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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Soul Kitchen

I enjoyed Fatih Akin’s films in the past, particularly the dramatic Gegen die Wand and from the reviews I knew that his latest œuvre, Soul Kitchen [IMDB, Wikipedia, Wikipedia, Website], isn’t quite as great for it has a somewhat non-dramatic story. Yet, I absolutely had to see the film after staying with friends in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg last December and passing the house used as the restaurant in the film in December.

The film centres around two Greek brothers, Zinos and Illias, the former of which runs the poorly going restaurant ‘Soul Kitchen’ which caters to the mediocre tastes of the locals while his brother is in prison. Zinos girlfriend moves to China for her job and Zinos can’t decide whether to give up his restaurant to go with her. With his restaurant becoming better and more popular thanks to a new – and slightly crazy – chef, he decides to stay for the time being and when he finally hands the restaurant to his gambling addicted brother and gets on the plane to China, his girlfriend has found another guy and his brother gambled away the restaurant to a gentrification-loving investor before he returns.

And yet, a new beginning comes along and things may just work out. — A bit cheesy perhaps, but we’ll enjoy the scenery. Be sure to also enjoy the nice graphical closing credits!

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Cowboy Bebop

A few years back, I enjoyed watching some episodes of the Cowboy Bebop TV series which Dan gave me. A fun science fiction series about freelancing bounty hunters, a.k.a. Cowboys, the coolest of whom is Cowboy Bebop. I tried to indulge in the feature film made of this as well: Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door [IDMB] , but – despite a great opening and all cool one would expect – I found it lacking. It seemed like they didn’t manage to span the action throughout a full movie’s length. I’m wondering whether the films they made later on (2005) or in the future (2011) will be better. IMDB comments don’t suggest so.

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Objectified

I finally saw Objectified [IMDB, Website], Gary Hustwit’s design-focused follow-up to Helvetica. I was definitely looking forward to this film, but I also suspected it couldn’t live up to the standards set by Helvetica, a film which treated a very specialised topic – typography – at the example of a typeface that manages to be at the same time one of the most remarkable and most humble ones. It managed to show countless examples, serve as an eye-opener and give a voice to a bunch of widely varying opinions on the typeface.

The topic of design is much broader, people have a bit of an idea what it could be about, and hence Objectified lacks the specific focus of Helvetica, the film. While following the same show-object-show-interview-related-to-that-object scheme used in Helvetica, I couldn’t help thinking that, on average, the ‘object designers’ interviewed in the film were more on the wanker side than their typographer / ‘graphic designer’ counterparts in Helvetica. They seemed to have a much harder time stating opinions and presenting coherent arguments for them. Just as many of them seem to have difficulties talking without waving their arms around all the time.

A big issue for designers is (should be?) that their services are mostly used to support the business of selling stuff. A look around our world suggests that ugly unusable crap is the design that the market-intelligence favours. It sells. Like hell. And it litters our environment ecologically, visually and in all other conceivable ways. The film tries to touch that topic in a few places but unfortunately most of the interviewees fail to grasp the topic or go for some kind of lip-commitment to it before quickly returning to more ‘interesting’ subjects. A shame really.

The interviews with the IDEO guys on the birth of software design were particularly interesting and, surprisingly (?) Dieter Rams [Wikipedia, London Design Museum] didn’t fail to impress [Disclaimer: author grew up in a household with great respect for him and Braun’s design]. Should the voice of such an ‘old’ designer be the most outstanding one in a film like Objectified? Particularly if what he’s saying hasn’t changed too much over the past fifty years?

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A Serious Man

This year’s film by the Coen brothers is A Serious Man [IMDB] which unfolds the breaking life of physics professor Larry Gopnik. He has problems, he is religious, his wife is leaving him for an older acquaintance, nobody seems to care too much about the leaving but people do feel sorry for him because of the guy she’s leaving him for; a student tries to bribe him, there’s the risk of him losing his job, but he starts an affair with his neighbour. His son is ‘looking forward’ to his religious initiation while developing a healthy drug habit, and yet, the ritual brings the family back together.

While beautifully depressing, I’m not sure the film’s story is my cup of tea. However, as usual, the film looks great and the Coen brothers attempt to capture the style of an era long passed in the film. Both in terms of the visuals and the fears and hopes people may have had.

And if you’re a bit of a physics geek, you’ll have to watch the film for this split-second that’s also available in the trailer (from looking at the trailer, I’d say the 1920 resolution looks a bit like a waste of pixels):

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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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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]

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…

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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.

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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]

Runaway Train

The mid-1980s flick Runaway Train was surprisingly good. All the drama of prisoners escaping from an Alaskan high security prison, getting onto an uncontrolled train and everybody trying to figure out what to do in that situation. Does anybody know they’re on there? Is it reasonable to derail the train to prevent it from destroying things along the line?

Throw an enraged policeman trying to capture the fugitives into the equation and you’ll end up with extra expletives and violence. Fun to watch and interesting to see Alaska feature as something huge, lonely and white - rather than the home of a stupid politician - for a change.

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Jerichow

A bit of drama happened in Göttingen’s cinemas at the end of last year when the big cinema megacorporation finally shut down the ‘Stern’ cinema. This didn’t seem like a surprise - what good is there in a small-ish cinema showing the slightly smaller films in times of few visitors to a big corporation? Still it seemed like a shame because the cinema itself is quite nice and comfy - and less than five minutes by foot from home. But the Stern cinema re-opened in January with new people running it. And one fun idea they came up with was to run Sunday matinée shows with a sort-of breakfast going along with them.

We gave that a shot and saw a preview screening of Christian Petzold’s new film Jerichow there. Situated in a East German village by the same name it shows all sorts of misery. That of the region seeming a bit run down, that of a tragic marriage and that of an intruder into it.

The marriage is between Ali, a successful businessman with a bit of an alcohol problem who’s running a bunch of fast food stalls and Laura who’s tied to Ali by big debt she used to have and will tolerate the occasional beating for that. And the drama comes in the form of ex-soldier Thomas who is broke, needs a job, starts working for Ali, does his job well, and gets involved with Laura. Tragedy ensues, plans for killings are made and, yet, everything ends up not quite as planned.

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Dufte

Another nice thing about the re-opened cinema is that they show an additional short film before the main feature. We got to see Dufte this way. A short film playing in a train compartment in 1950s GDR where all people in the compartment try to smuggle coffee from West Berlin back home. The smell gives their little conspiracy away - even to the representative of the police state who has a blocked nose and the harmless old lady who brought the coffee for her husband’s birthday is betrayed by one of the passengers and loses her coffee that way. And despite the official making clear that they know everything and there’s no way to evade them, things come to a happy end in which all parties have their nice cup of coffee.

[Now who thought that English subtitles in Arial are a good idea?]

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance

Chan-Wook Park’s 2002 film Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is wierd, somewhat violent and yet compelling to watch if you don’t mind the odd bit of blood, desired and forced kidney transplants, kidnapping, working on a revolution and yet the protagonists seeming to be ‘good’ people. The film looks good, is relatively quiet and suggests it needs a second viewing to get all the details straight.

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona

With Woody Allen going all warm and European in his latest films, one doesn’t have to venture to New York to pursue the task of seeing all his films. And with him enlisting Barcelona in its full touristy Gaudí beauty as well as the hotness of both Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, there remains very little chance for failure. And indeed, the film is a winner in terms of hotness alone. Even more so for darkroom aficionados…

I am not sure that Allen’s narrator style and determination to not miss out on any clichéed photo opportunity is the greatest of filmmaking but with its ironic touch it’s certainly an interesting idea.

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Hundstage

When seeing Austrian films you always wonder what’s wrong with the country that makes their directors create such depressing or fucked up films. Hundstage (a.k.a. Dog Days) is no exception. Meandering through Austrian suburbia with the associated funny accents in a series of hot days we see a lot of people stressed and undressed by the heat. Add some grumpiness, adultery, insanity and criminal intent to that and you already have the spirit of the film right there.

I was once more struck by the way Ulrich Seidl’s films capture that certain emptiness and blandness you see in postindustrial suburbia.

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Lichter

In Hans-Christian Schmid’s 2003 film Lichter (a.k.a. Distant Lights) we go to Germany’s eastern border and see Eastern Europeans trying to come into the country after having been dumped close to the border by ‘facilitators’ who were supposed to bring them to Berlin. While it remains unclear what exactly those people - whole families even - try to escape from, the questions they raise on arrival are clear: Who will assist them in trying to cross the border? Who on the German side helps them? Who makes sure they get sent back home properly according to the law? Difficult questions which the film approaches.

In a side story we also see some German-Polish business going on with office buildings being built and a young architect (August Diehl) being disillusioned by both his pretty plans being ruined and an old acquaintance working to ‘entertain’ the business people.

The EU has expanded since the film was made, so Germany’s eastern border is not the one people need to surmount to come in anymore, but our great poor eastern neighbours still remain a relevant topic.

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Let’s Make Money

Erwin Wagenhofer’s new film Let’s Make Money [IMDB]is a documentary about modern capitalism. It was made before shit hit the fan and gave us that fincancial crisis to enjoy but it deals with topics pretty close to it like tax havens, pension funds and investment gambling. With the focus, however, being more on social aspects such as people getting a rather bad deal out of growing cotton in Burkina Faso because free markets stop when it comes to subsidies for cotton farming in the U.S. or insane investments into building holiday resorts in Spain which seems quite profitable for the people who do it even though they remain unpopulated and burden the environment and tax payer as each of them has to bring along its own infrastructure which apparently has to include a golf course for a resort to be attractive to investors.

Just as in We Feed the World Wagenhofer lets the people who are involved in the topic do the talking, highlighting that even people who are in those businesses sometimes consider their practices shoddy. And also highlighting that things like investment schemes or Channel Island tax havens can sound like perfectly reasonable things to work with when presented in the right way and focusing on essentials like ‘profit’.

Particularly the cotton topic was depressing. I am not a textbook consumer and I already hate doing things like buying clothes, but this makes things more upsetting: There’s essentially no way I can buy a shirt and support the people who plant the cotton, weave the fabrics or create the shirt from them. Whatever you do, the money you put into the system as a ‘consumer’ seems to end up in the hands of the people whom you wouldn’t want to give it to. And it’s hard to see how to reasonably change that, no matter what all those young happy politician types (like the attac/Green guy who was in the discussion after the film) tell you.

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Kauas pilvet karkaavat

I really need to visit Finland. If only to check out whether all people do there really is drinking shutting up and being depressed. Aki Kaurismäki’s Kauas pilvet karkaavat (a.k.a. Drifting Clouds, a.k.a. Wolken ziehen vorüber) certainly reinforces that impression.

The film may be quite adequate for these days as it tells the story of a couple who lose both their jobs - as a tram driver and headwaitress respectively - in a recession and suffer through the agony of feeling useless, possibly having to apply for benefits, and so on. Instead of discussing their problems they mainly shut up, look tragic or drink. And then, somehow, the film still manages to go for a happy end.

And, yes, there is a distinct lack of headwaitresses in many places these days.

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8½

Fellini’s 8½ (a.k.a. otto e mezzo) was recommended to me a long time ago and finally I managed to see it. Not only is this 1963 film in stunningly pretty black and white with the protagonist played by a grey-headed but charming-as-ever Marcello Mastroianni - it also manages to be wonderfully surreal in the way it tells its story, the allegedgly somewhat autobiographical one of a director in a creative crisis, in a wonderfully dreamy way. ‘Dreamy’ in a surreal sense rather than a kitschy one. And somehow the 2+ hours of the film past in a breeze. I suppose one could studiously re-watch it to discover and grasp all the hints and nuances in there.

[Corridor scenes always make me think of the Coen Brothers ★]

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Det Sjunde inseglet

Remaining in the realm of highly lauded black and white classics with numbers in their title, next came Ingmar Bergman’s Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal). While the whole subject of mediaeval films and knights coming back from crusades isn’t close to my heart, the film was still fascinating in the way it touches a bunch of issues with both religion and social behaviour in a direct and yet reasonably positive way.

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Spur der Steine

While there’s no number in the title Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones), the film is old and in black and white as well. Though not quite as gorgeous visually. Which may (or may not) be because it was made in the GDR in 1966. The film deals with the way work was done in the GDR at the time. And it doesn’t put that in the best light by making clear that construction projects could suffer from both a lack of materials and from the people in charge being mainly concerned about whether things went according to the party’s ideology. Said ideology may well require them to highly laud the working schedules they despised last week. It also brings them into a bit of a crisis when one of the female lead engineers expects a child from one of her married colleagues…

While the film was made by the state run film making company in the GDR, they somehow realised that it wasn’t propagandistic enough afterwards and the film was banned later on.

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Conte d’Automne

Conte d’automne is the third part of Eric Rohmer’s seasons cycle. Again, it’s full of fancy intellectual talk of book store owners and wine makers discussing in complex terms the tragedy of their relationsships - and the former actually courting some guy for the latter. An amusing film but once more lacking the lightness I sensed in Conte d’Été.

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Inland Empire

I really liked some of David Lynch’s old works like Lost Highway, Eraserhead or Twin Peaks. But the guy lost me somewhere along the way. Mulholland Drive was confusing and watching Inland Empire now left me with the impression that things haven’t improved since. There must be some line between films that are too long, ill-lit, without a clear story and those who aren’t. Inland Empire seemed to be on the wrong side of that line.

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Batman

I’ve never been a big comic or superhero fan and all the Batman I had seen before was some crappy 1970s TV series or so. Seeing The Dark Knight this year suggested that I might have missed out on some subtle conflicts because of that. And German television deciding to screen a few Batman films between christmas and the new year helped me fill the gap.

And Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman fills the gap rather nicely. And while Heath Ledger made a brilliant Joker in this year’s film, Jack Nicholson was an equally excellent Joker in the older film. Coming to think about it, the Joker seems like the perfect role for the guy.

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Batman Begins

The newer, 2005, Batman Begins which was the predecessor of this year’s Dark Knight wasn’t as strong a film. Still, it gave a useful story about Batman’s background and how everything came to be. Not really thrilling, but helpful for ignorants like myself.

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The Big Question

The big question remaining is which films were the best in 2009, now that the time for end-of-year sum-ups has come. Looking at the new films, I’ll point to Waltz with Bashir as my favourite which manages to be animated, very good, historically relevant and with a cool soundtrack at the same time. Then comes the wildly popular The Dark Knight, if only to prove that I can also like mainstream stuff. I still agree with the Joker that the people on the boats should really have blown each other up, though. Good fun could be had with Burn after Reading. An I’ll give an honourable mention to Juno which only came to Germany in 2008, was kind of sweet and had a great soundtrack.

And while not really relevant for the year 2008, I’d also like to highlight the following ‘old’ films which I found rather excellent: Unashamed brilliant Michael Haneke misery in Der siebente Kontinent, fantastic drama of past decades in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, more Austrian drama in Import/Export and rediscovering a film I liked a long time ago: Funny Bones.

There we are. Which films did I miss out on last year? Which ones were your favourites?

Gypo

A long time ago I still thought I should just try and watch all Dogme 95 films, but at some stage their number exploded and that became infeasible. Still, the way in which those shaky Dogme films bring you ‘close’ to the protagonists remains amazing. And with an impressive film like Festen kicking the genre off, I keep expecting the worst and most dramatic things to happen in those filme. Not with a blast, but simply by dragging you in.

Gypo is a British dogme film - #37, if you need to know - featuring two broken families. That of Helen, mother of three, and grandmother before 40 who works night shifts at a supermarket, has to look after her grandchild because her daughter Kelly still goes to school and hopes to do something more creative than watching soaps on telly. And that of Tasha who fled to the UK with her mother Irina from the Czech republic to get away from their respective husbands. They live in fear of being caught by both the British government (for working) and much more so by their husbands.

Tasha and Kelly meet at school and eventually Tasha develops a relationship with Helen who likes her and is appalled by the way her refugee friends are treated in Britain (both on the streets and by her own husband). Quite a depressing situation already, but that’s only before some evil looking guys from Eastern Europe come to make sure ‘their’ women return.

The film tells the same story three times, each focusing on a different person (Helen, her husband, and Tasha) to let you see more of what’s going on every time. In some ways what’s revealed later on makes things worse and in other ways it - luckily - makes them better.

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Continental - un film sans fusil

Continental (a film without guns) is a recent Québecois film on various aspects of loneliness. In the opening scene a man wakes up in a bus in the middle of nowhere and gets off. The bus leaves and the man vanishes into the forest. He’s gone. Later, we meet his wife who tries to deal with the loss but can’t really handle the uncertainty and despairs about the police not wanting to help her. It’s unclear whether it would be worse if he had died or if he had run away.

Other people in the film are an insurance salesman who is happy to get the job but has to stay in a hotel away from his family to do it; his noisily fucking neighbours and the charming lonely night shift concièrge at the hotel get to play a role as well. As does the old and broke second hand shop owner who can’t afford the dental treatment he needs.

While these stories touch in a few and superficial ways by their protagonists meeting in the film, they do remain distant. Yet the common theme and drama of loneliness and despair may join them.

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Kondom des Grauens

I had read the cartoon Kondom des Grauens (Killer Condom) ages ago and only now saw it’s been turned into a film in 1996. To be honest the story is patently absurd: Mad scientist develops a creature that looks like a condom but has teeth and will aim to bite in just the right moment. He’s taken hostage and the condoms are ‘deployed’ around New York’s gay scene, brothels and so on.

Gay cop Luigi Mackeroni investigates the case and eventually solves it - finding out that the onslaught is run by our christian nutter overlords to ‘clean’ the world. A little ode to tolerance and open-mindedness later everybody lives happily ever after.

Amazingly they managed to turn this into a rather entertaining film whose characters are pretty much spot-on and funny (as films with corpses are wont to have, there’s a hilarious coroner who dissects one of the killer condoms). It just seems odd to have all those obviously German actors in New York.

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Wall·E

Pixar’s new Wall·E was the big hype in over in the U.S. this summer and it surely sounded like a sweet film in a cool setup with half of it going by without dialogue and cute little robot. When the film finally made it over here, I agreed that it was quite sweet, but I wasn’t too impressed by it.

Technically nice animations perhaps (but really?). Yet the story, while funny, seemed a little ridiculous to me with the humans first falling from grace but then coming back to save the planet. A bit too much kitsch for my taste. I guess I prefer the real HAL 9000.

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Mystery Train

Strangely I hadn’t seen Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train before. But that was corrected now and it’s a cool film repeating the same story over and over again, as experienced by different people in different locations. There’s alcohol, there’s a shooting, there are two incredibly cool doormen, a similarly cool Japanese couple and it all takes place under the surveillance of The King.

While films with different episodes and points of view like this one have become more common, many lack the fun and freshness of this one. Very enjoyable.

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The Magic Christian

The Magic Christian is a 1969 comedy starring an extremely wide range of people from Ringo Starr to Roman Polanski to Peter Sellers to John Cleese. In it we see rich industrialist Sir Guy Grand adopt up a boy - henceforth Youngman Grand - from a park and introduce him to being rich and the wonderfully corrupting power of money. It is amusingly demonstrated how enough money doesn’t only turn black into white, no parking zones into parking zones, Dutch painters into French ones and smelly shit into must-have bath; it goes further because it shows that people sincerely enjoy exchanging their convictions for a bunch of cash.

Hat tip to Richard for pointing me to the film.

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Burn after Reading

While probably not being the most excessively subtle of their films, the Coen Brother’s Burn after Reading is a splendidly funny affair. Humanity’s finest from intelligence services to gyms congregate to fire and cheat one another. As a result we see a bit of bloodshed, a shitload of confusion and once in a while have the opportunity to sympathise with a cynical intelligence service administrator indulging in the irony of all this.

After the film I thought I understood why the girls consider Brad Pitt to be ‘sweet’. His role in the film as a dumb but enthusiastic fitness instructor who’ll happily cheer along with his iPod and nibble on a fruit juice seemed just that. I was very soon told that this is not sweet. Ah, well it least it was quite funny…

Before the Devil knows you’re dead

Sidney Lumet (* * * * * *) is still directing films and Before the Devil knows you’re dead is his latest one. A story about a simple plan - two brothers robbing their parents’ jewelry store so they can restart their lives with the cash while their parents won’t have to worry because of the insurance. Such simple brilliant plans usually go a single way - wrong. And this one does in all possible ways.

People die, family tragedy ensues, even more people die. It’s all quite tragic, but there’s just no way the boys can go and apologise to their father for having caused the death of their mother.

Extra kudos to Philip Seymour Hoffman. Not just for having an amusing drug dealer and who’s at the receiving end of his killing frenzy eventually. But also for becoming older and fatter. In quite a few scenes during the film I had to think that if he progresses this way for another decade or two, he’ll be perfect to play Helmut Kohl in a film. Perhaps someone comes up with a good film featuring the ex-chancellor by then…

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Yella

Christian Petzold’s (*, *, *) 2007 film Yella is another decent one one. Yella manages to get out of her home town and away from her ex by getting an accounting job in a bigger town. Just that the job is gone when she arrives and the situation seems mostly dire and corrupt. She meets a financing consultant in her hotel and starts working with him. Several cool scenes of negotiations are featured with Yella both playing the psychological games they studied on their way and doing a good analysis of the situation.

While she is good at the job - too good and ambitious eventually - it never looks like it’s going to be a permanent thing which keeps the film in a certain floating imbalance that allows Yella’s past to catch up with her again.

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Paranoid Park

Another teenager film by Gus van Sant: Paranoid Park. This time with a possibly even younger and more troubled boy being the protagonist: Alex enjoys skating and does so at a place called Paranoid Park right next to the railway line where all the cool kids hang out who don’t even have middle-class homes to return to. One day when hitching a ride on a passing train with a guy he got to know there, he kills a guard who’s trying to stop them.

Which means we end up with many shots of Alex worrying about how to handle this, looking at us fuzzily with big eyes all the while he has to figure out how to handle growing up, dealing with the skating, his overly-eager cheerleader girlfriend and the new more understanding girl he gets to know who suggests he writes things down so they get out.

Perhaps not as dramatic as some of van Sant’s other films but still amazing how Alex’ situation is transported in such a simple and straightforward way.

[More a red shirt than a yellow film, though.]

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Also seen

Helen Levitt’s short film In the Street with 16 minutes from the streets of New York in the 1940s. She’s getting quite close to people in there, is great with the kids and not too shy to look into people’s windows or film them picking their noses. Almodóvar’s 1980 film Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón is a bit overdone for my taste in its mix of everything between punk and masochism in wedlock.

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