Change Your Image
blaakmeer
Reviews
Heimat - Eine Chronik in elf Teilen (1984)
the best
Heimat is one of the best works of art of the twentieth century. Period. That is really all there is to be said. But the format of these comments forces me to write a minimum of ten lines. Well, lets just say that never before in film there has been as successful an amalgam of epic and lyric qualities. The TV-series depict the troubled history of Germany by focusing on a small community and a handful of families. As the show unfolds they become our family. Also: In art the profound and the entertaining seldom go together. In Heimat they do. Be amazed and cry. Still not enough lines. I have nothing more to say. Heimat is the ultimate television masterpiece.
Feed (1992)
Remembering Paul Tsongas
This documentary should be out on DVD for one reason: Paul Tsongas. Tsongas is one of the best candidates for the presidency that didn't make it. Watch him on stage being asked whether he knows the price of a pack of milk. First he laughs out loud and steps out into the audience to shake hands with the man who posed the question, telling him that he asked a 'great question'. Back on stage he offers a price (can't remember) and when the audience starts to laugh adds: "at your friendly grocers?" Tsongas died a few years later. He would have made a great, if somewhat short-lived president. The man who did make it, Bill Clinton, plays a huge part in the documentary, as if the filmmakers knew what they had in hands. Well, of course they did, Clinton being the best natural politician of the last few decades. But Tsongas would have made a better president. No cigars in his Oval Office.
Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993)
yes its very good, but that music
Yes indeed, 'Blue' is a wonderful movie, containing some of the best film-making of the last decades or so. Binoche's role is as perfect as possible. Lighting is splendid, even though the use of filters is quite obvious. But that music! The score is an integral part of the story, or better, the essence of this film, and it is, in one word, horrible. I'm very sorry. This is very bad music. Like Mozart, as one reviewer thought? No way, Mozart is always light, and when he isn't, like in the requiem, he is profound. The score is neither. It's pretty personal, I know. But imagine what an Alban Berg-like score would bring to this movie. Or any twentieth-century informed music for that matter. Here we are stuck with music as boring as a Gorecki-symphony, endearing for a minute or two, but containing absolutely nothing.
Le fils (2002)
breathtaking
For a full, true and truly splendid review, read Ebert. Only this to add: if film is indeed time at work, the Dardennes brothers made a penultimate movie. For instance: a man and a boy in a car. The man is going to ask the boy a question which is too personal but which has to be asked, giving the circumstances. The man, being at the wheel, gazes ahead at the road just long and often enough to drive safely, but otherwise just looks at the boy. We know what he is going to ask. He doesn't, not yet. Near the end, the man has to tell the boy what we have known for some time now. He is going to tell, we are sure of that, but when he does even we are taken aback. Timing. 'Le Fils' is as simple as film can get. True cinema doesn't need budget. It needs a story and the grit to be true to it. 'Le Fils' just does that.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
immensely boring
Part one nearly put me asleep in a crowded cinema, part two finished it off. I'm not kidding, I really slept for several minutes! I like a good action movie almost as much as i like Fellini's 'Otto e Mezzo' or Bergman's 'Persona'. I mean, brainless joyrides and intellectual tedium both keep me awake. Mind you. I read Tolkien twice, rather liked it, but don't belong to the zealots who deem it unfilmable. This film comes fourth in the imdb top 250! What?!? Yes, fourth in the list. 'Commit it then to the flames'.
September (1987)
very underrated
I saw this film twice many many years ago. Most reviewers tend to think it's Allen's worst film to date, but I beg to differ. Although I can't remember any details concerning the plot, I am, after all these years, left with the strong impression that September is a forgotten gem. I would like to see it again.
La ville des pirates (1983)
stunning piece of surrealist filming
Man, would I love to see this film again! The problem is, it has seemed to disappear completely; never shown in theaters or at festivals anymore, never shown on European television. I saw it twice, many years ago, and can't remember much detail, let alone a story-line if there is any. Ruiz' film is a gallery of stunning images, woven together to make a surrealistic masterpiece. A woman sleepwalking through a moonlit mediterranean village; a man on a terrace eating lunch, the camera inside his mouth. And best of all: a kitchen-scene in which someone opens a window and you can actually feel the temperature dropping. A wonderful wonderful film, but i don't know why. Isn't that the essence of all great art? Would I love to see this film again!
Krug vtoroy (1990)
Minimalistic masterpiece by tarkovsky's foremost pupil
The first time I saw Aleksander Sokurov's 'The Second Circle' was during a festival in Groningen, The Netherlands. During the credits that opened the film I thought it would have been better to go home and have a nap. Not because of the credits, they were as forbidding as in other Russian films, but because of my condition, severely undermined by lack of sleep and by the bombardment of Greenaway's 'Prospero's Books'. Anyone who goes to see a Sokurov film in those conditions runs the risk of annoying his fellow viewers with loud snoring. Sokurov's aim is not to keep his audience awake by providing entertainment. You have to be in the best of shapes. Or so I thought. What followed was one and a half hours of utmost concentration on a very slow film the dramatic content of which can be summarized in a few sentences. 'The Second Circle' is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. A son returns to the humble abode of his father after receiving the news of his death. We do not learn who he was and in the same way we learn nothing about the son who has to arrange his funeral. What we do see is a room with a bed. In the bed is a corpse. In case of a corpse there is a strict procedure that has to be followed. A doctor has to confirm the death. The only survivor has to pay a visit to the town hall. A bitch (pardon my French) from the funeral parlor arrives to negotiate the price of the funeral, treating the son like an infant. A coffin is delivered, the corpse is embalmed, put in the coffin and taken down the stairs in upright position. What is left behind is an empty room. The End. As is the case with all Russian films that are favoured by the small circle of cinephiles, you can ask yourself what Sokurov's films are all about. 'Days of Darkness' for instance was a magnificent film, but as a western viewer, not familiar with Russian symbolism, you had to wonder whether you had missed the point. According to Andrei Tarkovsky, Sokurov's shining example, the Russian frame of mind is inaccessible to western viewers. The result is endless interpretation. This is true as well for 'The Second Circle', which has led to elaborate speculation concerning the way in which Sokurov comments on contemporary Russian society. But anyone searching for symbolism in 'The Second Circle' is in my view looking at the wrong film, because Sokurov's little masterpiece is as clear as crystal. The preoccupation with death was already present in films like the aforementioned 'Days of Darkness' and in 'Madame Bovary'. In 'The Second Circle' Sokurov has stripped away the mystifying elements of his previous films and laid bare the essence of our frail existence using minimalistic means. Never before in cinema, in which death is often a welcome guest, has the inevitable goal of human life been lit so poignantly.