Beloved Berlin Wall (***1/4)

Sure East Germany was a ruthless police state, but there were things there to be nostalgic about, like the way a West German woman living near a checkpoint could cross into East Berlin and get some very fairly priced groceries. So it is that the perky heroine (Felicitas Woll) of this unusual romantic comedy winds up spilling her packages in view of one of the East German guards (Maxim Mehmet), who quickly descends his tower and comes to her aid.

Unlike an ordinary courtship, theirs is one of carefully arranged meetings and the frisson of danger. A single woman frequenting East Berlin could be a spy, could she not? It is 1989, and the democratic contagion in Poland and Hungary would soon spread west, but meanwhile the Stasi still went about its business. This is all explored with a good deal of cuteness, not entirely different from that in Goodbye, Lenin, the popular film that also displayed a certain kind of nostalgia about the communist era. But when someone does discover the whole affair, there is a stronger reminder of the truly nefarious nature of a totalitarian state. Yet the tone manages to stay light, and the last third of the film becomes a nearly farcical comedy of mistaken identities, questioned loyalties, and bureaucratic bumbling. Bordering on the contrived, it’s kind of clever and charming too.

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viewed 4/12/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/12/11

Unknown (***)

The thing with a thriller like this one is that its success hinges on what happens near the end. If the plot does a good job explaining why Dr. Martin Harris—or should that be “Dr. Martin Harris” (Liam Neeson either way)—wakes up after a taxi accident in Berlin and finds another man in his place, great. If it turns out to be something stupid—like the dream sequence that erased a season of the TV show Dallas—or absurd, well, you’ll have felt like you wasted 113 minutes.

Dr. Harris, bearing an American accent, has arrived in Berlin for a medical conference with an American with his prim young wife (January Jones). Berlin was Paris in the Didier Van Cauwelaert novel on which the movie was based, but in any case the good doctor is out of his element when he awakens, which probably explains why he never calls his mom/dad/sister/best friend to verify his identity to the police, who understandably don’t believe his story. Since his wife doesn’t seem to recognize him, there’s only the cab driver (Diane Kruger) to help. Her and an ex-Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz) now working as a missing-persons expert. Ganz, though his role is brief, is certainly the most memorable character in the movie. Reviews suggest that the book had a deeper focus on memory as the locus of identity, and the agent character seems to be the chief remnant of this philosophical aspect.

So this is no Momento, but as conspiracy thrillers go, it’s not bad, and while not truly believable, the explanation does indeed explain all. Director Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan) does all right with a couple of car chases, and, unlike Neeson’s last thriller Taken, there is no gratuitous torture scenes or even that much violence. You could do worse for a diverting suspense drama.

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viewed 2/15/11 at Ritz East and reviewed 2/22/11

The Baader Meinhof Complex (***1/2)

Neither apartment buildings nor a psychological condition is the subject of this drama. The title probably sounds better to German audiences, but something pithier like The Terrorists would have been better in translation. The RAF (Red Army Faction) were something like the Weather Underground, only the latter group targeted only buildings, whereas RAF didn’t mind killing its enemies, such as police and politicians they considered instruments of a corrupt state. Moreover, despite the violence, the RAF, unlike American radical groups, enjoyed a substantial level of support among the German youth who had grown up after the Nazi era.

The group grew out of the student movement of the 1960s. (See Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers for a very different look at the movement, in France.) The early sequence in which pro-Shah of Iran security forces and German police violently clash with peacefully protesting students feels as real as any riot scene I’ve seen, but the rest of the movie concentrates on violence committed by RAF members. The film more or less traces the history of the group from its origins in the 1960s student movement to the late 1970s.

Primary characters include two women. One is Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a leftist journalist who becomes radicalized upon witnessing police brutality and meeting Gudrun Esslin, a Mao-quoting firebrand who questioned the utility of words without deeds. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu, of Run Lola Run and Munich), another RAF founder, was Esslin’s boyfriend. Esslin believed in drawing a thick line between friends and enemies and, as played by Johanna Wokalek, spends a good deal of the movie cursing the “pigs” and the capitalists and the American and German governments. The shrill rhetoric and general level of anger among the RAF members can become wearisome, but not dull. Esslin in particular is tremendously irritating, yet real, for which much credit must go to Wokalek.

Providing a calm counterpoint to the radicals, and welcome quieter cinematic interludes, are the scenes in which the government plans its counterstrategy. The film’s most recognizable actor, Bruno Ganz (Downfall’s Adolf Hitler), plays Horst Herold, head of the West German anti-terrorist force, Although the movie is no way polemical, when one of Herold‘s subordinates questions why Herold wants to understand what motivates the terrorists, it’s hard not to think of more recent differences of opinion on the same subject.

It’s also hard to tell what sort of a society the RAF would have wanted to create had they succeeded in defeating those they called imperialists, but the film presents a good view of their general worldview and the differences of opinion between somewhat more practical members like Meinhof, and less-cautious ones like Esslin. Neither overly bogged down in detail nor dumbed down, this brilliant German film clearly deserved its foreign-language film Oscar nomination and will appeal to those who like films such as Munich, thoughtful real-life thrillers. Despite the 2:30 length of the film and unfamiliarity of the subject matter to me, it was neither slow nor confusing. However, if the plotters in Munich were merely morally suspect, those here present the paradox of incredibly passionate people who might seem admirable had they applied that passion via less-appalling methods.

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viewed 9/23/09 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/23–24/09

The Brothers Bloom (**1/2)

The greatest trick in any film about con artists is to get the audience to buy the tale. Alas, in writer Rian Johnson’s follow-up to Brick, they may not. That the brothers are played by non-lookalikes Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo doesn’t help; nor do they look like the child actors in the opening sequence. But that’s not a big deal. More significant is that in that sequence the two boys look like bowler-hat-wearing twits, and their elementary-school swindle is not rendered convincingly. The first scene with the adult brothers—still conning—is rendered in such a stagy fashion that I expected the camera to pull back and reveal that Brody and Ruffalo had become actors in a play.

I liked the movie somewhat better once I got used to its rhythm. There are two other members of the brothers’ team. Rinko Kikuchi (Babel), as their mysterious, nearly mute Japanese explosives expert, is equal parts cute and coy, even if her role is contrived. And Rachel Weicz does well enough with the character—the wealthy mark—who actually has the most dimensions. She’s supposedly an expert in, among other things, several musical instruments, a martial art or two, juggling, and unicycling, and speaks multiple languages. Except for the last, she doesn’t get to use any of these abilities. Now why have such a character and not use that? Of course, her primary function is to pair up with Bloom, the brother played by Brody, but if you don’t figure that out immediately you may have never seen a movie.

So the usual questions get raised. Will Bloom choose love or money? Will his brother Stephen the supposed genius of the operation, let him decide? And what is real and what’s just a con? All of the ingredients of the classic caper film, but The Sting it’s not. Johnson can evoke a style, but it never feels very organic. I thought the same thing about Brick, in which high schoolers used 1930s detective-novel slang, although plenty of people seemed impressed. Here, Johnson has Stephen drawing elaborate diagrams and using Herman Melville novels (no, not Moby Dick) as inspiration for his con jobs, but they never seem as clever as they’re supposed to. It would also have been nice if the grand finale, in which all of the themes (finally) come together with more action than the rest of the movie, had actually been comprehensible. Stephen says, in the movie’s best line, that the best cons are the one that leave everyone feeling they got what they want. And if you want to give the audience what it wants, you need to let them feel like they’re in on the action.


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viewed 6/6/09 at Tilton 9 and reviewed 6/7/09

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (***1/4)

A child’s-eye view of the Holocaust?

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viewed 11/5/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse)

The Lives of Others (***3/4)

? When it came to intruding on the lives of ordinary citizens, the KGB had nothing on East Germany’s Stasi. Its 300,000 agents monitored a population numbering just 20 million. Germany’s upset victor for this year’s foreign-language Oscar follows a playwright who, with his actress girlfriend, becomes the subject of Stasi surveillance. At the same time, we follow the agent, a loyal socialist whose job it becomes to listen in on and interpret their conversations.
+ Information was the currency of the Stasi, and writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck depicts the state’s use of both electronic methods and human intelligence-gathering methods to acquire it. Von Donnersmarck’s heavily researched script shows the fears that the system relied on and the human feelings, ambition, jealousy, loneliness, and so forth, that a canopy of legalistic structures and misguided ideology could not obliterate. The story tends somewhat to the inevitable, but then doesn’t end there, and it’s the last act that sets the rest in relief. Even the color and light of the post-communism period is shocking compared to the drabness of most of the movie. (Both the look and even the sound of the bygone era are strikingly revived.)
- The story spends as much or more time with the playwright and his girlfriend as with the Stasi agent. I might have tilted the balance toward the character who makes the greatest transformation, one perhaps inadequately explained by the events in the film.
= ***1/2 If you’ve wondered what it was like to live in a static totalitarian regime where the personal and the political are inseparable, this re-creates a still-recent era with docudrama reality. (For another such perspective, check out the biographical Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, set in the Nazi era.)

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reviewed 3/9/07

The Good German (***)

? Continuing his quest to make at least one of every type of movie, Steven Soderbergh turns his attention to the World War II mystery-thriller, utilizing black-and-white photography to give his adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s novel the look of a period film. George Clooney, working with Soderbergh for the fifth time, plays a war correspondent/army captain in bombed-out Berlin at the time of the Potsdam Conference. Tobey McGuire, playing a soldier serving as the journalist’s seemingly chipper driver, plays against type by turning out to be a black marketeer with a wide nasty streak. Cate Blanchett plays a German Jew, known well to both men, whose has managed to do what she needed to do to survive until 1945.

+ Soderbergh is always attentive to detail and has obviously seen a lot of film noir and other old movies, especially Casablanca, whose plot this somewhat recalls. Even the screen wipes used to transition between scenes and the noticeably fake rear projection in the driving scenes are reminiscent of an older style of filmmaking. So is Thomas Newman’s score. Only the language—more explicit than the censors once allowed—is updated. It’s perhaps more true to life, but jarring in such a context. Blanchett commands every scene she’s in, and it’s her character that the story turns on.

- The obvious comparison to Casablanca (whose famous ending is visually replicated here) is instructive. Both stories are about idealism in places where cynicism is the mood of the moment. Both are anchored by the memory of a past affair. Even though it’s conveyed by just a couple of brief flashbacks, the romantic back story in the older movie is enough that you feel as sucker-punched as Bogart when he and Ingrid Bergman are separated. The captain’s affair with his onetime protégé is not rendered with such sentimentality. There is some smart dialogue here, but no “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Replacing Bogart’s weary stoicism is Clooney’s journalistic objectivity, which is not quite the same thing, and is shed more quickly. The journalist is as much an audience stand-in as a full-fledged character. Thus I found myself less invested emotionally with the movie as I might have. Still, being negatively compared to an all-time classic is no great insult, and the thread of the plot still pulled me along, especially in the second half.

= *** On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 6 for the characters, an 8 for the mystery, a 4 for the romantic aspect, and a 10 for the look and feel.

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Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (***3/4)

The riveting story of the arrest and interrogation of a Munich dissident in 1943 is a true story that feels like one as well as a revolting but fascinating look at the Nazi judicial system.

One of the nominees for this year’s foreign-language film Oscar (it lost to Tsotsi, but would have been my choice of the four I’ve seen), this is the absolutely riveting story of the arrest and interrogation of a political dissident in Nazi Germany. In 1943, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, members of a group called White Rose, were arrested for distributing anti-government flyers at the University of Munich. Sophie, played quite well by Julia Jentsch (of 2005’s excellent The Edukators), denies guilt, but unless you forgot to notice the film’s title, there’s not a lot of suspense about her eventual fate. Yet that doesn’t detract from the movie at all. Part of it is knowing that the story is true. Watching it, you wonder if you’d risk your life to distribute leaflets, if you’d maintain hope seeing your country in the hands of a Hitler, if you’d sell out your friends to save your life, and so on. The interrogator (Gerald Alexander Held) is also compelling. He’s not amoral, and clearly feels sympathy for Sophie, yet feels duty-bound to apply the laws of an immoral regime, which he does skillfully. Finally, the look at the appalling Nazi judicial system is notable. Definitely worth a look.

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posted 8/23/13