An inordinate number of peppers

Watch this one again

quint — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:07:37 GMT

Saw this through The Netflix Watch Instantly thing and was blown away. This is well worth watching again. The lo-fi effects are ingenious. The acting is a hoot. I love nearly everything about this. The story is great: Ice pirates. Time warps. Sword play. Awesome.

talky, slow

quint — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:14:40 GMT

This movie was so talky, that entire portions of the plot happened without being acted out. They just talked about it for a really long time. It felt a bit like Peckinpah in space, only without the violence. Smart, but hardly worth the dullness.

Way inside the stage

quint — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:55:15 GMT

I'm a fan of Svankmajer, although he can be pretty freaky. What I love about this film in particular is how deeply the metaphor of the stage is exploited. Puppets, people, the city, the set.

A man is handing out flyers to the people coming out of the subway. The flyer is a map to a particular address. There is nothing more on it. One hapless character goes there and discovers the accouterment of an alchemist. He puts this on, as well as a fake beard and stage makeup. Tada, Faust. He is on the puppet stage. He takes of the clothing and cuts through the scenery and walks out through the back door out to the city. Yet he is still on the stage. In fact the story has become the inescapable element. The character can not free himself from the character.

This is quite fascinating especially given the pervasiveness of the story of Faust, the classic "Be careful what you wish for" scenario. The Faust story belongs to no one author and Svankmajer draws freely from Goethe, Marlowe and some others, including the Opera by Gounod (which is playing here in Grand Rapids in May 2009.) The movie is not based on any one Faust, but all of them and then some. A myth to be retold and re-imagined but always recognizable.

How it ends hardly matters. Goethe lets Faust get to heaven. Svankmajer, well, you'll have to see for yourself.

A good Svankmajer. A good Faust. My favorite Faust movie is still Faust (1926).

Eisenstein's first film

quint — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:55:46 GMT

Le journal Gloumov

hard on the heart

quint — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:04:31 GMT

This took me a while to process. It's long of course, has many technical challenges for the viewer, but I sort of knew the range of what to expect from Fassbinder and rode with it all just fine. Wow. This is an intense portrait of a strangely likable dupe. The acting is fantastic. Günter Lamprecht is amazing. There were technical complaints about the production, but I think Fassbinder got what he was after. I can't bring myself to say I loved it, although it affected me profoundly. The epilogue was mind blowing. The cascade of dream images succeeded in feeling appropriate and deeply revealing of the character's descent. Weird and disturbing, but true somehow.

A modernist tragedy is bitterer than the classic sort. The one is a culmination of a life's unfortunate meaning, resolving destiny with death. Franz's destiny is surely spent, but in our day and age a life devoid of meaning is still lived.

A pimp, a thief, a murderer, sure, but Franz is somehow a sympathetic character. I wanted him to find the happiness he seemed nearly capable of. Something is broken in him. The implication would seem to be some psychological disorder, perhaps a remnant from WWI. There are lots of avenues to rationalize him. I liked Franz. He creeped me out, but I liked him. And I liked Mieze too though she had some off things about her. They are both a little crazy in a way that makes them seem innocent of their lives. Unlike Reinhold who is irredeemable in my book. A bad man.

Living in a bad time increases the pressure towards an inhuman decay of society. But that does not excuse bad behavior, it just makes it all the harder to live up to. Germany in the twenties feels a little post-apocalyptic and some of those classic scenarios play out. Franz is the perpetual optimist, believing in the basic humanity of others until experience can break him of it. It's hard on the heart to watch it happen.

Arkadian on Google Video

quint — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:38:46 GMT

Public domain

quint — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:32:26 GMT

There are so many great public domain videos on Google video.

German after all

quint — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:02:46 GMT

My father's side of my family is German. They came to America in the late 19th century, looking for work and opportunity in the furniture trade. My great great grandfather was a cabinet maker and an otherwise successful future was cut short by tragedy in 1929 when my great grandfather, an only child, was killed in a night club fire in Detroit just one month before the stock market crash. He left one son behind, my grandfather, and that narrow thread leads to me.

I've spent a good deal of time at the library trying to reconnect with these roots. To understand the patterns of thought in my own mind. It's a romantic dream I suppose. The stories handed down to me feel more like legends than truths. Among them is the fact that an ancestor of mine was once the burgermeister of Baden-Baden. My grandfather was supposedly among the first to cross the bridge into Baden-Baden, liberating that town with the Third Army. He shot a Nazi officer and took a French police pistol off his body. This is now in my father's possession. A family treasure.

Watching this series was the most powerful signifier of the characteristics I inherited down this path. It traces an extended German family in a small village in the Hunsbuck from the end of WWI to 1982. There were innumerable moments watching this series (Netflix has it) where I recognized myself in the choices characters made. This sort of cultural resonance was a real coming home for me.

Maria, Paul, Anton, Hermann, Maria Goot, Glassich: these were like long lost family. When Anton goes to Baden-Baden to visit Paul to ask his advice about the sale of his optics company to a multi-national corporation, I was on the edge of my seat. That was my ancestral home. Finally, I got a taste of that German spa town. Baden-Baden. My Baden-Baden.

I've always been a fan of German cinema. Fassbinder and Herzog have inspired me and confounded me. But here, with this monumental work by Edgar Reitz and the sequels, I have a true glimpse of what my family history might have been had we stayed in Germany all those years ago.

My family's history could have easily been a branch of this tree, a narrow thread off in America that might have circled back around to attend a funeral if the timing were right, much like the Brazilians who attended Maria's funeral.

This connection to what is German in me is a great service Reitz has done for the German people. I can't express enough how important this series has been to me. When Glassich scooted his chair closer to the speakers to hear over the racket of confused pub patrons the premiere of Hermann's avant-garde composition, (poor Glassich the town fool, his scabby hands hidden in his gloves), his eyes wide, his lips open, he alone hearing the beautiful sound of the nightingale amidst the electronic processing, he alone overwhelmed with the beauty, I wept as well. I felt like poor Glassich, hearing at last the strange and beautiful music of his homeland.

So far so great

quint — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:34:05 GMT

So, I'm only two episodes into the series, but I feel compelled to wite about it already. I love Heimat. I am so glad that I have a lot of episodes ahead of me. The subtle characterisations, the dense and lovable characters, the people's history of a very traumatic time. Fascinating and important.

Frickin' giant geode

quint — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 03:19:14 GMT

I really liked watching this. I got a real kick out of the giant geode their laser rock zapper train fell into. I thought that the wireframe of a diamond the size of Cape Cod was very convincing. This film was cleverly constructed. It threw me back to the choice days of Ray Harryhausen's imaginative audacity. And it was dumb sometimes, which was awesome.