by ·Comments Off on Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, Werner Herzog)

We follow Fini, a deaf/blind advocate who visits her people in different family and institutional situations. It’s almost a public-service issues doc, showing sad disabled people and explaining how systems have failed them. But ever since watching Little Dieter I’ve known that Herzog likes to take his doc subjects to unusual places, and who else would take a party of blind women to a cactus garden?

Vogel: “confirms Herzog as the mysterious new humanist of the 1970s, light-years removed from the sentimentality of the Italian neorealists and the simplistic propaganda of untalented documentary film radicals.”

Hand communication:

by ·Comments Off on The Big Mess (1971, Alexander Kluge)

Space explorers set out to find a home beyond the reach of monopolist capitalism – sounds serious, but the actors in the rebel mission’s crew are absolutely goofing around. Early on, their ship catches fire and they’re not sure whether to try to save it or to sell it for scrap.

Some good montage, and the lo-fi outer space effects are fun, but the actors reading from scripts with indifferent blocking is too much. I guess this is self-consciously bad, but it is bad. Raymond Gun-Virus speaks for us all: “Extra .5 star for the 100+ individually designed intertitles and a live-in-space performance by Amon Düül II.”

My first by film-philospher Kluge, falling somewhere in the middle of his features both chronologically and in popularity. I don’t know what his whole deal is yet, besides that his career spans from Lang’s latest works to our all-digital present, and Cornell calls him “the German Godard.” This movie’s janky space-travel aspect reminds me of Ga-Ga, which I loved – am I not supposed to be watching more of Szulkin’s weird sci-fi films instead of digging up new German nonsense?

Hark Bohm, Fassbinder regular and a doctor in Underground:

by ·Comments Off on Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975, Rainer Fassbinder)

Mother K receives a bit of bad news: her husband went to work and murderer-suicided his boss. She gathers the family (son Ernst and his wife Irm Hermann, dancer daughter Corinna), and their situation attracts reporter Jorg and a communist couple. Everyone involved exploits the tragedy in their own way, also a sharp movie about political fractures within families.

L-R: Mother K, son, Irm, bearer of bad news

Communists:

Mom is the lead from Fear Eats the Soul in another big role. Ernst (star of Fear of Fear the same year) and wife Irm Hermann get the hell out of there and return pregnant. Mom’s daughter Ingrid Caven (a Year with 13 Moons star and a Suspiria Remake teacher) shacks up with the reporter (the large-faced star of Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day) and finds a job in town playing off her family’s infamy. After the daughter leaves, mom calls up communists Peeping Tom and Petra von Kant, who were the last people to be nice to her, but she wants real action while they say things like “it’s a slow process / we can’t work miracles / we won’t forget you.” Falling in with increasingly radical groups, Mother K meets anarchist Horst (Matthias Fuchs of Decoder) whose plan is to bring guns to the newspaper and demand a retraction of the reporter’s sensationalist article. We get a couple of possible ways out of this: a bloody shootout via intertitle, then a happy fantasy where Mother K survives, is abandoned by everyone again, and meets a nice lonely man.

dancer, reporter:

by ·Comments Off on Germany Year 90 Nine Zero / Phony Wars (Godard)

Germany Year 90 Nine Zero (1991)

Bursts and scraps, especially impressive in headphones.
“Now that the cold war is over, being American is pointless.”

Lemmy Constantine travels through Germany, speaks three languages. Good stuff.

–
Phony Wars (2023)

More scrapbooky than ever, and made of smaller scraps – his scrappiest one yet, but charmingly homemade in its montages and handwriting, without the typed titles.

Still, even when directors seem to have fully ignored or subverted the assignment, I continue not to like shorts commissioned by fashion companies. May ’68, tho. :raised-fist:

by ·Comments Off on Nosferatu (2024, Robert Eggers)

Dickensian intro in “Germany” with Warboy “Steve” Hoult as a green realtor sent to the Count’s castle. Sure are a lot of dream sequences in this. It’s got more narrative than the other versions, at least, and definitely more dream sequences, and references to Possession and The Exorcist. The music is very “Mica Levi but bad.” It must not feel great to have made the longest and worst Nosferatu movie, but if you rank it with all the Draculas it’s probably somewhere in the middle – I recall Dracula 2000 being quite painful.

Willem Dafoe plays an alchemist who knows the VVitch Dad. Lily-Rose sacrifices herself to free the town from a plague. At least the vampire’s death scene was good.

by ·Comments Off on Scorched Earth (2024, Thomas Arslan)

Our man Trojan is back, still doing clean, efficient jobs, and still getting screwed over afterwards when the client decides to kill his team instead of paying.

Smooth-haired hitman Viktor kills Computer Chris first, then old buddy Luca, while museum lawyer Rebecca is working both sides trying to recover the stolen painting.

Computer Chris is apparently old enough to have been in Petzold’s The State I Am In, Luca had parts in Head-On and the latest Guy Ritchie joint, new girl Marie Leuenberger does a lotta TV and hopefully has a bright future.

by ·Comments Off on A Cure for Wellness (2016, Gore Verbinski)

Valerian “Val” DeHaan travels to a secluded German manor to work out a contract for his employer – is this based on Dracula? Upon arrival he signs some papers without reading them, then starts mad hallucinating, taking too long to realize what kind of movie he’s in. Gore’s ability to illustrate a creepy horror thing with big striking images makes me wonder if I should rewatch his Ring remake.

I guess Val dreams his mom dies after his limo crashes into a Very Digital Deer. Mia Goth plays the weird girl wandering the grounds, but then, everything is pretty weird. Val finds micro-bugs in the water, later panics when his scuba therapy becomes eel-infested. He sees eels everywhere, then tries to rally the patients to revolution but instead they zombie-attack him and the doctors pump Val full of eels – in the end, this is like The Matrix, but with eels instead of technology. I guess the incestuous mad doctor/baron Jason Isaacs (military guy in The Death of Stalin) is Mia’s dad, and they are 200 years old, kept alive through eels, until Val snaps out of his zomb-eel stupor and foils their plan. Partly based on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which the guys who wrote Shutter Island may have also read. Someone should program a Cure for Wellness / Road to Wellville double feature.

by ·Comments Off on In the Shadows (2010, Thomas Arslan)

Criminal Trojan who looks like the intersection of Adam Scott and Nathan Fillion gets out of jail and looks up some guys he used to work with: one guy so he can get paid for the job that sent him away, and the others so he can pull off One Last Job and steal enough cash to get outta this town. But he’s being tracked by another criminal associate Meyer who looks like a hot evil version of Richard Kind. Our guy’s friend Dora knows an armored car inside man Kruger, so they enlist retired Nico (Rainer Bock of De Palma’s Passion, a sinister cop in Barbara) and pull an easy heist. But Hot Richard tracked the action and wants his piece, finally Trojan is fleeing town with a stolen car and nothing else. Watching this now because Trojan will soon return in belated sequel Scorched Earth.

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope:

Arslan’s stripped-down approach may well deserve the epithet “masterly,” but only in the modest sense of such acknowledged forebears as Irving Lerner or Don Siegel, whom Arslan cites as an influence for his preferred style of laconic, almost “neutral” acting he likewise admires in Hollywood films of the ’30s … Although the director says that the heist sum of 600,000 Euros was simply chosen in order to remain realistic, it seems hardly a coincidence that it is slightly higher than the budget of In the Shadows itself.