European Cinema

Slightly more interesting version of the usual, is it good?

Veronika Voss, Rainer Werner Fassbender's bummer of a movie about an actress who was a big star in the Nazi era but finds herself a White-Dwarf Starlet in 1955, with a crippling morphine addiction to boot.

Pretty amazing, powerful. And doubly depressing when you find out that it's a Roman à Clef of a real actress, Sybille Schmitz (she was in the Nazi Titanic), who did in fact meet just such a sad fate.

Added to the list. I really like those kinds of film, is it told in a similar way to Film Stars Dont Die In Liverpool?

Edited by lakingsif on Aug 7th 2018 at 5:23:37 AM

I wouldn't know. It's in black and white, lots of old-fashioned wipes, really a Retraux effect simulating the kind of melodramas Voss/Schmitz would have starred in back in the day.

I've done what I said I'd do a while back, namely, broken the redirect and made a work page for The 400 Blows. I still haven't seen the movie so I simply transplanted everything that was on the Antoine Doinel page.

I did however watch the short film Antoine and Colette and make a work page for it.

It's been a while since I've watched it, but I'll try to add what I can.

Playtime by Jacques Tati.

I think my own personal viewing habits helped me understand why the movie did poorly. I've gotten in the habit now that I'm older and constantly online via my ipad, of watching movies or TV or just about anything in chunks. Like I'll watch 10 minutes of Playtime, check twitter, read some news, back to the movie for 15 minutes...anyway, who cares, but I think watching Playtime like that helped me like the movie better. Especially when it's a movie where there's no story and frankly, nothing happens. Sitting in a theater and watching that for two hours without a break would be a totally different proposition.

So, we tend to talk about the old here more than the new, but for once it looks like the German cinema might (might! Final judgement has to wait) have produced a movie worth mentioning…this one:

Sorry that the trailer is just in German, but I guess there are currently no movements to show the movie international. Anyway, it is the story of the production of the Dreigroschenoper from Brecht, the inventor of the epic theatre, in the style of the epic theatre adapted for the movie. If you want to know why the Dreigroschenoper (threepennyopera) is a big deal, you can read it up here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Threepenny_Opera

(To clarify something about the Wikipedia article, when they write "initial poor reception" they mean that the premiere audience was pretty much set on hating the play and sat in icy silence...until the first song, then they were excited).

Epic theatre is basically the deliberate breaking of the fourth wall and the emphasis on the perspective of the audience. There are already traces of this in the trailer and certainly the movie deploys a deliberately unrealistic style, even though the story itself plays in the Weimar republic.

I will watching the movie Sunday and I am really looking forward to it.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 21st 2018 at 10:43:41 AM

So, I have seen the movie…

sooooo worth it. Not sure how it translates because nearly the whole text of the movie are Brecht quotes. And I'll have to see it at the very least a second time, because there are so many narrative levels in it.

Oh come on, don't say that, German cinema has Uwe Bo− *dodges a brick*

Jokes aside, this makes me wish I hadn't dropped German after high school… I almost can't get a word, but the looks and musics of this trailer fascinate me. Hopefully it gets exported at some point.

I am actually a defender of German cinema...I would recommend to everyone movies like "Goodbye Lenin", "Das Wunder von Bern", "Lola rennt" or "Pina", just to mention a few. There are also movies which I think are great, but too much tailored for the German mind to translate well - "Pappa Ante Portas" might be my favourite comedy, period. But there is also no denying that Hollywood has better resources and more money. It is very rare to see a movie looking like this coming from any other country.

But that is actually not why I liked the movie. Frankly, sometimes it was maybe a little bit too much happening on screen. It's how the movie honours Brecht's work while also adding another level to it by showing how, well, current his ideas actually are.

I am really not sure how well this translates. A lot of quotes in the movies are quotes Germans just know by osmosis.

I know that the movie was on the list of academy award nominations for best foreign movie from Germany. Not sure if it is still a contender though. I kind of doubt it, I bet that the movie is too communist for the US taste.

I can help you with the songs, though:

That's from the 1931 movie of the Dreigroschenoper, the movie which was actually made in the end. The current movie is an attempt to do the movie Brecht actually wanted to make, but wasn't allowed to. So basically the new movie tells a little bit of the story behind the 1931 movie, and the songs are pretty much the same in both, with a few tweaks Brecht added later on.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 25th 2018 at 3:12:15 AM

Does German cinema need defenders? Good Lord, the Germans have been making great movies since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

German Films

Lots of great stuff on that list.

I have seen Good Bye Lenin a long time ago, and Pina recently (if we're talking about the Pina Bausch tribute). I can still remember some of the former's scenes in details − like that fake TV broadcast where West Germans "escape" to the East, or when the protag is talking with his mom and there's a Coca-Cola ad being installed on the building behind. A really great balance of drama and comedy.

Well....kind of. It is kind of a thing in Germany to complain about the German output. For three reasons:

1. No matter what German film is nowadays, it never reached again the influenced it had before WWII. Germany used to be the trend-setter in film. One of the first animated movies (and the oldest surviving one) was German. Metropolis, basically the first science fiction movie, was German. Other countries actually used to care what Germany was doing in film.

2. There are a few typical German movie genres which aren't exactly high brow. The Heimatfilm, the German school comedy (basically the equivalent to the American High school comedy, except that those always seem to be about the relationship between the pupils, while the German ones tend to focus on pranking the teacher) and naturally the infamous "Schulmädchenreport" filme. Basically a successful concept beaten to dead because the audience liked it back when those movies were released. And it naturally seems as if this stuff is more typical than the truly great entries.

3. Germans who own a TV have to pay a fee for the state programming, and part of that money is used to support movie projects. Without the money, there wouldn't even be a German film anymore. But naturally a lot of people like to complain about what they are doing with the money they get.

But yeah, despite all those complains there have been actually a number of good movies in the German output.

Yes, that's what I am talking about...one of the very few cases in which 3D actually adds to the movie.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 25th 2018 at 3:44:17 AM

Too Communist? I doubt it. At least not with something with that source material, which still has respect here in America.

(The songs, of course, are great; the translation in the subtitles at least rhymes but kind of leaves something to be desired, especially in the translation of, well, you can guess the song I mean. I suppose it's too much to stop thinking of the familiar lyrics.)

I understand Toni Erdmann is great but I haven't been able to motivate myself to rent it yet.

Well, the movie touches on the fact that Brecht was a communist. And considering how allergic the Americans already react to the word "Socialism", this might not go over well. And naturally a lot of thoughts expressed in the movie can be considered anti-capitalist. It covers the "Dreigroschenprozess" among other things, and I doubt that the big-wigs in Hollywood would like the message of this one.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 26th 2018 at 12:54:14 PM

Watched Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard.

Pretentious nonsense. Like the director set out to shock people in any way he could. There is a long sequence in the movie, I didn't time it but it must have been like ten minutes, where characters literally sit and stare at the camera while other characters lecture about Marxism and imperialist oppression of Africa. There are also hippie cannibals, and a scene where one of the characters discusses in gross detail a threesome she had. Bleah.

A pretentious movie by Godard? I can't believe it!

Watched Palme d'Or winner The Best Intentions, directed by Bille August from a script by Ingmar Bergman.

Three hours of people having angry conversations in cold places. I've seen Bergman films I liked, but this isn't one—of course it's technically not a Bergman film but it's basically In the Style of. Apparently there's a six-hour version made for TV, which must have been great for Swedish insomniacs.

Which means the entire afternoon or evening of programming was taken by that one movie…?

On another note, has anyone gotten to see Climax? Every single review I've seen of it describes it as a 90-minute long nightmare and a traumatizing experience, which… doesn't really make me want to see it. >.<

Why is a work page with a Spoilers ahead warning on it still littered with spoiler tags?

As for The Best Intentions, I'd rather poke an eye out than watch the six-hour version but I assume it ran in multiple parts.

Edited by jamespolk on Oct 10th 2018 at 4:28:56 AM

I have just seen The Sisters Brothers, an English-language French Western film directed by Jacques Audiard. I liked it. Californian beaches suspiciously look like South-West France, for obvious reasons.

Edited by gropcbf on Oct 22nd 2018 at 5:47:41 PM

Just watched Cold War, a Polish film. I think it was good. I may create the work pager later (right now I am mostly thinking of negative tropes such as Le Film Artistique or Misplaced Accent and it would look like I am complaining).