14 responses to “29 days to go”

1. 

   granville

   12/23/2024

   Wolfgang Becker’s “Goodbye Lenin” is better than I thought it would be. There were four or five German films bunched up around that time that made it into our consciousness (Downfall, Baader-Meinhof Complex, The Lives of Others), it wasn’t the best of them but it took a pretty thin screwball premise and actually made a thoughtful and touching story out of it. Oddly I don’t think I’ve seen, or can even name the title of, a single German movie made since that little spree.

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/23/2024

      Herzog and Wenders and Fassbinder and schnitzel and sauerkraut are all good. Subtitled movies are a little more effort to watch and a lot more trouble to pirate, but usually worth the work. Some great stuff from the Krauts, but I guess I’m egalitarian — once the subtitles are there and legible, I can’t hardly remember whether movies I’ve seen were German or Spanish or Scandinavian.

      You type Baader-Meinhof, I think Myers-Briggs, but one of these things is not like the other. Baader-Meinhof Complex jumps the queue, and it’s downloading now. Downfall and The Lives of Others also go on the list, grazi!

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      1. 

         granville

         12/23/2024

         Oh yeah, there’s a huge tradition of course but most of these broke out of the arthouse scene that Fassbinder and Herzog (in the old days) would have had their films shown in. The Lives of Others was kind of an international phenomenon which, for its subject matter, is odd. Volker Schlöndorff was from the Fassbinder generation and made another film that maybe should have been in that group but had a badly translated title (“The Legend of Rita”) and didn’t condemn its subject matter (a left-wing terrorist), as it reflected one of his earliest, best known films, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. This was the mid-2000s so a film about terrorists that wasn’t about murdering them gleefully had an upward climb in the US market.

         All of them (except Goodbye Lenin) share a lot of the same actors, so the guy who plays Hitler and the guy who play Speer in Downfall also portray a cop and his chief assistant and interact in a different way in Baader-Meinhof. Their secretary in Downfall is a hair-stylist/terrorist they’re pursuing in Baader-Meinhof. It’s a bit weird, one of the things I like about foreign films is you’re not numbed by familiarity to the actors, so it really feels like “Oh so Martin Bormann became a Stasi agent?”

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         1. 

            Claude Reigns

            12/23/2024

            Goodbye Lenin is indeed a fine film, and much better than the others you list, which also seem to get more attention from the press, probably because they’re more “serious”.

            I remember watching The Edukators (technically Austrian, not Kraut) but have no memory if it was actually any good. Seems like something Doug would be able to write well about, considering the storyline.

            Downfall is wildly overrated, and has been reduced to memes (rightly so). Sokurov’s Moloch is my favorite film about Hitler, by far, but it’s a capital-A art film, even if it has hilarious scenes of Hitler shitting in the snow, etc.

            Lives of Others is terrible, and obvious, and therefore pointless. I think Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is much better, even though it’s only tangentially related by setting and milieu.

            This guy Edward Berger is also a fraud. Everyone and their brother wet their pants for his remake of All Quiet On the Western Front, which was profoundly middling (I don’ like the Milestone film either, or the book they’re based on) and his recent Conclave was laughably stupid, like Shoes of the Fisherman remade by M. Night Shyamalan with a trans twist. So fucking dumb.

            No discussion of German film the last fifty years should exclude Haneke, but while I think he’s very smart and conscious of what he’s doing, I find his stuff turgid and predictable. Compare him to his obvious influences – Bergman, Pasolini, Antonioni – and he pales.

            Frankly, German cinema, like all world cinema of the last 40 years, has been terrible. How can anyone ever compare to the Fassbinder or Wenders or Herzog of the 70s? Impossible.

            There is one recent German film I think is a masterpiece, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann. Hilarious and smart and ultimately very moving.

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            1. 

               Doug Holland

               12/23/2024

               Don’t know much about German cinema and haven’t seen most of these movies, so I can’t wade in very deep. I’m intrigued by the movies you two disagree about, and added a few as ‘coming soon’, and double intrigued by any movie about left-wing terrorists that doesn’t condemn its subject matter.

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            2. 

               granville

               12/24/2024

               All these films are about history, just taking different approaches toward it, and I don’t think any of them are terrible. Baader-Meinhof’s protagonists range from intellectual to just nihilistic, which seems to square with the reality of the Red Army Faction. Both this, the Lives of Others and Downfall are pretty “Hollywood” in the way they prod at their audience, but I assume that just had to be in the cut if they wanted an audience outside of Germany. “Il Divo” is a film that refused to do that, it’s an incredibly kinetic movie and worth watching but anyone unfamiliar with Cold War Italian politics is not going to get it or why this guy in a jumpsuit keeps insulting the protagonist in fantasia sequences.

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               1. 

                  Doug Holland

                  12/24/2024

                  I am unfamiliar with Cold War Italian politics, but I’m going to try it anyway. Root for me.

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                  1. 

                     granville

                     12/24/2024

                     Haha, you’re going to be the text case then.

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2. 

   Sam I Am

   12/25/2024

   Loving “our friends the democrats”

   How many times have Democrats said “We couldn’t have won that vote, so we didn’t push the issue” But fuck, **that’s how you change the conversation!** You get Republicans on record voting against whatever would have helped. You don’t avoid the issue because you’ll lose that vote — not if the Dems believe in anything.

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/26/2024

      Factual, of course. 95 out of 100 Democrats offer nothing but clichés and don’t even believe the clichés. Dems have become the enemy of progress. I used to wonder, but Luigi has me convinced, we need a new party. This one can’t be rehabilitated.

      Reply
3. 

   Leon Sphinx

   12/26/2024

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqbk9cDX0l0

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/27/2024

      That’s corny but funny. Here’s the same song with better sound and accompaniment.

      Reply
4. 

   Leon Sphinx

   12/26/2024

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8

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   1. 

      Doug Holland

      12/27/2024

      Catchy, but a little too cop-friendly for me to adopt it as a favorite and sing along.

      Reply

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