Gerhard Richter - Painting (Sunday, March 18, 2012) (30)

It's possible that Gerhard Richter's color-field abstract painting are the best example of the physical work that goes into the creation of art, the formalism of a canvas. In her new documentary, Gerhard Richter - Painting, Corinna Belz, shoots the German post-modernist in his studios and in museums and galleries where he fights with the paint and the canvases to create his work.

As a process documentary, this is absolutely amazing. We see how Richter takes a blank white canvas and adds big swaths of color, seemingly at random, then takes Plexiglas trowels of different lengths to smudge the paint. He then covers over one layer with another, then scrapes again to reveal the hidden and random color fields beneath. Finally he applies paint directly to the edges of these massive knives and goes over the surfaces another time, removing and adding color at the same time.

It is never clear to us when he is done with a work or at what state he is in. At one point an assistant jokes that it's better to not comment on anything because he'll take a positive remark as a sign that the picture is bad and will start over from the begging, thus wasting everyone's time.

We get small glimpses of his mindset and his approach to his pictures, but he remains particularly sphinx-like about what he does and how he knows when pictures are done (I guess he has to keep some secrets).

There is a wonderful small moment as he looks at old family snapshots and comments that he has no memory of the scenes or the people in them (his parents) and can't actually account for the surrounding areas, beyond the borders of the image. It's such a wonderful overintelectualized and particularly East German view of the world. A fetishization of the banal and bleak. Still, it offers an interesting prism through which to see his work. He makes pictures that we can see, concentrating on composition and relationships of shapes and color. Any other content for him is noise and irrelevant.

The best moments in the film come when the canvases he works on fill up the entire screen and we see him moving across it scraping with his Plexi-ledge. Frustratingly, Belz includes moments of his representational pictures that seem to confuse the story and become noise for us. Still, this is an excellent example of some of the best moments in the recent trend in artistic process docs (there have been dozens, including recent ones on Louise Bourgeois and Richard Serra).

Stars: 3 of 4

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss (Thursday, December 23, 2010) (160)

This is an interesting documentary about Veit Harlan, a German director who was commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to direct several anti-Semitic, nationalistic films for the Nazis in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The most well known and powerful of these films was a melodrama called The Jew Suss, which advocated Nazi party tropes of Jews being untrustworthy, filthy criminals who killed, raped and stole.

With strong Nazi backing, the film was released throughout Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940 and further inflamed the already scorching anti-Semitic sentiment of the people. After the war, Harlan continued to make films, but was always haunted by his decision to work with the Nazis. He was twice brought up on charges of collaborating with them as a propagandist but maintained his defense that Goebbels threatened his and his wife's lives so he had no choice.

In this documentary, we see how not only did the shadow of that film haunt Harlan himself, but also his kids, grand kids, nieces and nephews. Director Felix Moeller tells most of the story by having Harlan's living children, grandchildren talk about him. We get a very interesting, sometimes contradictory take on his life.

One of Harlan's sons, Thomas Harlan (an accomplished filmmaker and writer himself), explains how much he's struggled with his father's sin and how he is now convinced that because Harlan had his wife act in The Jew Suss, he could not have been coerced into making it. Another son, Kristian Harlan, takes a more tender view saying that it might not have been as black and white as his father said it was, that he thinks his father could have fought back a bit, but probably had no choice but to make the film.

Most interestingly are the views of the grandchildren who are all very separated from the passion of the story. They never met their grandfather, but have had to live with his name and the shame that comes with it (in Germany, at least). To them, this is a very distant mistake that they have to deal with on a more basic day-to-day level. They generally have a more nuanced view of the story. (Also interesting is that Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane, and her brother and long-time collaborator Jan Harlan are Veit Harlan's niece and nephew. They speak here too.)

This is a very interesting story about sin and who pays for it in the next generation. Some of the children have gone on to defend their father, some have turned their back on him as much as possible and blame him for doing something unspeakable. The documentary runs a bit long, perhaps, and might have been more powerful if it was trimmed by about 15 minutes. Still, it is a fascinating story and a very interesting, effective treatment of the material.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Soul Kitchen (Saturday, August 21, 2010) (106)

I strongly believe that Fatih Akin is one of the greatest active filmmakers working today. Both Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are brilliant and they suggest to me that the young German writer/director will have a long and interesting career ahead of him.


His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.


Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.


Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)


I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.


I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).


There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.


I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."


Stars: 2 of 4

The Human Centipede (Saturday, May 29, 2010) (47)

The Human Centipede is one of the most shocking and disgusting movies I've ever seen and at the same time, one of the most elegantly conceived and presented films of recent memory. It is a disgusting thriller, and not for the timid, but it is much more than the typical gross-out blood-and-guts horror flick you might find at the local cineplex.

The story begins typically with two young, hot American sorority girls on vacation in Germany. One night they go looking for some hot dance club, when their car breaks down on the side of the road (of course). They go searching for help and come to a beautiful modern house set in a remote forest. Inside is a crazy doctor, a surgeon who spent his career separating conjoined twins, who now is looking to spice up his life by connecting three people ass-to-mouth in one long "human centipede". The idea is totally gross, yes, but it is presented with respect and a bit of a wink.

Of course the two women are imprisoned in the doc's basement laboratory along with an equally unlucky Japanese man. When one of the women tries to escape, she is caught by the doctor and told that she will be the "middle section" of the centipede - unable to escape because she has one person on either side of her.

The film is beautifully directed by Tom Six and shot by Goof de Koning (both Dutch, I think). (Six's IMDb profile is hilarous, saying he collects AK-47s, eats curry every day and loves Klaus Kinski). The house is stark white and off-puttingly modern with a lab that is antiseptic, medical and isolated.

More than anything is the wonderful horror created by the situation. Not just is it shocking to think of your mouth connected to someones anus (so you have to eat their shit), but then, what happens if they die and you're suck to the ass of a dead person. OK, this is clearly something that normal people don't think about, but it's hilarious and shocking in the context of the film nonetheless.

Despite its Dutch/German production, most of the film is in English (with the two girls speaking English and the doctor speaking English to his three captives). Brilliantly, the head of the centipede is the Japanese guy, so he is able to scream and cry in his own language, making the film marketable in Japan, where gross-out horror is super popular.

By far the worst part of the film - the most unfortunate part - is the silly American slasher opening 15 minutes. It begins exactly like any other dumb American slasher flick would open (with two hotties getting into a bad situation). One could argue that Six is merely starting with something that we know in order to twist it into something we don't know - but I think it's just simply dumb. The elegance and respect throughout the rest of the film make the first few scenes seem especially silly.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

North Face (Friday, May 28, 2010) (46)

North Face is a German movie about the push to get to the top of the Eiger mountain by means of the northern side, the hardest climb in the Alps. The film takes place in 1935 after the Nazis are already in control of Germany. Some mysterious group of people, some mix of Nazis and journalists, decide that if a German team can summit the mountain before others, it will be a sign of Aryan might - especially ahead of the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

One duo, found by a Berlin newspaper, are two country boys who are amateur but accomplished hikers, who seem to be screwing around in some official capacity in the Nazi army. By the time they are convinced to go try the hike, there is another team of Austrians who are also making a go at it.

The two groups begin together and our German pair are clearly the more experienced and better team. At some point, the Austrians get into trouble that could foil the bids of both teams.

My main problem with this film is that it's really boring, it moves very slowly for an "action/adventure" film and there are too many characters with too silly sub-plots. I guess we're supposed to like the German guys because they're nice and friendly and don't seem to be Nazi party members. For a movie set in 1935 Germany (OK, Switzerland), Nazis are almost not present at all (the only real Nazi stand ins are the Austrians, who seem more interested in their Aryan heritage than the German guys.)

But there are layers and layers of ridiculous story lines and relationships. There is no need for a newspaper to be involved in this (even if it's historically true, I don't really care and it feels totally like an add-on to the story). What's worse, the main journalist is a young woman who is a childhood friend of the climbers. There are suggestions of a sexual affair between her and one of the guys, but this too goes nowhere. Then there's the woman's editor who makes untoward advances at her... as if I cared about her chastity in the first place.

All I really want is a story about two guys hiking up a mountain, and due to bad planning of others and bad weather, they had a hard time doing it. I didn't need all the other stuff. I mean don't show me Nazis and then suggest that a successful climb would be good for German propaganda and then do nothing with that (I mean I can't even get a single scene with Goebbels in it?! C'mon!).

Beyond this, the characters are really boring (I think that's actually part of the point. They're simple, boring guys who love climbing mountains. They are not political and don't care about the propaganda) and the technical parts of the film (the photography, music, editing) seem banal (even as beautiful as shooting in snow generally looks onscreen, this is just trite and unimpressive).

Director and co-writer Philipp Stölzl does a really lousy job of making me care at all about what is going on with the hike or the ridiculous sub-plot about the journalists off the mountain. It's basically a lot of snow and frostbite with some dull action scenes (that might have been shot on a sound-stage) and a mess of a story.

Stars: 1 of 4

Everyone Else (Saturday, April 10, 2010) (29)

Maren Ade's film Everyone Else is a beautiful and heartbreaking work about two young lovers, Gitti and Chris, who are on their summer holiday on Sardinia relaxing and spending time together. She is a free-spirit, artist who is much more likely to joke around than be serious. He is a traditional Teutonic worker who can be playful, but only for regimented periods of time. They split their time between erotic sex sessions and daily excursions to the beach or the mountains for a hike. Over the course of the film, their relationship continues to be punctuated by moments of uncomfortable tension, until it is clear that it is falling apart. This is a devastating, unromantic look at the reality of communication and how two people might not be right for one another.

All the elements of the film work beautifully together. The script, also by Ade, is really wonderful and she directs it beautifully. There are long scenes with very little dialogue that are excruciating because of the uncomfortable silences. The acting by Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger is really superb. It is clear they love each other, but they both are incredibly convincing in their very particular character. Technical elements of the film as well, like the cinematography, by Bernhard Keller, and the costumes, by Gitti Fuchs are simple, but elegant.

This is a long film. It only runs two hours, but feels every minute of it, as Ade rolls out the story in deep detail. She gets the most out of every scene - but it might be too much for many viewers. I didn't really mind the speed and pacing of the film, but I could see many finding it dull. You have to let the total film wash over you. It is Bergmanesque in it's painful detail. Imagine being on a terrible roller coaster ride that you can't get off. It's thrilling and difficult, but when it's over, you want to ride again.

This is about those relationships where you are madly in love with somebody, but reach a point where you are clear you are not right for one another... and still continue together out of sheer momentum. It's easier to stick together with the help of an occasional white lie, than to break up and face the loneliness of singlehood. Gitti and Chris have a ton in common and like spending time together most of the time, but simply don't connect on a basic level. She's too playful and too silly for him and he's too stern and too academic for her. She tries to become serious for him, but stumbles; he makes an effort to be goofy for her, but she doesn't buy it. Sex for them is a salve and a retreat - but it doesn't last all day.

I think this is also about the German-ness of Germans and how they can't deal with people who are less German than they. This is probably the same thing for virtually any group of people, I'm sure. An outsider is always an outsider and is hard to reform and make part of the greater group.

I love Ade's frankness with the subject matter and her honesty and kindness to both characters. She does not judge either party. It is neither Gitti's fault nor Chris' - it is a state of nature that they would love to be together, but simply cannot. They have a magnetism to one another, but are a very bad, destructive match of each other. There is a lot of power in the quiet moments of this film. I think that takes a true artist's touch to convey. I look forward to other work by Ade - not to mention future efforts by Minichmayr and Eidinger.

Stars: 4 of 4

The White Ribbon (Wednesday, December 30, 2009) (213)

Michael Haneke has made a career out of interesting and shocking films that never shy away from raw violence and frank sexuality. His masterpiece, The Piano Teacher, deals with repressed sexuality, self-inflicted torture and abuse. Cache speaks to a much more specific post-colonial French guilt, but deals with it by showing that children have the potential to do terrible, dark things. Funny Games (both the Austrian and the American versions) shows how evil and terribleness are sport for disaffected youth who are otherwise bored in their dull lives. The White Ribbon uses themes from all of these earlier films to talk about not only the limits and effects of bad deeds in a community, but also the causes of those actions.

The title of The White Ribbon refers to a band that the preacher of a small Austrian village puts on his children's arms to remind them of their innocence and inherent goodness. Throughout a year just before World War I, the hamlet has several unexplained violent acts committed mostly by unknown actors on the townspeople, including a few acts against some of the kids. The film opens when the town doctor is thrown from his horse after the animal trips on a wire strung between two trees near his house. At another point, the rich village Baron's small son is kidnapped and beaten in the woods. Later a special needs boy is also kidnapped and beaten.

As this happens, the townspeople try to figure out what to make of it and why it is happening in their village. What we see is that just about every child is out of control, rebelling against the rigid strictures of their parents. The parents are bad people as well, as they bicker and fight, punish and threaten and rape and abuse one another as well as their kids.

The idea of the white ribbon is very interesting as it represents an old-fashioned out-of-touchness that the adult world has with the kids' world. It suggests that the children's world is not real but just a series of symbols and lessons. It ignores that they might have lost their innocence partly because of the horrible things they see in the grownups. The uptight protestant preacher is a hateful man who seems to relish disciplining his kids with a belt or stern lecture but almost never a loving sign. He doesn't realize that his lessons are not getting through to his kids and that all they get out of it is the hatred he seems to express toward them.

There is no question that Haneke is a master filmmaker from a technical point of view. Each shot is perfectly composed and perfectly executed. Cinematographer Christian Berger's beautiful black and white photography ass well as the monochromatic costumes by Moidele Bickel create a suffocating environment for all the action to take place in.

I think the script (also by Haneke) has a lot of problems with it. For one thing, it sets up an interesting mystery where we don't know who is committing many of the terrible acts we see, but leaves these questions floating in the air, almost not trying to solve them at all. Haneke points at one answer, but this is not taken seriously by the characters and the question is then left open. I get that this is a more nuanced, European style of filmmaking - to leave questions unanswered and leave the audience guessing - but here I think he just walks away from the mystery rather than engaging in any real debate. The film ends rather abruptly, creating less of an ending to the story, than a cut to the credits and an end to the film with no resolution. This is a bit too elliptical for my taste and I would have preferred a bit more examination of the story.

Considering how well sketched out some of the major adult characters are, such as the preacher and the doctor, the children in the village are rather nameless and faceless and lack any real identity. I don't think this adds to our understanding of things, as much as it's just sort of sloppy. They are a mindless mob who move from one place in the town to another, almost like a flock of birds. This is an interesting idea, but it falls apart when we are supposed to feel any sympathy for individual kids, such as the preacher's two oldest. I think if a few of the children had been better flushed out, the story would have felt much more intimate and emotional for me.

The story is narrated by the village school teacher, a nebbish who tries to discipline the kids while they are in his control, but realizes he is a small pawn in a bigger struggle in the village with terrible parents. This character, however, is basically unnecessary and the use of a voice over narrator looking back at this point in his life is ridiculous (I especially hate real-world narrators who are able to tell stories that happen between two people in intimate situations. How do they know what goes on behind closed doors?). That Haneke wastes time showing the teacher's crush on a young governess is just indulgent and pointless. I think a good 30 minutes could have been cut from the film to make it a more powerful story.

Many people have been interested by this film because it's a criticism of Austrians and Europeans who treated their kids so badly that their children subsequently grew up and allowed unprecedented atrocities go unquestioned in the Second World War. I think this is overly simplistic. I don't think it was just evildoing by adults that led Germans to become mute in the face of fascism. I think there is a level of mischief and badness in all people and when that is allowed out in children at an early age, bad things can follow. But I also think that there is a lot of good in people too and that there are not communities where every person is evil (as Haneke seems to suggest here). I appreciate his argument, but I disagree with it fundamentally.

Stars: 2.5 of 4