Conte d’été
Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’été (aka Summer’s Tale) is part of his four ‘Tale’ films which span all season. But it’s the only one I saw so far. Just now I watched it again on a VHS tape which I recorded from telly back in the 1990s.
It’s a nice film telling about a guy named Gaspard spending his summer at the beach, being into music and flirting with the girls. He means to meet Lena, a girl he’s in love with. But he first meets Margot instead and gets along well with her and who introduces him to Solène, so Gaspard ends up in a bit of a messy situation. And only after he leaves it becomes clear that some opportunities may have been missed.
The film’s end is almost tragic, but in total I liked the lightness in it. People don’t actually do anything. They enjoy their summer, and they get themselves into a little mess.
The Darjeeling Limited
Highly lauded last year and only seen by me now The Darjeeling Limited was a fun film to watch. Just like Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic it’s a bit weird and quite colourful. And somehow these films manage to have a very similar and distinct ‘feel’ to them which gives away the director right away (with my bad memory for names I actually had to head over to IMDB whether it’s from the same guy who made The Royal Tenenbaums).
In the film we see three rich brothers travelling through India on a luxury train with a whole load of personalised baggage. Slowly you learn about their relationship to one another as well as the whole point of the journey. Things don’t go smoothly, but they don’t fuck up too badly either. It’s weirdly entertaining that way.
And the Technicolor India the film presents is amazing. Everything is very colourful
Don’t Drink the Water
I think with Don’t Drin the Water I’m reaching a point where I arrive at the lesser Woody Allen films in the interminable quest to see all of them. Set in the cold war, Woody Allen is caught in an Eastern Bloc country and has to flee to the U.S. embassy because he tried to take a photo and was then pursued. There he has to stay for a while rather than being back home at work and of course he doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. Obviously he’s also neurotic vis-à-vis the foreign food he may have to eat or the the Arab dignitary who comes visiting.
With the ambassador being over in the U.S. and his son (Michael J. Fox) taking his place not all that competently, more room for laughter is created.
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Persepolis
Persepolis is an amazing animated film that’s based on an autobiographic graphic novel of an Iranian girl growing up during the Islamic revolution in her country and living abroad in-between. It’s probably good to see this just to be reminded that also countries like Iran have a rich and dramatic history. And that - just like in the USA - the fact that they are run by religious nutters doesn’t mean that all the citizens agree.
The film is set in the 1980s and we see the protagonist Marji’s family rejoice when the Shah’s regime is overthrown. It takes them a while to realise that what follows it isn’t necessarily better and they eventually send their daughter to Vienna for studying and growing up free of oppression. Yet, she eventually misses her home and her family so much that she returns to Teheran where she quickly realises that she cannot cope with the new oppression and running around veiled up all the time and thus she says good-bye to her family another, final, time. A rather sad story, well and directly told.
I really liked the simple black and white style of the animation as well. If your story is good enough, there’s no need for glitzy high-tech animation, it seems. A final high-note was hit with the German synchronisation. While generally German versions of films aren’t too bad, the occasional tidbits are ruined or lost in translation, particularly when it comes to youth language or jokes. In Persepolis I thought they did a really good job at getting all this just right. Possibly because the author herself grew up in Vienna.
Cashback
I enjoyed the Cashback short film a lot and was keen to see the full-length film. While the film is basically an extended version of the short and adds some more details to the story, I was unfortunately left with the impression that it’s not really better than the short. A few of the new details are nice but somehow the sweet idea of the whole art-student holding time to look at shoppers’ tits idea wears off rather quickly. Some times less is more, I guess.
Look Around You
Look around you is a totally amazing comedy series that the BBC made made a few years ago. Its small number of short episodes comes in the form of an educational TV show and each one explains a topic like Maths, Music or Sulphur. This is done by lab-coated scientists who reveal numerous interesting ‘facts’.
The stories are amusingly built-up with lab experiments and telling the student to write that down in your copy book
throughout. It’s also quite stylishly done in mocking 1970s educational television and with consistent elements such as pencils to point at things and Helvetica used throughout.
What’s most fun about the series is that it’s so full of nonsense. But that nonsense is presented in the serious authoritative way we are used from television. Obviously the question arises how far this can be taken. How many people will just take anything they see for a fact? If it weren’t right it wouldn’t be on telly / YouTube / the internet? How many people will happily believe that H20 is an element in the periodic table and so on. Makes me wonder.
Go and check out Look Around You on YouTube. The numbered episodes are the good ones from the first series.
Barton Fink
An early 1990s film by the Cohen brothers, Barton Fink, shows the weird story of New York playwright Barton Fink moving to L.A. to write for Hollywood. Not only does he suffer from staying on his own in a run-down hotel whose residents are more permanent than the wallpaper’s stickiness to the wall, he also gets into a creative crisis because of this. And when he finally manages to write his script after waking up next to a dead girl in his bed one morning, that script - for a wrestling film - is laughed at by his Hollywood boss.
What makes the film fun is Barton’s neighbour Charlie (John Goodman) at the hotel who doesn’t just keep him company but also helps him to get rid of the girl’s body. … and who turns out to be a bit of a nutter in is own lovable way. As with many of the Cohen film, there’s a lot of atmosphere in this one which really makes this more interesting than it sounds and makes you suffer with Barton. Also: Cool retro-look hotel corridors.
The Trap
The BBC’s ‘documentary’ mini-series The Trap - what happened to our dream of freedom uses three one hour parts to elaborate on how the attempt to mechanically ‘manage’ society failed in many places. With amusingly retro-stylish visuals consisting mostly of archive footage along with patronising BBC-talking this point is driven home.
We get to learn a bit about game theory and how it may have been a good tool for managing or at least simulating the cold war. And how it may even be useful for managing markets which in their cosy everybody-against-everybody-else way could be argued to be not completely unlike the cold war. But then similar strategies started being applied to politics and ‘managing’ both people’s well-being in the small and the society at large. Examples from psychology are given as well as from recent politics.
I am really split about these documentaries. In a way they reflect my own point of view quite well, that a lot of the stupidity we witness in our daily lives, politics or the companies we deal with doesn’t exist because the people we are dealing with are idiots but because the whole system is idiotic. And I don’t mean that in a small way. Somehow beancounter strategies have managed to infiltrate everything and people who ‘manage’ what’s going on try to formalise things rather than actually managing them.
Perhaps I should put it like this: I find that in mathematics when you learn about a new topics there are several phases. The first phase is that you have to learn about the terminology and that you won’t really understand the intricacies of the area. In that phase it can be quite helpful to work on a very formal level because it means you’ll always rest on firm ground and can trace back your steps to the basics. After working on that for a while you start getting a good intuition for what’s going on and you can advance to a more free-style level of working which you can still back formally if you need to but which enables you to take larger steps and do things that are actually interesting. My impression is that all ‘management’ aims to stick on that first, purely formal, level because it’s the only thing they can handle.
And even worse, these people aren’t doing maths. They may be using formulas or computers or even game theory, but - unlike mathematicians - they are not proving theorems but they are trying to run companies, societies or wars. Things which are much more complex and much less predictable than mathematical theories. And of course - which could be taken as the main point of The Trap - any such simulation is only as good as the model used to apply it to reality. What can I say, good models are rare. And the way people use them doesn’t seem to aim at actually understanding or improving things but simply at enabling them to cram everything into some pointless numbers. Bah.
As for the films themselves, I found them over-indulgent. Interesting points there for sure - I liked the psychology part - but hardly more material than would fit in an hour. Thus there were plenty of repetitious, the ‘explanations’ given felt severely patronising and the ever recurring references to game theory started feeling a bit old after a while. I’m not really sure I liked the style. Somehow this series seemed to have less points and examples than director Adam Curtis’ previous ‘documentary’ series The Power of Nightmares and Pandora’s Box. The latter probably being the most interesting because it covers a wider range to examples for a single idea and doesn’t ring the conspiracy theorist bells.
I also think that this kind of ‘documentary’ which is supposed to be thought provoking and might inspire further investigation would do really well with having a web site full of links to related issues. Both for backing up their facts and for giving access to further data.
P.S. Yo La Tengo’s Return to Hot Chicken and Stereo Total’s Cosmonaute.
P.P.S. So who’s the Helvetica fan?
P.P.P.S. Try Google Video.
Trade
Trade is a rather depressing film about children who are abducted to be sold as sex slaves. We follow 13 year old Adriana from Mexico City who is abducted and her slightly criminal but good-hearted brother Jorge who tries to find and free her. In the course of this he learns that his sister is to be ‘sold’ to people in the US and follows the truck carrying her and some other kids to the border. He sees how the officials are bribed and how photos are taken for selling them.
Luckily he meets American cop Ray who is also trying to find out about child trafficking for personal reasons. After a bit of a rough start they team up and try to track down and free Adriana which they manage to do in the end.
As the film treats a bleak topic which, according to its closing credits, has hundreds of thousands of victims, it has its share of shocking and moving scenes. The way these abducted kids are treated and traded as objects is disgusting. And the people who do that casually businesslike are sickening. But that’s probably what the film tries to communicate.
Unfortunately the film’s story is a bit weak in a few places and ends up in situations which require a bit of magic for things to go on. But the acting, particularly of Jorge and Adriana is great. And the phonecalls between the cop and his wife and downright weird.
Deathtrap
Michael Caine, theatre people, countryside
- my flatmate was really sure he knew the film Deathtrap and that it was great. Until we started watching it, when it turned out to be a different film after all. Turned out it’s a film of a back-then-famous play about a playwright in a bit of a creative crisis.
The first half is a bit dull and we see playwright Sidney loathe himself and devise a plan with his wife to invite a student of one of his summer classes, Clifford, who sent in a brilliant manuscript to steal his ideas. In the end they kill him to run with his story and we wondered what was going to happen in the second half of the film. That’s where surprises start coming in and we learn that the death was staged and the student/writer wasn’t actually killed but returns in the night to give Sidney’s wife a heart attack.
Then it’s revealed that Sidney and Clifford have a somewhat romantic relationship and they planned this little play out to kill her. Clifford goes on to turn it into a play for the stage which Sidney doesn’t really like and we get a bit of a crisis there. Add a psychic from the neighbourhood and a house full of weapons to play this in and things become quite entertaining once our two playwrights start realising that they have a bit of a conflict going.
Not outrageously good, but fun. Directed by Sidney Lumet in the style of a theatre play with pretty much all the film taking place inside the same house.
Heima
I’ve been a bit of a Sigur Rós fan for years (and I’m still a bit bitter they cancelled in Haldern in 2002 even though I finally managed to see them two years ago), so obviously I was quite interested in their Heima [IMDB] film which follows them around Iceland where they played a bunch of gigs in 2006.
It’s a really curious tour they did. Which is clear once you figure that there are around 300000 people in all of Iceland and that many of the areas there are mostly empty. Yet, it looked like a fantastic idea and putting the band from huge stages into tiny community halls, old factories or plain meadows (joining protests against a somewhat ridiculous dam) was cool. As was to see the audience which seemed to span all parts of the population who, in some places, just enjoyed the music along with some coffee while sitting around with their neighbours.
While actually not too excessive, the commentary by band members in between can at times be disturbing (which is probably why fuller versions of the songs are placed on a ‘bonus’ disc) and the recordings of the landscapes are stunning and made me think that seeing this in cinema could be even more stunning - just look at the HD trailer which contains this fantastic kite image that is now a happy member of my desktop background collection.
I was happy to hear them play many of their older songs like Ágætis Byrjun or Starálfur in the film as well. Other songs like Von seem very different from older versions and with subtle percussions to send shivers down your spine.
Summer of Sam
Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam deals with a series of murders by the ‘Son of Sam’ in New York in 1977 who shot teenagers in cars. But the film doesn’t focus on the murders or the police investigations alone but rather takes a look at the Italian neighbourhood and community close to which the murders happen. People start being vigilant and they start suspecting each other. To the degree that friends are suspected and ‘questioned’ for not fitting in.
I thought that was quite a cool idea for the film but I am not sure it really works that well as it’s not clear what a murder mystery and problems people have in their neighbourhoods have to do with one another. For my taste the whole 1970s stuff in the film was a bit overdone as well.
アキラ
Akira is the film for a widely lauded Japanese graphic novel. I never got into those, so I’ve managed to not even know about this for a long time. I thought the film managed to be visually impressive in many places, with the huge city-scapes being particularly outstanding. And I was surprised that it was made in the 1980s because it looked so modern. A bit of a trend-setter perhaps?
I was not all that impressed by the film’s story with the teenage motorbike gangs and people with super-natural powers who all play their slightly different roles from the rampant newcomer Tetsuo to the power kid Akira who allegedly caused a prior destruction of Tokyo and had been kept deep frozen and feared since. There are many more sub-plots in the story which just appear but didn’t make much sense to me. Why are there revolutionaries? What is happening to the country? What exactly is the role of the seemingly powerful military? All quite interesting questions, but we get to see teenagers surviving unlikely stunts on motorbikes instead.
Other
Nyphomaniac + emperor’s son + gay islamic terrorist all involved vaguely related stories give Almodóvar’s early 1980s film Laberinto de Pasiones. Funny in places but somewhat lacking a point or the style. - In Felicia’s Journey a pregnant girl meets a nutter who constantly re-cooks stuff from his mum’s television show and wants to talk her into an abortion. It’s a bit slow but Bob Hoskins does an scarily good job at playing the weirdo. - Then there was the Spongebob Squarepants Movie, and as much as I love Spongebob I thought that the whole David Hasselhoff thing went a bit too far. - Annie Hall is yet another Woody Allen flick. Not untypical with its New York comedian-plus-singer story but not too impressive either. - Topkapi is one of the more classical ‘clever heist’ flicks. Fun entertainment with a few minutes of tension when they actually steal stuff. - Schachnovelle is a 1960s German black and white film for Stefan Zweig’s novel of the same name. All right film for the story, plenty of famous German actors as well. - In Alfie, the main character Alfie (Michael Caine) is a light-hearted prick who enjoys his life and the girls in it. While being generally upbeat and rude, it transpires that this won’t make him happy in the long run.
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The Simpsons Movie
Although I’m not truly obsessed with The Simpsons, it’s safe to say that I saw sufficiently many episodes of the series in my life to leave no way around seeing The Simpsons Movie. And just like your average Simpsons episode it was funny, twisted your head and still managed to be somewhat forgettable.
Perhaps the feature film length (which probably works out to be around four episodes) doesn’t work too well for the series and the typical pace of a twenty minute episode couldn’t be kept up for a whole film. Perhaps it’s harder to stretch a ridiculous and/or non-existing story over more than twenty minutes. But end the end it was still a good laugh, complete with somewhat current references to other media.
What I mainly didn’t like was the 3D-ness of the whole thing. I’m not the biggest fan of the 3D stuff they do in the more recent Simpsons series. But the film just went much further than that and it didn’t feel particularly natural to me. Those yellow people need to be flat.
Hooray for Spiderpig!
Daria
In my quest to rescue old video gems before dumping the tapes, I came across the late 1990s MTV-series Daria again. It certainly is one of my favourite cartoon series. And probably the only cartoon series whose protagonist’s character has been copied straight from my own. I.e. it’s just brilliant.
Daria is misanthropically cool, her family is hilariously broken, her friend Jane hot, the whole school environment brilliantly depicted (although this is probably all the funnier for people who actually went to an American school with extracurricular activities and quarterbacks and all that) and it’s an ongoing shame that she never goes out with Trent… Anyway, brilliant stuff. And also great for the music.
Val:: Daria, tell your dad what ‘EDGY’ is!
Daria: As far as I can make out, ‘edgy’ occurs when middle-brow middle-age profiteers are looking to suck the energy, not to mention the spending-money, out of the quote-unquote youth culture. So they come up with this fake concept of seeming to be dangerous when every move they make is the result of market research and a corporate master plan.
Anyone disagreeing with that choice quote?
Death Proof
The Americans got Grindhouse, two films by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. And as far as I understand that bombed a bit at the box office and we get the two films separately here as a consequence. Tarantino’s Death Proof now, Rodriguez’ Planet Terror in autumn.
Death Proof’s reviews left mixed feelings. The whole low-fi violence thing seemed daunting and people quickly turned to discussing feminism topics appeared strange. But interestingly theses reviews weren’t so far off. And in a good way!
The first thing to say is that this film is so Tarantino. You get the music, you get the foot fetish, you get some violence, though not excessive amounts of it to be honest, and you get the hot girls with the cool dialogues (cool, but slightly awkward sounding at times in the German translation, although they made an effort and threw in a couple of cool expressions). Even if you didn’t know its director you’d spot very quickly that this is a Tarantino film.
And then there’s the ‘grindhouse’ thing which makes the film mock low-quality productions by using slightly imprecise cuts where it seems that a split second is missing or where the sound isn’t cut quite cleanly. Similarly colours are made to mock 70s style bad colours and the film includes a bit of film breakage like vertical lines over the screen (which I stopped finding particularly convincing about a second after first seeing that effect in QuickTime a decade ago).
Apart from all these technical issues there’s the story (guy kills girls, other girls kill guy) which is filled with plenty of hot girls. Girls who kick ass. And which you’ll start noticing a lack of in your neighbourhood. It’s just fun to watch and it’s over in a breeze. It’s also a film for car lovers.
Vanishing Point
I had heard about Vanishing Point a long time ago and meant to see it for a while. But after seeing Death Proof this became pretty much obligatory (at least once I had figured out that the German title ‘Fluchtpunkt San Francisco’ which they used in the German version of Death Proof refers to this film). And sure enough there’s the white 1970 whatever car and it’s a road movie possibly in the most literal sense of the word. As there’s the guy, Kowalski, driving the car from Colorado to California and that’s about it.
It isn’t quite it, perhaps, and we get a number of side-stories – particularly the one with the blind guy at the radio station who keeps commenting on Kowalski’s ride and escape from the police and even gets beaten up for that by a citizen who’ll no doubt consider himself law-abiding.
And while it’s not entirely clear what exactly drives Kowalski and why, it’s still fascinating to see how he is driven and just keeps going and going. Together with the side-stories this paints an interesting picture about the people and their time.
I don’t know anything about cars, but is the car he’s driving really a good one as the girl in Death Proof says. Or is it just a ‘cult’ car. From what it looked like in Vanishing Point it’s neither particularly fast nor does it drive particularly well or precisely. Looks more like the stereotypical soft American car to me.
Dinner Rush
Dinner Rush had been recommended to me as a film for food lovers (nothing as mouth watering as Eat Drink Man Woman or Tampopo) and sure enough up to very few scenes it plays in and around a restaurant in New York.
We see a bit of the proverbial kitchen stress and likewise we see annoying customers and a bit of Mafia play (the restaurant being Italian and one of the chefs having a bit of a gambling problem). And while this gives a bit of drama on different levels, I ultimately thought that it fails to tell a convincing or even outstanding story.
In addition I thought that it was a bit over-done in terms of filming. There’s only so much blurry/out-of-focus filming and there are only so many overaccentuated colours I can take. And Dinner Rush overdid in this respect. In a way I think that too many effects in the filming just suggest that they didn’t manage to make things good enough with proper focus and normal colours.
azuloscurocasinegro
azuloscurocasinegro (dunkelblaufastschwarz in German, darkbluealmostblack in English) is a film with a strangely spaceless name (that separates words by their weight on the posters, though) which was touted as the next great Spanish thing in the papers, all of which didn’t fail to make a comparison to Almodóvar. And while, obviously, the film is Spanish and perhaps even has colour schemes that faintly reminded me of Almodóvar in some places, it’s quite a different beast, mainly because the film just doesn’t go as far as you’d expect an Almodóvar film to go.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it greatly reduces the danger of going too far and makes it much easier to relate to the characters on screen. And still, the film’s story is somewhat tragic. We meet Jorge who tries hard to satisfy expectations for no reason he understands and even gets a business diploma for it while looking after and caring for his ill father, working a housekeeper job, fancying his upper-class childhood friend and neighbour Natalia, hanging out with his friend Israel and forgetting about his selfish brother who is in jail.
Despite all this things start being lively all of a sudden. Jorge earns his degree. But despite his faible for dark business suits fails to score a job thanks to his ‘non-professional’ work before. He starts thinking that despite the relationship they established, he will never quite ‘arrive’ in Natalia’s world. He has to deal with Israel being shocked by spotting his father using the ‘services’ of a masseur while spying around the neighbourhood with his tele lens and then starting to visit that guy himself. And, most importantly, his brother, after being released from jail and trying to get at their dad’s money, asks him to impregnate his in-jail girlfriend because he himself is sterile and the motherhood ward is much better than ordinary jail.
And I guess it’s pretty apparent that mixing all this together creates enough drama and confusion to drive a film. Not hysterical drama, just Jorge trying to figure out how to live is life and how to bring all these different things together.
And, indeed, the film does that rather well.
Other
Furthermore I was slightly amused by the silly comedy What’s New Pussycat which stars Woody Allen as an actor (and writer) in the time before he directed his own films. Gus van Sant’s Even Cowgirls Get The Blues sounds so promising with a great director and even Uma Thurman in it. But somehow the film about a bunch of lesbian cowgirls doping up protected birds on a beauty farm fails to impress. The huge thumbs of Uma Thurman’s character Sissy may leave a bigger impression but possibly not the best one. Luckily, re-watching Luc Besson’s La femme Nikita left a much better impression and was rather enjoyable.
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Den Brysomme Mannen
Den Brysomme Mannen, aka The Bothersome Man, is a recent Norwegian film. It plays in a very slick and clean city where protagonist Andreas is brought by bus at the beginning. Offices are spacious, girls are pretty, houses and their ineteriors are modern. The world looks like a perfect commercial. Yet something is wrong. There are no feelings, no smells, no tastes, no emotions. And some people can’t take that.
From time to time there are suicides, the results of which are swiftly removed to keep the city nice and clean. Andreas starts feeling strange in this place and discovers than an old man is digging a hole in a cellar through which they eventually get to a kitchen in the ‘real’ world from which they manage to grab a few bites and smells cake before being caught.
After being caught, Andreas ends up in that bus again, presumably taking him back to the ‘real’ world. But that doesn’t quite work out either – which I didn’t really get. Just as I didn’t get why people in that city just submitted to the place’s livelessness without even talking about it. And isn’t it a bit too stereotypical to play Grieg all over a Norwegian film?
Sous Le Sable
François Ozon’s 2000 film Sous Le Sable (Under the Sand) starts with a married couple going on vacation to the seaside and the husband Jean not returning from a swim in the sea. His wife Marie (Charlotte Rampling who also played in Swimming Pool) enters a state of denial after that and starts hallucinating that Jean is still living with her.
She refuses to move on in life and even in conversations with friends keeps referring to Jean as if he was still alive. While she makes progress at stages and gets to know another man, her moods are so inconsistent that she easily falls back into her denial. Which is quite dramatic and painful to watch.
In total the film was a bit lacking for my taste. Many things (e.g. new flat, new lover, mother-in-law) are quickly touched but not elaborated. This may fit in with Marie’s loss but it leaves many unnecessarily open ends for the viewer.
Beijing Bubbles
Beijing Bubbles [IMDB] is as outlandish as things get: A German documentary film about Punk and Rock music in Beijing. Obviously filmed in China and following a few band members around. As documentaries go, it’s not that exciting in the way it’s filmed. And as punk goes the film’s quality isn’t outrageously good either.
Yet, the film manages to convey the feeling of that music scene in China. About being different from the mainstream taste - which is said to be a much stronger stream than here - about people living their musical dreams with the help of their families there and giving the country a different image than what we usually read about in the media. After seeing the Humanism in China exhibition recently, this is the second opportunity I have to get a view on China which isn’t dominated by cheap copies of ‘our’ products or sweet-and-sour sauce. And that’s great.
What I did find astonishing, is how Western these musicians and their tastes were. Only half of them sing in Chinese and their tastes would neatly fit in in our music scenes here. Even Peaches got an honorary mention and the somewhat drugged looking singer of Joyside with his pink shirt with black hearts, his Mick Jagger smile and love of Jim Morrisson almost looks like he was made for television.
The film’s German subtitles for the Chinese speaking were a bit annoying. It’s probably well known that Helvetica isn’t a good typeface for subtitles. And if that isn’t well known, simply trying to read them would have made the point. But at least proper Helvetica would have been better than the Arial subtitles they actually had…
Zodiac
I am not a big fan of long films. But I will make an exception for all 158 minutes of Zodiac. Directed by David Fincher who already rocked with the criminal masterminds in Seven (I’ll refuse the silly ‘proper’ spelling of the title, if I may), this is another detective story digging into a (apparently real) series of sick murders.
It’s great to follow around the police and some journalists in their attempts to figure out and catch the murderer. The only problem being that they don’t. Any lead they have gives no usable results. And every suspect will have to be let go. Obviously this drives the people involved in the case nuts. And it fools you, as the viewer, into thinking that person x must be the murderer over and over again. So well, in fact, that in one scene you’ll be utterly convinced that the investigating cartoonist Robert is facing the murderer and will be killed by him soon.
Tense and at times uncomfortable. But in a good way.
Fitzcarraldo
Impressive. Early 1980s Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski film Firtzcarraldo at first looked like madness and boredom to me. But then things came together and started making sense. And opera house in the Peruvian jungle isn’t as absurd as it seems and the dedication that protagonist Fitzcarraldo puts into it is enviable. Even if moving a ship over a mountain is what it takes to arrive at his goal. It’s nice to see the mad plan work out and follow Fitzcarraldo - always dressed in his white suit and insane grin and equipped with Kinski’s ability to actually look down on people far taller than himself. ‘Childlike wonder’, I say. And perhaps there’s some magic in opera after all.
[Which is much more than I expected after seeing a wrong-way-round quotation mark in the very first text the film put on screen…]
Woody Allen
Another chapter in the never-ending book of Woody Allen films is his 1990s film Mighty Aphrodite (German title is Geliebte Aphrodite which copies the Aphrodite but not the sound of the English title and doesn’t work quite as well in my opinion) in which Allen’s typical New York psychotic rich artist story is mixed with classical greek theatre - complete with a chorus commenting on what happens - while Allen’s character tries to find the mother of his adopted son, who turns out to be a hooker. In Another Woman writer Marion is a very strong and active woman; but in the course of the film through meeting her family and friends and listening to the analyst next door she realises that people rather see her as closed and selfish control-freak which doesn’t exactly correspond to the image she has of herself. Finally, Shadows and Fog, a somewhat different film. Not only in 1990s Black and White but also quite dark and foggy as the title suggests with all the nice/kitschy images that implies. In search for a serial murder many people wander through that night and we encounter a load of different scenes and relationships. Cool thing to note: Woody Allen’s fascination with magicians that we got a lot more of in Scoop recently.
Others
Finally got round to re-watching the classic North By Northwest; nice film, nice story. And I keep thinking that the whole airplane-landing-in-garden thing also appears in some James Bond movie. But I may just be mixing things up. Dark Habits (Entre tinieblas) seems to be the first full-length film by Pedro Almodóvar. While not as elaborately decorated as his newer films, it being set in a downtown convent with a taste for drugs. Many of the situations in there are hilarious and it’s a very entertaining film with a hint of drama.
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Children of Men
Children of Men was the favourite film of the year for many people commenting on such topics. It draws a dire future of humanity where procreation of humans ceased to work. And where the British society we see reduced themselves to a xenophobic police state in the constant fear and chase of illegal immigrants - war on terror pro, if you wish.
One of those immigrants happens to be pregnant which is great news in that situation and saves her life. We see the attempt of her being taken to safety to ensure she and her child will be well.
While the film was interesting and drew on numerous cool ideas, I ended up being a bit disappointed by it - particularly after all the extremely positive reviews I had read. In particular I missed the point of the raging xenophobia in the film. Would infertility make people xenophobic? Or nationalist? Why would they care for ‘their country’ if they don’t have kids to make that country good for? Or does the film suggest that Britain’s current development suggests that the country will become that way in a decade or two? Both points of view don’t make a lot of sense to me and would at least require further discussion. Insteat we see how soldiers stop shooting and start smiling because a baby cries. Which looks mainly like kitsch to me.
[The whole infertility theme made me think of Vonnegut’s Galápagos, there’s even a boat for the survivors…]
Ascenseur pour l’échafaud
Wow, L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud certainly is a classic that is worth seeing. Not only is it in cool 1950s black in white, in French, directed by Louis Malle and with a Miles Davis soundtrack - it also manages to completely capture the viewer with the drama and irony of its plot.
The story of which involves an almost-perfect murder whose offender is caught in a stuck lift while other people nick his car and gun and commit some more murders that he will be framed for. It’s a pleasure to see how the puzzle pieces come together and how it is figured out what actually happened.
Odd things: Could you imagine an office building where the mains power is turned off at night? Or a German who’ll invite you for drinks after you bumped into his Mercedes?
Ghost World
The basic story of Ghost World - two girls go to ‘stalk’ some poor guy whose ad they considered pathetic in the contact-classifieds - isn’t too thrilling I guess. But the film has Scarlett Johansson in it, so it seemed worth having a look at.
In the end Mrs Johansson wasn’t all that stunning in the film, but the story with the main protagonist Enid (played by Thora Birch of American Beauty fame) actually developing feelings for their victim Seymour (played by Steve Buscemi) ended up being a rather entertaining coming-of-age story with just the right people playing the protagonists.
Tanguy
Tanguy is a French film from a few years back with the odd topic of a guy, Tanguy, who keeps living with his parents and who cannot be convinced to move out. After all he loves his parents so much and he wants to stay with them. This, however, drives his parents nuts and makes them devise all sorts of schemes to make him move out.
And we see all of those schemes fail - with Tanguy calling home in the middle of the night because he can’t sleep in his own flat, with Tanguy suffering from suffocation and with Tanguy calling an ambulance to get to the hospital because of that.
At times the film really is hilarious because nobody seems to know a single person who’d be that keen to keep living at his parents’ place; and want to stay there even when being explicitly told to leave…
The Manchurian Candidate
I never watched the 2004 re-make of The Manchurian Candidate because I kept thinking I’d rather see the original 1962 version of the film. And it took quite a while before I actually did that.
As films of that time go it is black and white and tells the story of soldiers from the Korean war who have been brainwashed by the communists (I guess it’s a trivial exercise to guess how that aspect was updated for 2004…). And what a brainwash that was. Properly hypnotised the soldiers will do anything they are told - like kill one of their friends - without the least hesitation. Even better, they’ll forget what happened - giving more than just plausible deniability and peace of mind.
After a few glitches come up with some of the soldiers starting to have nightmares and the obstacle of actually convincing the army that there is a problem with their former servicemen that warrants an investigation is handled, a bigger story unfolds. One with a big communist conspiracy to take over the US of A in a perfectly democratic way. Clever.
Um, and I wouldn’t recognise Frank Sinatra even if he played the main protagonist in a film for two hours right in front of my eyes…
La Notte
After having seen and loved Antonioni’s Blow Up, quite liked his Professione Reporter, appreciated Zabriskie Point and not gotten Il deserto rosso and L’Avventura, we finally got to see La Notte.
It’s a long and slow black and white film set in Milan where author Giovanni and his wife Lidia experience a series of events that reach from a friend dieing to book promotions to random or not-so-random flirts to a decadent party to stating the end of their love. Giovanni is played by Marcello Mastroianni which along with the setup of the writer and the party reminded me quite a bit of La Dolce Vita.
As Antonioni’s films go, this one also floats around with apparently random things adding up to a big picture rather than having its characters pursue things too actively. In some areas of the film - particularly at the beginning with the hospital scene - I failed to see the point of that but as Giovanni and Lidia attend the big night out at the billionaire’s place (whoa, nice house!) this mode of drifting along starts seeming perfectly natural. Add to that the numerous cool shots in the film, some of which look more like photos than a film and you have something that’s worth watching even if it won’t become your new favourite film.
Kuhle Wampe
Kuhle Wampe is a 1932 film co-written by Bertold Brecht. It’s quite amazing for a film of its time in that it isn’t a silent film but even has parts with dialogue in it. The film is often labelled as communist propaganda and there certainly is a bit of critique of the powers that were in its story of a family suffering from poverty and a lack of jobs. Suffering that much that their son kills himself and they get kicked out of their flat and have to move to the campground Kuhle Wampe just out of Berlin.
But around the family drama and the love story of their daughter we see, the big question that is also the film’s subtitle (and English) title is Wem gehört die Welt?
- Who owns the World?
And in some ways that question - and even the way in which it is discussed in the film - hasn’t passed its best by date yet.
Melinda and Melinda
Melinda and Melinda is another newish Woody Allen film that I had to catch up on. It doesn’t feature Woody Allen but instead goes with a whole bunch of not-too-ugly women. And the film certainly has that Woody Allen feel to it with the upper-crust New Yorkeans discussing comedy and tragedy in a supposedly intellectual way.
With us seeing examples for those - of course in some relationships that we see breaking apart and re-form in two stories each of which features a Melinda. And with all those things happening in flats that should really be called appartements (I guess apartments would be more fitting?) and that are inhabited by people who know the names of more interior decorators than I know names of Ikea furniture and by people who just happen to be able to support that lifestyle from some creative job that isn’t all that taxing (or by inheritance).
In a way I start thinking that if these films weren’t so entertaining and so well-made I’d have to hate Woody Allen.
More Woody Allen
A few more - though by far not the final - steps towards seeing all Woody Allen films. I enjoyed Deconstructing Harry in which Woody Allen is the writer Harry who move the relationships to his friends and family into his books - thus attracting their hatred. Which doesn’t help him with his writer’s block. Ending up at an awards ceremony of his alma mater with a friend, a hooker and his son whom he ‘abducted’ from his ex-wife may have been overdoing things a bit, though. —— Hannah and Her Sisters is a not that great film from the mid 1980s in which Allen’s character contemplates becoming a Catholic or joining Hare Krishna. There are some really nice shots of New York in there, though. The Purple Rose of Cairo, another so-so 1980s Woody Allen film in which a film character escapes into the real word. And The Curse of the Jade Scorpion which gives us a somewhat entertaining story about two insurance workers (Woddy Allen and Helen Hunt) being hypnotised and then robbing jewels under the late effects of that hypnosis. While I didn’t think the film was that great, it certainly had its moments, particularly in the ways the characters interact and change.
Others
And Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the classic of film mockery from the late 1970s which was a little amusing but not really good (and falls far short of Bad Taste, say); Chinese film Breaking News is an interesting take on the cops meet media thing wich I think works really well and its bottom line of people seeing whatever they do as a ‘show’ focused on looking good rather than the real thing they do seems scarily real;
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Curse Of The Golden Flower
As I enjoyed House of Flying Daggers, appreciated Happy Times and loved Hero, I was looking forward to seeing director Zhang Yimou’s current film Curse Of The Golden Flower. Just like Hero, it centres around the Chinese Emperor and how people want to remove him from this position.
Just that this time these people are his own family rather than outsiders from other provinces. And hence most of the film takes place in the richly decorated and saturated environment of the palace where we learn about the Emperor trying to slowly get rid of his wife by medication while she and one of their sons conspire to take the power from him. In the course of all that we see a few fight scenes of outrageously monumental qualities which lead to an end that sees the Emperor persist but lose a lot.
While I didn’t find the film’s story particularly surprising, it is reasonably well told. And just as other recent Asian films this one bursts of colour. While usually a lot of that comes from gorgeous landscapes, most of Curse Of The Golden Flower takes place indoors and leaves us with a colour scheme that is golden and rainbowy. I found that a bit too overwhelming and I think it overdoes things. Meaning that Hero remains my favourite of Zhang Yimou’s films.
Soylent Green
Soylent Green is said to be a classic (by the TV show in which I learned about the DVD release anyway) that gives an outlook on a future where earth is overpopulated, overheated, real food has become scarce and people rely on nutrients such as the popular Soylent Green.
When the cop Robert (Charlton Heston, not that old yet in the early 1970s) gets to investigate the murder of a an executive of the Soylent company not only does he get the opportunity to see the luxuries these rich people live in – large flats with real food, even meat and women who live in those flats as ‘furniture’ to please them – but in the course of the investigation he also learns about the secret ingredient of Soylent Green which not just shocks him but also makes people want to kill him.
I thought this is an amazing film and I was astonished that it’s this old already with topics like global warming and food supplies playing such a role in there.
As Tears Go By
As Tears Go by is Wong Kar Wai’s first full length film as it seems. It was made in the late 1980s and definitely has that taste to it (sitting in a glumly lit bus with a Chinese version of Take My Breath Away playing…) while telling essentially a gangster story.
Yet quite a bit of the ‘typical’ Wong Kar Wai style, lighting and moods is already visible in that film. Not my favourite really, but quite interesting to see.
Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes
Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes (Water drops on burning rocks) is a 2000 film by François Ozon that is based on a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Formally it’s very much like theatre in that the film takes place within a single flat and that it is split up into four acts. It also makes to with just four roles and actors.
The first two of them being Léopold and Franz whose names already hint at the Franco-German wierdness we are going to see with the setup being in 1970s Germany but the film being French up to a few scenes where Heine’s Loreley [translation] is recited in German (with a French accent). Léopold is 50 and some kind of sleazy salesman type and he seduces the open-minded 20 year old Franz who then drops his fiancée Anna and starts to live with Léopold in a role that closely resembles that of a housewife at the time.
So far, so bad. But things get even worse when Anna and an old boy-/girlfriend of Léopold, Véra, turn up. While Anna manages to win Franz back at first, Franz doesn’t manage to just leave Léopold’s appartement and when Anna finally meets Léopold, she is attracted by him as well and things become too much for Franz to take them anymore. Though he is well-mannered enough to call his mum before killing himself.
At first this film irritated me. Just by the high percentage of gay and transsexual roles as well as the impeccably decorated flat it looked like a bit of a Almodóvar rip-off that lacked the bigger drama and exuberance. But then I started thinking that it actually is quite clever nonetheless and that the extra drama wasn’t needed.
Also Seen
Dr Murkes gesammelte Nachrufe, an ancient German TV film based on the follow-up to Heinrich Böll’s fantastic short story Dr Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen . Office Space which I missed when it was new – if it had an evil dog in it, it’s wonderful world of micro-management could be called ‘Dogbert, The Film’. Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry, written by Charlie Kaufman, starring Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans – should be a great film about people catching a ‘wild’ man in the jungle and taming him? But sadly it wasn’t. Woody Allen’s Anything Else that fully meets the shrink / comedy / young girl expectations you’ve started building for Mr Allen – not outstanding but still entertaining. And Karniggels (aka Little Rabbits), an old film by Detlev Buck that was quite famous in the 1990s.
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Celebrity
Celebrity is a so-so Woody Allen film from 1998. It deals with the struggles of a married couple who split up and start going different ways. While she goes on to an exciting new life in the media industry with her new husband, he continues to struggle as a neurotic writer trying to get his name known. When just listening and not watching what’s on-screen you’d bet that his role is played by Woody Allen himself as it’s just that typical Woody Allen role.
But it isn’t and I find it remarkable that Allen can make other people be so-much himself (or his on-screen self). As things have to go in a Woody Allen film, the neuroses and love-stories flourish while the writing suffers. All in a very entertaining way. We even have some scenes with a tolerable Leonardo Di Caprio in there.
At first I was thrilled by the fact that the film is in black and white. But as it went on I thought the black and white somehow looked rather modern and artificial. I’m not really sure what that is about.
Team America
I missed out on Team America when it was in cinemas because I didn’t think it sounded too compelling as a film. Yeah, South Park is fun, but seeing that dragged out in full film acted by puppets sounded like stretching things a bit too far. And in a way it is.
One thing did change, however. And that was the curious fact that some weeks ago my flatmates started saying Matt Damon
in a silly voice whenever the opportunity arose in the form of some celebrity news being in the paper or so. While that was funny in itself, I soon learned that it actually came from Team America. So I had to check that out myself.
And yup, it was quite funny. In all its actor hatred, singing dictator and anti-terrorism ridicule. And, hey it’s apparently Rated R for graphic crude and sexual humor, violent images and strong language - all involving puppets.
Uh, hot puppet sex! And it’s lovely to have a film in which all parties are wrong for a change.
Finally, they get extra credit for blowing up the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in the opening scene just to kill some Arab guys. The fact that this doesn’t seem completely unrealistic probably stresses the – err – ‘communication problems’ that American foreign policy has had a for a while.
[Let me add that German school education and the standard school atlas won’t help you finding out where Mount Rushmore actually is. Thanks to Google Earth…]
Gespenster
Gespenster is the most recent film by Christian Petzold (the director of Die Innere Sicherheit). It is quite short and painful in telling two tragic stories.
The main one is about two girls in trouble, Nina and Toni. Nina, an orphan, falls in love with Toni, a broke liar. And they spend some time together with fun activities like shoplifting and end up going to a casting where they are supposed to tell about their friendship. There, Nina stops lying and moves from the story they made up to the real story about how she first saw Toni when she was harrassed by some guys in the park. That leaves an impression and at a party soon after, Toni goes on to sleep with the director as Nina learns from his wife…
The other story is about a French couple, Françoise and Pierre, who come to Berlin. When Françoise sees Nina she is convinced Nina is her daughter who was abducted many years ago. And as charming as that may sound in terms of a happy end, it is just not happening.
With the people in the film and their problems, this film made me feel rather uncomfortable throughout.
Pan’s Labyrinth
I am quit split about this film. On the one hand I saw the preview with all its dark fantasy elements and decided I won’t like it. On the other hand I found it hard to find a bad review of it and heard many people recommend it and say Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno) is the film that should have won the foreign Oscar rather than Das Leben der Anderen. And people usually said that thinking about the film’s merit rather than the politics and stupidity going with big money film awards.
In the end my gullible self decided to go and watch the film anyway so I could form ‘my own opinion’ on the topic. And I found that people were mostly right because Pan’s Labyrinth really tackles a big story – fascism and how it is perceived by a little girl – and does so in an ambitious way.
This means we don’t just get to see the ugly face of good old fascism with its uniforms, power structures, unified opinions and arbitrary killing. (It made me wonder: people who flourish in fascist systems, would their skills also make them successful in business? or in art?) And we follow the girl Ofelia who has to move to the countryside with her mother who is pregnant by her new husband – a captain in the army.
Not only does she witness the cruelty going on in the fight against the terrorists opposition in the mountains who belong to the same families as the captain’s servants. She also dives into a fairy tale world in which she is a princess and has to solve problems so she can get back to her kingdom. Those stories take place in a dark world which isn’t really my type of thing. The only thing I really liked of that was the chalk to just draw a door where you need it, I thought all the fairy tale figures were a bit gross. Which probably was their point – but that didn’t make the film more enjoyable to watch for me.
One of those films which is well worth watching. But which I probably won’t watch again.
Rikyu
The Japanese film Rikyu plays in 16th century Japan and revolves on the dealing of the local lord Hideyoshi who wants to convince his peers to invade China. Not really my topic to be honest. If it weren’t that the film revolves around Rikyu, the lord’s tea master who conducts and teaches the way of the Japanese tea ceremony.
As I am quite keen on most tea-related things I was familiar with Rikyu who wrote what seems to be the book about the tea ceremony. And it was great to see the interaction between the powerful yet nervous lord and the calm and determined Riyku in the film. There are also plenty of tea ceremonies and different rooms for the ceremony which Rikyu designed and constructed.
While the film is quite slow, peaceful and long it still wasn’t boring and we see how Rikyu rises with the powers that are and eventually falls from their favour – leading ultimately to him having to leave and kill himself.
5×2
After having finished the François Ozon short film DVD with mixed impressions and really having liked Les amants criminels, it was time to try another one of Ozon’s full length films. This time I tried 5×2 which I still remember avoiding when it was in cinema because its posters looked definitely like a girl film romantic thing to me (and of course with a name just begging to be written with improper typography giving me an additional negative kick).
And while the film is about the relationship of a couple (2) in five acts (5), it isn’t the typical romantic film you’d expect. For one it is about a failing relationship. And in addition it’s told backwards. Now that sounds a bit silly. At least since the Pulp Fiction era non-linear narrative has become quite standard and just going straight-on backwards, with the acts going from divorce to meeting friends to childbirth to wedding to falling in love, doesn’t sound like an overly exciting concept.
But it works perfectly well. In fact running the story backwards makes it more dramatic because you keep wondering how things became the way they did. How they ended up wanting the divorce without too much stress and drama around it. And in the end it all spells out in an undramatic and slightly tragic way.
Network
Network is a mid 1970s film by Sidney Lumet (who also did Running on Empty a decade later) situated in the TV news business. While I was at first not too impressed with the film’s all 1970s media company setup, I started liking it once the main plot line thickened.
We learn about a new show which is transformed into a kind of preaching event in charge of its host Howard Beale. That show is wildly successful and gives a financial upswing to its TV station. All of which is orchestrated by the modern programme manager Diana (Faye Dunaway - Arizona Dream) who at the same time bedazzles the news show’s former manager Max. As time goes on and the show’s market share rises it becomes more and more apparent how all that success is totally market driven and lacks basic sense or even humanity. While such ‘insights’ may be completely obvious today – I found it quite astonishing to see them in such a well made story from thirty years ago.
And the whole idea of doing TV shows on terrorists with some wonderful ‘authentic footage’ surely is an interesting twist, particularly these days.
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La Strada
After seeing La Dolce Vita I was told to try out Fellini’s La Strada as well. La Strada is also called a ‘classic’ by many people and while being just six years older than La Dolce vita (1954 vs 1960) it looks much older with movements looking much less smooth and more like they did in old silent movies.
The story also seems less modern – about the girl Gelsomina who is sold to traveling artist Zampanò and who manages to cope with this thanks to her simple-mindedness. While she dislikes the crude Zampanò, she still gets used to him and enjoys the lifestyle of travelling and artistry. And of course there’s more tragedy on the way coming by the ‘fool’ character Il Matto who wants to offer more to Gelsomina than just playing along with Zampanò. But he can’t really do that. Particularly after Zampanò kills him.
I thought La Strada was more accessible than La Dolce Vita, probably because the story is more conventional and the film is shorter. On the other hand, La Dolce Vita seems significantly more modern in comparison.
What amazes me is Fellini’s – presumably unintended – skill to coin expressions: After being surprised to learn that La Dolce Vita established ‘paparazzo’ as a term, I was surprised again when seeing the protagonist in La Strada being called Zampanò which in German is occasionally used as a name for people who are showing off boastfully or to express that people who do have a good standing and who are proud of it probably can’t live up to that standard.
Last Days
Last Days is another Gus Van Sant film that plays with the Kurt Cobain story / myth. Some guys in a house in the countryside. Drugs, depression, strangeness, suicide. Hard-to-understand weirdness. All that in a non-excited environment with more mumbling than talking happening – and not even too much of that.
Perhaps this is an interesting approach to the topic, trying to avoid the obvious stereotypes that so-called ‘documentaries’ go for these days but rather attempting to let the viewer live with the main character and get a feeling for how he feels. That said, interesting isn’t necessarily good. And ultimately I didn’t like the film too much. Perhaps I’m just not enough into the whole Cobain story (although a friend always tried to get me in – but even he managed to survive the age of 27…)
Finally, let me bitch about the film industry: Showing a film in Cannes in spring 2005 and publishing it in the US and many other places in summer 2005 is mean when you only release it in Germany at the beginning of 2007. Grrr.
The Color of Money
The Color of Money is a mid 1980s flick starring Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. The former is good while the latter already sucked when he was young. Luckily not as badly as he does these days so the film wasn’t spoiled. And we get to see young Vince (Cruise) who’s a great pool player being coached by old-time player Ed (Newman) who wants to teach Vince the tricks of the trade.
Those focus on successfully making money more than on showing off and winning stuff. That of course doesn’t go down well with Vince who just wants to enjoy and win the game. But as Vince learns to live within profitable limits of the pool table, Ed gets drawn back into the sport that he dropped out of long ago. He gets himself some glasses and goes back to play. Quite unprofessionally, for the sake of the game rather than the money, of course…