Twin Peaks

I probably only saw an episode or two of Twin Peaks [IMDB, Wikipedia] when it came on telly in the 1990s. Hence I was familiar with the existence of Laura Palmer bit didn’t really connect to the story. With the opportunity to watch the whole series now, I can say that I managed to finally catch up: In the typical way that makes DVD sets both a joy and a curse – you get your series fix at the speed you want it but you lose the anticipation of looking forward to ‘this week’s episode’.

The series is very compelling in the way it builds up the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death, introducing special agent Cooper and his colleagues who come into Twin Peaks to solve it and by doing that slow peel layer by layer off the onion of relationships in the small town – and, by doing so, unveil more new mysteries than they solve. To top things off the relationships and affairs in Twin Peaks are rather intertwined and pretty much everybody has things to hide, thus making the investigations less fruitful but possibly more interesting.

The ‘mystery’ aspects of the series along with the ‘new age’ aspects of special agent Cooper give a strange counterpoint to the ‘professional’ investigation that is conducted, the heart-felt appreciation for cherry pie and all those ‘damn good coffee’s and of course the countless pointless messages spoken to tape for special agent Cooper’s mystery assistant Diane.

Twin Peaks is lauded for having created the blueprint for many successful modern TV series and the collection of cliffhangers and new pointless mysteries to dig into. While I do appreciate the open-endedness of that, I also think that few TV authors actually have the skills to keep a story going. Most of these series start running out of interesting stories to tell and keep alive by living on their hype, repetition and introducing new characters and plots wherever they can. That may keep things going but it lacks the cohesion of a proper story as well as the sense of direction one may expect from a competent author. Sometimes stories are told and it wouldn’t be a loss to just leave it at that.

Twin peaks also suffers from the resolution of the Laura Palmer murder as this simply terminates the main story and the additional plots, if they qualify for that term, often seem tacked on. It may be clever to build up all these stories about the inhabitants of Twin Peaks and their secrets but at some stage things do run thin. A few episodes after that, they drive all their ‘Black Lodge’ stuff to an absurd end which people probably considered clever back in the days.

To top things off, we also watched the ‘prequel’ film Fire Walk With Me [IMDB] which offers a little insight into the pre-history of people like Laura, Bob or special agent Cooper as well as a pointless cameo appearance by David Bowie. But it seemed like the film is by far too long and mostly lacking substance. Pretty much a waste of time.

I hoped I could find a nice graph of the countless relationships in the series, but Google didn’t find a comprehensive one for me, just what seem to be small views into the Twin Peaks universe. I suppose I would like something along the lines of a a xkcd style Movie Narrative Chart.

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King Corn

The ‘documentary’ King Corn [IMDB] offers another view into the world of modern agriculture. This one is tacked onto the somewhat absurd personal-touch story of two guys wanting to ‘do’ agriculture on an acre of land. Which means they don’t actually do anything but have the neighbouring farmers do the work and mostly stand there wondering about what happens – I guess they wouldn’t have needed their ‘own’ acre to gather the same information.

Not so surprisingly they arrive at the same results everybody else does: American agriculture business loves corn and you can only make money growing it by growing a huge amount of it and getting nice taxpayer money in the form of subsidies on top of it. Based on this all-American (which isn’t to say things aren’t very similar in Europe…) bit of capitalism FAIL is pretty much the complete industrial food chain as highlighted in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma in more detail.

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Invictus

Admittedly there was very little that could go wrong with the film Invictus [IMDB, Wikipedia] about Nelson Mandela getting behind (the conceptually white and hostile) Springboks rugby team during the Rugby World Cup 1995 in an attempt to unite all of the nation, no matter what their history or skin colour. The plan worked better than expected with South Africa winning the title and the enthusiasm gripping the country. The film is based on a real story of real people. And as things go with Mandela, the story is incredibly good.

Morgan Freeman plays a great Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon – as usual – looks too much like a little boy to pass as a rugby player. The message, as well as Mandela’s incredible determination to reconcile his country, is made clear. Perhaps a bit too clear in places with the film working hard not to omit any of the clichéd stereotypes one could imagine.

Unfortunately it seems very unlikely that history will not repeat again this year as the football world championship takes place in South Africa in the coming weeks as Bafana Bafana don’t seem to be doing too well in the past years.

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Howl’s Moving Castle

After becoming a トトロ fan last month, the next Hayao Miyazaki film I watched was Howl’s Moving Castle [a.k.a. ハウルの動く城, a.k.a. Das wandelnde Schloß, IMDB, Wikipedia].

Based on the English story of the same name it shows us the magic castle of Howl which is driven by a fire that is in fact a kind of demon who is joined together with Howl by some kind of dark magic. With its door that has an adjustable exit – pick the other side of the door by choosing a colour it’s full of weird ‘magic’ again and also puts quite a bit of focus on the ‘darker’ sides of the characters. I really enjoyed that.

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New York, I Love You

New York, I Love You [IMDB, Wikipedia, Official Site] is the New York remake of Paris, je t’aime, thus featuring a bunch of short films on love in New York. Those films were partially nice, partially unremarkable and had some ‘transitions’ between them blending the various stories over with recurring characters. I found that confusing as it meant I should have kept track of the various characters to make sense of everything.

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となりのトトロ

arte are having a bunch of Hayao Miyazaki evenings this month, showing half a dozen of his films. となりのトトロ [a.k.a. My neighbour Totoro; IMDB, Wikipedia] was the first of them I saw and it was very sweet.

Two girls, Satsuki and Mei, just moved to the countryside to be closer to their mother who is in a nearby hospital. They start seeing creatures who remain invisible to others, among them Totoro, whom they encounter a number of times and who helps them plant some trees and visit their mother with his cool-psychedelic cat-bus.

I really liked the film’s ‘lightness’ and how it is both sweet (just look at Totoro!) and absurd without strictly heading for some hero / happy end direction as most films do. The film just drifts along with the girls and their discoveries in the countryside. Not questioning but enjoying and going along.

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The Toxic Avenger

The Toxic Avenger [IMDB] is a 1980s trash film, and a rather funny one at that. In an American village with a toxic waste dump, the unpopular ‘mop boy’ at the local gym falls into toxic waste after the gym-people – and people there seem to live in the gym played a prank on him. Because of that he mutates into an ugly superhero who starts saving crime victims all over town and gets together with a blind girl. Of course everything works out well, even though he can’t really control his aggression against the bad guys.

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Night Falls on Manhattan

Sidney Lumet’s 1997 Night Falls on Manhattan [IMDB] is another quiet but dramatic film about the struggles and responsibilities that come with power – and people’s constant failure to live up to the standards that’d seem desirable.

In the story, drug investigators tracked down a big-time dealer and are aware that not many of their colleagues should be told about this because most of the police department is on the guy’s payroll. On their approach, one of them is shot dead and the other injured. The trial that follows is to be lead by a young lawyer who happens to be the son of the injured policeman. This will make his career and he eventually becomes the new district attorney. Yet, at the same time he experiences how troubled his business is as he soon realises that most people – including his own father – may be liars or at least withholding information as the corruption is widespread and ever

Thus he wins his case as well as a career, but is immediately aware of the fact that his job may have more to do with who owes what to whom than with what’s right. There goes the fresh naïveté.

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Alice in Wonderland

Loving all of Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, I absolutely had to see the new Alice in Wonderland [IMDB, Wikipedia] film. It was sweet and a tad weird as Tim Burton’s films aim to be. But it was also a strange remix of both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass along with plenty of new ideas. Not necessarily bad ideas but perhaps with too much mixing them up, thus destroying the clearer lines of the original stories.

The very end of the film was rather disappointing as well with everything being resolved and people doing happy dances just as they are wont to do in cheesy American family film crap. I found that disappointingly irony-free.

The film’s mix of real actors and animation was interesting in the way it made people half-way real and half-way animated. In many places I couldn’t really say which was which, meaning that they manage to blend the two approaches over better than they used to. In addition the film was shown in 3D – a gimmick on which I’ll comment later on.

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Up in the Air

Unlike most other people I actually like flying on planes, so I found it tempting to watch Up In The Air [IMDB], despite looking like an overly cheesy George Clooney film. The selling point was that Clooney’s persona is flying around a lot on business – his job being the charming one of firing people when their managers don’t have the balls to do that themselves – and really loves the lifestyle without a home a gazillions of frequent flyer miles.

In fact he’s obsessed with those miles, finally reaching some super-frequent-flyer status with a platinum card or so and even starts an affair with a fellow miles-lover after they showed off their membership cards to each other in a bar. And then comes the cheesy bit: His company wants to do their work on a screen via the internet rather than having their staff visit the affected companies. And it’s made clear that the personal touch is important to make being fired tolerable. Being as charming as he is, you’ll of course be delighted to be fired by Clooney who won’t hesitate to point out all the great opportunities this opens to you. But, seriously, that idea of teleworking mainly means that you don’t get any frequent flyer miles when doing it.

Further cheesy bits come with his sister’s wedding. He hardly knows his family, but still eventually goes there and puts up with them, actually even using his charme to convince the groom that he really wants to go ahead with the wedding, even though he finds the idea ridiculous himself.

I don’t think any of that made particularly much sense. But it was cool to observe the perfectly smooth packing, checking in and passing security controls routine the protagonist had set up for himself.

I was surprised, btw, by the sense of loss and anger people expressed when being fired. In our romantic image of the USA, it’s a country full of entrepreneurs where the hire-and-fire motto is lived fully. I would have expected people to be more used to being kicked out in such an environment. But perhaps debts and a lack of social system just make people less relaxed.

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Il Colosso di Rodi

Il colosso di Rodi [a.k.a The Colossus of Rhodes, IMDB, Wikipedia] is a film made by Sergio Leone in 1961 which I saw to get to know his work a bit better after enjoying his ‘dollar’ films recently.

While a few scenes in the film look exactly like they could have been in one of those American films, the general story and drama doesn’t live up to their standards. The story about ancient wars and occupants of Rhodes may have more ‘history’ behind it and the Colossus earned its position as a ‘Wonder of the World’, yet the film is mostly what one would expect from an ancient drama: sandals, circus and an uprising. Not really my cup of tea.

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Smukke Dreng

Smukke dreng [a.k.a. Pretty Boy IMDB] is an early 1990s Danish film about a thirteen year old boy, Nick, who doesn’t want to stay at home with his poor promiscuous mother, doesn’t find the friend he wanted to stay with and ends up with a gang of hustlers who have a side business in theft.

While those circumstances are rather unpleasant – as is the impression you get of Copenhagen which is mainly pictured as a city of old guys who dig young boys – Nick doesn’t seem to mind, does his work, looking for father-figures in the process. Eventually he falls for fellow hustler Rene who is actually a tomboyish girl and more-or-less accidentally kills one of his former father figures after his confirmation.

The storyline may be a little weird. Yet, the main attraction seems to be the fact that Nick doesn’t mind the aspects of his life which I’d consider weird, painful or dangerous and is fine going along with it, possibly finding it exciting. And the story is quite consistent at portraying that.

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The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski’s latest film The Ghost Writer [IMDB] features Ewan McGregor as a ghost writer and Pierce Brosnan (does he start looking like Ronald Reagan?) as the former British prime minister whose autobiography he’s supposed to write. Unfortunately the ghost writer’s predecessor in that job died while writing the book and was a bad writer. Hence the Ghost Writer has a lot to do: writing and figuring out why the guy died. He does so thanks to some photos which the former writer hid in his room and the stupid BMW navigation system which leads him to a relevant place – the target his predecessor had set. I found that setup rather lame (why didn’t anybody just turn the damn navigation system off?) but its in a pretty setup with funky architecture and the notion that big politics can be greatly criminal.

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Män som hatar kvinnor

Stieg Larsson is a Swedish author writing crime novels which I heard lauded to be a bit more exciting than the usual Swedish crime fare that’s so popular on German television. And there’s a film for his book Män som hatar kvinnor [translated Men who hate women, a.k.a. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a.k.a. Verblendung; IMDB, Wikipedia].

The film is about journalist Mikael Blomkvist who essentially loses his job due to some litigous rich person and goes on to work for Mr Vanger, another rich person to research some family history, specifically the case of his niece Harriet who disappeared decades ago. While on this hopeless job he meets Lisbeth who somehow manages to spy out his Powerbook without him noticing and who’s clever enough to help him shed some light on this case and unveil a bunch of nasty family secrets which lead to both of them risking their lives and, ‘solving’ the case.

But that’s just scratching the surface, there are many side-stories in the film (and people claim the film loses a lot of the book’s detail), each of which touches unpleasant topics like being abused by a guardian or relatives’ Nazi past. Much better than the TV crime film I had anticipated.

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Whatever Works

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

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

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She, a Chinese

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

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

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Metropolis

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

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

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

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Food, Inc.

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

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

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

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

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

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I Hired a Contract Killer

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

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

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A Fistful of Dollars / For a Few Dollars More

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

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

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Teorema

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

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

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

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Other

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

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

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

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

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

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Verfolgt

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

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

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

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

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

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The Postman always rings twice

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

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

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

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

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Black Cat, White Cat

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

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

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

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

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Star Trek

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

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

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

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Praxis Dr. Hasenbein

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

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

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

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Das weiße Band

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Coco, avant Chanel

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

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

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

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Die Märchenbraut

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

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

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

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

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U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha

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

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

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La graine et le mulet

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

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

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Nacktschnecken

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

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District 9

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

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

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

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

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

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MathFilm Festival

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

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

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Che

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

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

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

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Central do Brasil

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

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

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Judgement at Nuremberg

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

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

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

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L’aile ou la cuisse

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

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

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

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

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Boogie Nights

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

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

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Inglourious Basterds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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