Phoenix Movie Review

There’s a current movement in German cinema. I’m not sure if it’s acquired a catchy name yet. “The Berlin School” is the closest I can find, but that’s not descriptive in the way that “film noir, “French New Wave,” or “Italian neo-realism” were. From my own observations it’s something like neo-German historical realism. But that’s a little clunky. At any rate, the movies, which tend to focus on post-war Germany or Communist Bloc East Germany, have been making their way stateside, illuminating the ways in which a new generation of German filmmakers and their audiences are responding to the important historical markers that shaped Gemany and its people today.

Short Cut Movie Review: Two Lives

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

This film has not yet been released commercially in the United States.

The German-Norwegian co-production Two Lives is about the war children of Norway – babies fathered by Nazi soldiers during the occupation. Because Norwegians were considered true Aryans, these children were regarded as part of the pure race and so the movie, written by Georg Maas, Christoph Tölle, Stale Stein Berg, and Judith Kaufman (and directed by Maas), claims many of these children were forcibly removed from their Norwegian mothers and placed in Lebensborn homes in Germany. This is the story, based on an unpublished novel, of a woman who was reunited with her birth mother in Norway, but whose life begins to unravel after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Barbara Movie Review

German director Christian Petzold’s movie Barbara is one of the most paranoid films of recent years. Not in a lunatic, they’re all out to get me way, but in the very real way that political dissidents lived in East Germany during the Cold War. This particular study, which could easily be considered a sister film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s brilliant The Lives of Others, concerns a female physician forced to give up her prominent post at a hospital in Berlin for a life at a pediatric hospital in the countryside. I’m not sure the reasons for her exile are made explicit in the film, but Wikipedia (not necessarily renowned for its accuracy) says it was because she applied for a visa to leave for the West.

Pina Movie Review

In his introduction before the presentation of his latest film, a documentary called Pina, director Wim Wenders claimed that if you’d asked him in the mid-80s if he’d ever make a film about dance, he’d have laughed. Then he saw a performance by the Tanztheater Wuppertal choreographed by Pina Bausch and he was hooked. After lengthy planning stages in preparation for a documentary, Pina suddenly died. Ready to abandon the project completely, Pina’s dance company, some of whom worked with her for 20 years or more, insisted they continue with a film but make it a tribute to her work and incredible artistry.

I, like Wenders, never would have thought I’d be so captivated by dance but this film hooked me from its first moments until the close. Not only is the dancing some of the most wonderfully beautiful work I’ve seen in any medium, but Wenders uses his 3D cameras to expertly capture the performances in a way that makes it feel more like a live production.

Oscar-nominated Live Action Short Films

The Oscar-nominated short films are playing in select cities around the country. In New York I saw them at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.

The first of the Oscar-nominated live action short films was Pentecost, a light Irish comedy about an altar boy who just can’t resist the urge to ruin Sunday mass. After a supposed accident in which he caused the priest to fall by swinging the incense ball too close to his face, he’s given a second chance by default to be part of the altar boy elite ‘squad’ to perform a mass given by the Archbishop upon his return to this small town. Taking place in the late 70s, the boy is threatened with never being permitted to watch or listen to football again (and Liverpool has the European Cup final coming up!) The boys are given a pre-game talk that amounts to a sports team pep talk. Directed by Peter McDonald, it’s light, amusing and somehow distinctly Irish.

Classic Movie Review: The American Friend

In honor of the late Dennis Hopper, I took a look this week at 2 of his films. Hoosiers I'd never seen and The American Friend I'd seen but had virtually no memory of any single detail. Here I review the latter.

Wim Wenders’ 1977 film Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) is loosely based on the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game, the third of her novels to feature the sociopathic character of Tom Ripley. The novel was adapted several years ago with John Malkovich in the title role, but the Wenders film stars German actor Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Zimmerman and Dennis Hopper as Ripley.

This is perhaps one of the most inaccessible films I’ve ever seen. The film is almost all mood and atmosphere. After all, that was a primary effect of German New Wave Cinema of the 70s and 80s, of which Wenders (along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder) was a key director. It’s filled with opaque dialogue and lines that, upon reflection, probably served as inspiration for American independent film makers such as Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. The most interesting lines are spoken by Ripley: “I like this room. It's got a good feel to it. It's quiet and peaceful;” and “This river reminds me of another river.” As read by Hopper, lines like these are sinister and forbidding.

A single viewing is probably not sufficient for following the story carefully. What you will get is a great sense of location as the action switches between Hamburg, Paris and New York. There’s Hamburg with its overcast skies and shipyards in the background, a setting as dreary as the subject matter of the film. New York is identified by the World Trade Towers looming in conspicuous solitude in the background as Ripley walks down the West Side Highway. And the Paris depicted is hardly the romantic postcard vision the movies normally provide. Wenders’ Paris is one in which organized crime bosses plan murder and doctors are complicit in medical deception. It’s got elements of film noir combined with a Hitchcockian thriller, which should come as no surprise as Highsmith also wrote the novel Strangers on a Train, most famously adapted by Hitchcock.