South Africa shown in the film still looked rather white with high posts and income being mostly held by white people. That’s probably not entirely unrealistic either.

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MathFilm Festival

2008 was the year of Mathematics in Germany. Part of the events taking place in the course of that was the MathFilm festival. The idea of which being that they rented some copies of films involving maths in some way and tried to get them shown in cinemas around the country. Local mathematicians were encouraged to perhaps give introductory talks along with it and they had a DVD with short maths film as well some of which could be shown. Those films are quite interesting and it’s fun to watch them, particularly with non-mathematicians. Those films cover very practical issues like 3D modelling, more abstract practical stuff like optimising railway timetables and more abstract stuff like higher-dimensional polyhedra. A good mix all-in-all.

The bonus part of the DVD also contains some ‘ads’ they made for the maths year. Quite cool films actually which highlight how maths are used in numerous daily situations, trying to raise awareness for that. Unfortunately I couldn’t find this on YouTube, so here we go:

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Che

Steven Soderbergh’s two part opus Che [part one, part two, Wikipedia] adds some more hours to the films made on Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. While the great recent effort of The Motorcycle Diaries showed Guevara’s youth and how he started to believe in struggling for South America, these new films show his and Fidel Castro’s fight for Cuba in the first part and his losing fight in Bolivia in the second.

I thought the first part was rather good. Showing how they started the fight and how they put a lot of effort into gathering and educating a group of guerillas. It’s amazing to see at the same time a certain intellectual diligence and the ability and willingness to enforce discipline down to death sentences for transgressions against the rules. It’s also amazing to see the relative humbleness and the belief in the collective effort for a common goal. The film is great in how it mixes the guerillas’ conquer of Cuba with an interview given by Guevara and a speech he’s giving at the United Nations in New York - both in glorious black-and-white even. Not only does this give extra context, showing how Guevara works and argues outside ‘his’ guerilla-world, it also looks rather cool in the black-and-white style used for it.

The film’s second part seemed less great to me. It lacks the interesting structure of the first film and focuses completely on Guevara going to Bolivia and trying to start a guerilla group there. It’s tough, there is much less support by the population and a fiercer defense by the government supported by the U.S. And soon they lose with Guevara being shot. It’s pretty straightforward, slightly dramatic but fails to captivate your imagination. In particular it remains unclear what makes Guevara so obsessed with putting his life on the line another time to help people free their countries, countries which aren’t his own. While it is shown how he arrives at his convictions in The Motorcycle Diaries, some deeper exploration of might have been more interesting than guerilla tedium.

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Central do Brasil

My flatmate had to do a report on Central do Brasil [a.k.a. Central Station - IMDB, Wikipedia] for his Portuguese class, which gave me the unexpected opportunity to watch it. The 1998 film starts in Rio de Janeiro’s central station where ex-teacher Dora works as a writer. Illiterate people come to her desk and pay her to write letters for them. She’s a mean person, judges her customers by their letters, takes the ‘liberty’ to mock the letters together with her friend back home and isn’t too keen on actually mailing the letters in case she disapproves of their content.

One of her customers, Ana, comes along with her little son Josué and is run over by a bus when she leaves the station. Against her initial intentions Dora eventually takes care of Josué, particularly after she starts having a bad conscience after selling him off to child traders for ‘adoption’. After freeing Josué from that, they start looking for his father on a long trek on buses through Brazil during which they lose much but eventually start trusting each other. Eventually they find the right place, Bom Jesus, figuring out that Josué’s father is himself on his way looking for Ana and his son in Rio, but hasn’t come back. So Dora leaves the boy with his half-brothers and sneaks away to get back home.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Judgement at Nuremberg

1961’s Judgement at Nuremberg [IMDB, Wikipedia] is a black and white film that clocks in at more than three hours without being dull. It presents a court trial against judges under the Nazi regime.

The film highlights two main things: One the one the the (from today’s point-of-view unsurprising) ease with which otherwise intelligent people end up justifying the killing of people because ‘it’s the law’ and they’re ‘doing their job’. The other are the political difficulties of the trials against Nazi-era crimes: There was supposed to be the illusion of the Nazi-era powers being held responsible for what they did without turning the German people into enemies (or killing too much of the local business elites, I guess).

The first of those points are shown in the film by the reactions of the judges who built their own little models about doing their jobs well and about what ‘law and order’ is and it’s reflected from time to time by the way they answer questions or the way their attourney attacks witnesses. The second point is highlighted by the setup of the trial whose judge comes from the American hinterland and who is ‘reminded’ by the military that it’d be a bad idea to be too harsh.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

L’aile ou la cuisse

I’ve been a fan of Louis de Funès films as a kid. He’s always this hectic slightly choleric guy running around and pulling grimaces and his films were on TV. Yet, the list of films seems endless and L’aile ou la cuisse [a.k.a. The Wing and[?] the Thigh -IMDB] is one I only saw now.

In the film, de Funès plays Charles Duchemin, the owner of a famous restaurant guide who makes and breaks restaurants by assigning stars to them. He does that job in typical de Funès style by dressing up (so he isn’t recognised), pulling faces, taking little samples and so on. But the big challenge in the film is that Jacques Tricatel, a big industrial foodmaker who brings a lot of bad food to the people tries to buy good restaurants as well and serve his ‘malbouffe’ there.

After running through a few side-stories involving Duchemin’s son Gérard who’d rather be a clown in a circus than a food tester, Duchemin’s pretty and young new secretary Marguerite and the fact that a former star cook takes revenge on Duchemin by forcing him to stomach a bunch of industrial food, leading to a loss of taste, they break into Tricatel’s factory to uncover how his ‘food’ is made. In a final show-off in a TV debate, Tricatel and the Duchemins are confronted and the ‘quality’ of Tricatel’s food as well his attempt to kill Duchemin are revealed.

The film is funny and entertaining. It’s also well balanced by mocking both the food guides and critiquing industrial food. When keeping in mind that it was made in 1976 one also suspects that it’s rather prescient or that we should be scared about the ‘malbouffe’ we can/have to buy today.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Boogie Nights

I never saw Boogie Nights [IMDB, Wikipedia] and catching up with that gap wasn’t really worth it. A guy starts being a porn star and all the stereotypes you may have about the porn business - cheeky names, people congratulating each other for their cheeky names, directors who are artists, porn stars who are actors, drugs, stupidity - end up being spelled out. Um, great.

Sure, there are a few fun scenes in the film, and one has to chuckle when seeing the cheeky trailers shown in the film or directors trying to insist on using proper film for their art. At an hour less this may have been entertaining, but the way it is it’s a dull ode to the 1980s to me.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds [IMDB, Wikipedia] boggles the mind with the spelling of its title. At just over two-and-a-half hours it’s a very long film, but time just flies by. The film is quite funny, a bit violent and - not quite unexpectedly - indulges in a play with stereotypes.

The film plays in Nazi occupied France in 1944. It focuses on a small unit of American soldiers (jewish ones to make the message clear) who set out to kill and scalp German soldiers and send a few of them home with a swastika carved into their forehead. On the other side there’s most notably German ‘Jew Hunter’ Hans Landa who is smart, well educated and takes pride in outwitting the people trying to hide things from him by careful observation.

German propaganda end up premiering a film ‘Stolz der Nation’ about one of their war heroes, Frederick Zoller, in Paris. Zoller shot hundreds of American soldiers from a bell tower. The premiere eventually takes place in a cinema chosen by Frederick because he fancies its owner Shosanna, a jewish girl, who previously managed to flee from a raid by Hans Landa on the place they were hiding in. With many highly ranked Nazis - all the way up to Goebbels and Hitler - being in the cinema, Shosanna sees the opportunity to take revenge by burning down the cinema during the show. A similar chance is seen by the Inglourious Basterds and even by Hans Landa who sees a nice opportunity to come out of this as a hero.

First and foremost the film is great entertainment. It’s also an interesting mix of American and European cinema with Brad Pitt starring as the boss of the ‘Basterds’ (in a remarkably good and un-Brad Pittian role) and young (ah well, a few years ago’s young) German actors like Daniel Brühl and August Diehl being fresh faced Nazi officials. With their different origins people speak a whole load of languages and it just works out.

From a historical point of view, I am not sure how well the film does. Hitler seems like a joke (as usual on the silver screen), the whole concept of ‘revenge’ against the Nazis may feel intuitively good but is intellectually wrong, and things just work out too easily. The absurdity of three attempts to kill the high Nazi officials succeeding at the same time, trivialise the whole problem. On the other hand, particularly the portrait of Hans Landa is brilliant. Smart beancounters like him who are happy to use their powers in the most profitable way and - one suspects - even enjoy the triumph of having caught, trapped, exposed, others, always look like a particularly depressing part of the evil.

Finally there are the stereotypes. Tarantino makes an effort to leave none of them out. From the French countryside to Riefenstahl to the Nazi decorations: While his cross references to other films may be subtle, all of those decorations are as in-your-face as they can get. And neither is there much subtlety in the film’s stereotypically good guys behaving just in the way the bad guys do.

It’s a good film that easily fills its length. But - in a typically German way if you wish - I am inclined to think that may handle a serious topic like the Third Reich a bit too lightly. And while it has those typical Tarantino-style dialogues and first-class absurd scenes (e.g. SS officers sticking cards saying King Kong to their head) it does seem to lack the abundance of cool and sexy one got used to from earlier films..

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Code Rush

The 2000 film Code Rush about the demise / open-sourcing of Netscape was made available on the net recently. It follows a number of the people involved around and let’s us see how it’s all exciting for them to work all-nighters, remove bugs to before their open sourcing deadline and cheer at their bosses when needed. I didn’t think it was particularly informative or that it managed to shed additional light on what was going on. There’s nerdery and there’s money. Surprise, surprise.

Free Rainer

German film Free Rainer makes dreams come true. Media-person Rainer ends up in a bit of a crisis and decides to stop working his high-powered, overly well paid and coke driven ‘job’ of bringing stupidity to the people’s homes via the teletubes. Instead, he wants to create a better world where TV offers great shows worth watching. And, being part of the business, he knows that the way for achieving that is to manipulate the viewer statistics. After all, nobody in the media ‘industry’ gives a fuck about what they’re creating as long as the advertising people shove money up their butts for it. And the advertising people don’t care either as long as they have numbers telling them which shows ‘reach’ the biggest audience.

With that setup, he decides to invest his money in a bunch of technology and jobless people to capture the viewer statistics and manipulate them before sending them where they should go in the first place. After a few difficulties that works and viewer habits do surprisingly change, leading to a happy end full of intellectual Germans. As unreal as it is amusing but fun to watch.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Megacities

Michael Glawogger’s Megacities documents the lives of poor people in Mumbai, Moscow, New York and Mexico City. They have boring jobs which ruin their health, they have few perspectives, they collect garbage, dance in strip clubs or pretend they’re hustlers. Yet they find a way to go on and on. It’s depressing because of the way their lives are. And it’s encouraging to see that they can cope. Like many of those modern Austrian documentaries, the film is impressive by just showing things without commenting in any way other than showing it.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

16 Years of Alcohol

In 16 Years of Alcohol which comes in the style of a British TV film we follow a guy named Frankie. As a kid he enjoys going with his dad to the pub. Eventually disillusioned from his dad, he ends up being a drinker and hanging out with his friends, enjoying to beat up people in the spirit of Clockwork Orange. Trying to leave either these friends or the alcohol for a girlfriend or a better life becomes a huge challenge for him.

Breaking the Waves

After many years of being a Lars von Trier fan, I finally managed to see Breaking the Waves which probably played a big role in making him famous. The film’s landscapes are rough and the people are tragic.

Far away at the British coast, close to the oil rigs, the community is not very enlightened but all the more christian and conservative. There, Bess, a good person, tries to abide by all the rules, be helpful and nice. She also falls in love with oil-platform worker Jan. The extent, or rather fanatism, of her love is hard to describe and it’s hard for her to even let him go back to work after their wedding. There, at work, he is eventually injured and becomes paralysed as a consequence. She starts blaming herself for that and things go downhill from there: prostitution, expulsion, inury. And as a viewer you’re sure to be close to Beth when all of it happens.

As usual, this von Trier film is very intense; it’s not easy to watch and with a duration of more than two-and-a-half hours it is quite long as well. Yet, the tragedy sucks you in. You don’t foresee what will happen but the agony and the hopelessness give you hints.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Underground

Another very long (2 hours 50, and apparently there’s a director’s cut that lasts longer than six hours) and totally amazing film is Emir Kusturica’s Underground. The film starts in Belgrade in the second World War. It takes the history and runs with it, liberally mixing in drama and surreal elements around the crook Marko, his family and friends. A lot is happening in the film, and it’s hard to make sense of it. There’s war, with the Germans and the allies coming into the country, people try to defend themselves, make do, run their theatres. Some fall in love with the German officers, others wouldn’t ever consider doing that. There’s a brass band running around with Marko, creating the stage when he comes, there’s an underground bunker for living, creating weapons and giving birth. The Tito regime is coming. And the people in the bunker never learn that the World War ended, living down there making weapons for decades while documentaries about their lives are made and a new war starts in the country, creating another wave of death and leading to the statement that a war isn’t a proper war until brothers kill one another.

It seems impossible to sum up this film, from the facts and tragedy of history to the absurd elements there is a lot going on without the slightest break and with plenty of room for details that are lost on the uninitiated viewer like myself.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The King is Alive

I won’t manage to watch all Dogme ‘95 films - the last time I looked at their by now dysfunctional web site, their number had grown beyond 60 - but I did manage to add #4, The King is Alive to my list of watched Dogme films. And while not outstanding it was still rather good and grabbing my attention throughout.

The film starts on a comfortable South American bus. Quite literally, it’s going nowhere. The driver is clueless, he is going South by compass and the compass is jammed. They end up in the middle of nowhere without food or the chance of anybody passing by soon. So one of them - apparently an experienced outdoor person - instructs everybody how to survive in the abandoned village they stranded at and starts walking for help.

The group of holidaymakers has difficulties dealing with the lack of comforts and service at first - and likewise at taking the danger of their situation seriously, but soon they get into a rhythm and to pass time one of the travellers reproduces the script of King Lear so they can perform it as a play. This gives plenty of opportunities to learn more about the people in the group, see them interact and struggle with one another as we know it from Dogme films. A more subdued drama than in some of the other Dogme films, but drama nonetheless.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Supertex

Supertex is a 2003 German film playing in Amsterdam based on what apparently was a popular novel. It looks like a well made German TV film more than something created for cinema.

In the film the family owning the ‘Supertex’ cheap clothing company plays the main role. Their father built the business, is proud of it and has his sons joining him at the company. At the same time he doesn’t let them do any real work or take and decisions there. While one of the brothers, Boy, can happily live with that unsurprising life, the other, Max, one starts feeling unappreciated and decides to leave the company.

Add some family drama (discovering their father has a maitresse, his girlfriend having personal problems and thinking that going to Isreal helps them) for confusion, the father eventually dies, leaving everybody in a tumble. People have difficulties coping with the situation and eventually Boy decides to leave the company while on a business trip to Casablanca which he cannot handle (he opens a portaloo business later on - not kidding!) while Max is quick to return to the family and the company to keep things running.

Stereotypical TV film, not just from the looks.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

99 Euro Films

The wonders of digital filmmaking! In 2001 people decided to let young filmmakers take a cheap camera and make a film for 99 Euros (possibly as an introduction to the Euro era?). The result is this collection of 12 short films. Northern German guys sitting on a car drinking Jever, a guy letting other people punch him with boxing gloves for a small fee, elderly German tourists complaining about shouts in a foreign hotel, and so on. The films are so short that they only need a single idea - and a dedication to putting them on tape for 99 Euros. Not world shattering but quite cool.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Primer

Primer is a fundamentally geeky films about some engineering types discovering a strange device with the quasi magic power of time travel. They can’t make too much sense for it but go for a trip anyway a few times, eventually changing little things here and there.

While the film may be clever because of the way it plays with things happening parallel, I ended up finding it a bit pointless. The film looking like a modern day TV series with wrong colours all over the place didn’t help either. It reinforced my idea that they started with a clever idea and then had to pull all sorts of ‘clever’ tricks to make it into a film because they didn’t have a good story.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Blood Brothers

Blood Brothers - a.k.a. Jiang Wu is a Hong Kongese gangster film, taking you along the story of the ‘blood brothers’ Hung and Left Hand who worked their way to the top of the local mafia down from the very bottom as clueless youths. By now Hung has a family and starts thinking ‘responsible’, while Left Hand suggests he should remain more relentless when people don’t do as they’re told. Not least because of the relentless attitudes people want to see them die, and they do. Ironically in a situation not unlike a crime from their own youths.

Nice and clean film of parallel storytelling.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Saddest Music in the World

The Saddest Music in the World tries hard to defy description. When asked what it is about one could say that it’s about the 1930s depression along with prohibition, alcohol business and public entertainment (possibly giving a slight hat-tip to They Shoot Horses Don’t They? which at least I was reminded of epoque and public-contest wise). One could equally well say that it’s about a drunken doctor who amputated the wrong leg of his girlfriend while his son was watching - cue drama and hate there - and worked from then on to create replacement legs made of glass and filled with beer (beer legs - better than a beer belly!) which are wonderful but soon destroyed by the music of a depressed cello player. Or one could say that it’s about two brothers one of which claims to be Serbian, plays cello and carries the heart of his deceases son conserved in his own tears with him at all times, while the other works on broadway shows and dies at the piano with a piece of glass from his lover’s broken legs in his stomach (all that it a burning show-arena, naturally). Finally one could just point to the title and say that it’s about a contest to find the saddest music in the world (strangely a worldwide contest taking place in the U.S. in which ‘Africa’ competes as a single nation and yet Serbia is a full contestant.)

None of these descriptions would be wrong, but it takes all of them to get an idea about the film. And by the time you try to turn that into a consistent description, people are likely to consider you insane because that’s what it sounds like. However, it still makes quite a cool film on screen. Add an arty-farty look (mostly) in fake black-and-white with a hint of that early 20th century poor focusing and uneven exposure and it’s even interesting to look at.

Choice quotes: I’m not an American - I’m a nymphomaniac. • Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Other

Despite liking Tim Burton and Johnny Depp I had never seen Edward Scissorhands, that has been corrected. Nice film, even though it’s a bit too kitschy for my taste. Religulous [Google Video] is one of those modern mockumentaries taking the piss at religions. That sounds like a fun idea at first, but it’s quite simply boring and non-entertaining because obviously nothing interesting can happen in such a film.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Assembly

Following recommendations, I watched Assembly (Ji jie hao), a film about the Chinese Civil war. More specifically it tells the story of a soldier, Gu Zidi, who has to defend a position with his troops until the bugle sounds for assembly. Their job is hopeless, his soldiers all die and the bugle never sounds. He’s tormented by this ever after, thinking that he may not have heard it, killing all his soldiers as a consequence. Eventually he tries to figure out what exactly happened and to make sure his unit and the dead soldiers get the credit they deserve for it.

This may sound like a typical war film, but it’s more than the normal ‘hooray’ thing you’d expect. Gu Zidi isn’t running around all the time boasting about ‘honour’ and the great guys, but he’s wrecked by what happened and only manages to get out of that with the help of a friend he won in the war by saving his life. The fight scenes at their hopeless command in the first half of the film are also impressively graphic and cruel, thus driving home the hopelessness of their task and the ingenuity they put into it.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Milk

Gus van Sant’s Milk was highly lauded when it came out in the U.S. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical about that as of van Sant’s films those about growing up tend to be great while the others like the biographical Last Days were so-so. Luckily I was unnecessarily sceptical here and the film errs, if anything, on the side of being a bit too popular and mainstreamish in telling the story of Harvey Milk who fought a good fight for gay rights until he was shot.

What’s probably most impressive about the film (apart from the fact that - going by the photos shown at the end - they managed to cast people for the various roles who look really similar to the real people they represent) is how the film brings back the ‘bad old times’ in which people could expect to be taken seriously when they demanded that people should be fired from their jobs for being gay. While things probably aren’t perfect yet, it seems that society has come a long way since, thanks to the effort people like Mr Milk made.

They also showed the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk which is probably a bit more factual yet still quite dramatic, for the drama is in the murders that happened. It also put a bigger focus on the upsetting verdict the killer of Milk and Moscone (whose name the non-Californian only knows from the convention centre of the same name…) received and the civil unrest that followed. [But why-oh-why did this film which could serve as a Helvetica promotion come with Ari-fuckin-al subtitles, as so many German subtitlings do?]

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Don’t come Knocking

Despite being the posterboy (or at least respected old man) German director, I haven’t watched that many of Wim Wender’s films. Possibly because they have a reputation for being a bit slow. Don’t Come Knocking isn’t particularly fast but in no way boring as it tells the story of an actor riding (he’s a cowboy actor) away from the set he’s working at, visiting his mum for the first time in decades and tracing down his kid he didn’t even know of before being retreived by a Matrix-like agent of his employer.

It’s amusing how the film is very artificial in the scenes and shots it creates, merging the various ascpects/stereotypes of American hinterland. Skies are blue, colours are rich, views are depressing. What still upsets me, though, is how Earl manages to throw pretty much his entire furniture out of a window and it’s not dropping down right next to the window but makes it all the way onto the street. Good for the film, for sure, but physics seem to work differently here.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Il Divo

Much lauded and recommended: Il Divo, a film about Italian politician Guilio Andreotti finally made it to local arts cinemas. As seems common in the ‘dynamic’ world of Ialian politics Adreotti was elected many times to many offices. He also seemed to be associated with many criminal charges, timely deaths of people disagreeing with him and so on. Yet he was never convicted. People say that this film helps getting a feel for how politics in Italy work.

The amazing thing about the film is how it’s pretty much told from the point of view of Andreotti himself. A small hunched and migrained man who is convinced to not do anything for himself but just for the sake of god. He’s friendly but quite distant at all times and while he never does anything explicitly evil, the feeling remains that he isn’t really independent of them.

I thought the film itself in the way it was arranged and shot was amazing as well. With fantastic looking scenes and bits of electronic music being injected in the narrative, it left a great impression. There’s are great spatial effects through camera zooming and the revealing of text as well. The film is a pleasure to watch for the looks alone.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

But I’m a cheerleader

But I’m a Cheerleader presents itself as a comedy-drama about a girl whose parents are worried about her loving girls and sending her out for re-education. Naturally that doesn’t work out particularly well, particularly with other similarly inclined girls around. The whole setup of the film with the pink re-education centre where the girls wear pink and learn ‘girl-activities’ like vacuuming and changing nappies and the guys wear blue and learn ‘guy-activities’ like logging wood and fixing a car is rather funny and that kind of humour is probably the only way to address such institutions in a light-hearted way.

I suppose the sad point is that similar re-education institutions, along with the people believing they’re a good thing, most likely do exist for real.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Quiet Earth

In The Quiet Earth something fantastic happens and pretty much all people vanish from the planet. However, discovering that is quite scary, as the planet suddenly becomes very quiet without all the chatter and movement generated by people. For some reason, Zac is still around and he tries to figure out what was going on (he eventually sort-of manages as, incidentally, he worked at a project which may just have led to that situation). Later on he meets two more survivors, Joanne and Api and they try to get along, figure things out and prevent worse things from happening. Amusing to watch but not the best-motivated film.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Electroma

Two robots strive become human in Electroma. They fail. They’re also Daft Punk. It’s not a big Daft Punk music video. It’s a slowly told story, it’s tragic, it’s a bit on the boring side to be frank.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

La Zona

La Zona is a cool Mexican film about a rich suburb which managed to wall themselves off completely. To an extent that they don’t even usually let state officals into the complex. When shit starts hitting the fan - which it does after a billboard collapsed on the complex’ wall, some guys walk in to steal things and one of them is shot - the inhabitants of the ‘zone’ can’t admit any wrongdoing and simply try to get rid of the bodies putting up a blank front of denial to the outsides.

This situation is aggravated by the fact that one of the guys who walked in there was not caught and is still running around between the rich people’s homes. This adds drama as there’s now a scared kid running away from a lynch mob inside their walled off compound. This is bound to end up in the wrong way and it does.

Probably a good reminder why - unpleasant as it may seem at times - it may just be a good idea to live in a state where all people have the same rights and police can investigate everywhere.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple is an absolutely hilarious film from 1968 starring Jack Lemmon. He’s playing Felix, a guy who has been kicked out by his wife because he’s too fussy and pedantic. After moving in with his friend Oscar who’s living in a huge, messy and dirty apartment since his divorce, he starts messing up Oscar’s life and apartment. Or rather he un-messes up th appartement, thus making it impossible for Oscar to live his normal life because he starts being told off for placing a glass on the table without using a coaster, every meal ends up being a stress situation because it has to be cooked with great scrutiny and eaten at the exact time and so on.

After a while Oscar kicks Felix out as well - after he had messed up a date they had with their charming British neighbours. Felix uses the opportunity to place all the possible blame on Oscar and somehow manages to move in with the British neighbours instead of committing suicide as all his poker friends fear and expect. Win-win situation, one thinks…

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Toter Mann

Trying to catch up with even more Christian Petzold films, we watched the 2001 Toter Mann (a.k.a. Something to Remind Me), which once more feels quite distanced and tragic. The bottom line is that Leyla - played by Petzold’s favourite actress Nina Hoss once more - gets to know a guy and then vanishes. After a while it becomes clear that he’s a lawyer and she just wanted to steal his laptop to find one of his clients. Said client just being in the process of being reintegrated after having been to jail for murder.

She’s very charming and the guy is hopeless. He likes her. He falls for the traps he sets for her and he doesn’t even disagree with her idea to punish him for his deeds, going along the path she has set even after he figured out that it’s a trap.

The most amusing scene in the film happens when the lawyer tries to locate Layla, gets into her department and find the book Zielobjekt Mann (target: man) on her desk which illustrates the exact scenes which happened earlier in the film when he thought he’s getting to know her… We googled the book but it seems to be made up for the film. Cool effort, particularly as the book was nicely illustrated in the film.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Conde d’Hiver

Watching Conte d’hiver (a.k.a. A Tale of Winter) completed my consumption of Eric Rohmer’s seasons quadrology (if that’s a word). Unsurprisingly, the film is a sweet bit of nothingness with endless conversations about why who’d doing what and (not) loving whom. The sheer seriousness with which these discussions take place is amusing and, yet, there’s a happy end coming out of nowhere. This stuff may simply be better and more charming to watch in French (albeit with subtitles as my French seems to have degraded too much by now…).

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Gomorra

Gomorra was a big hit in 2008 but didn’t go to see it mainly because the trailer I saw consisted of two guys in pants standing at a river shooting guns which I didn’t find too appealing. But I was convinced to finally see the film anyway and that was a good thing as that trailer may have given the wrong impression.

The film is based on a popular novel about mafia-life and ‘the family’. We follow a number of characters in a run-down 1960s housing block [the architecture and setting alone is genius, IMO, taking q quarter of an hour before you even see the whole block from the outside the first time] and see how the ‘family’ is everywhere without being visible. People get paid, people get killed, kids are keen to join them, others want to leave but can’t, toxic waste is deposited, politicians are bribed, and a few don’t really see how the system works and pay the price for that. It’s subtle, and it’s everywhere which makes it scary. Quite an impressive film, despite the trailer.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]