brennaus

I was quite eagerly expecting this movie, it's Netflix' first German movie (i.e. produced by Netflix, not bought). Directed and written by Oliver Kienle, one of the writers of "Bad Banks" (German television's excellent drama series on the banking crisis), it sounded quite promising. The story draws its tension from two German neighbouring cities--Heidelberg and Mannheim. While Heidelberg is nice and mostly middle class, Mannheim is a blue collar city. Isi is a girl from Heidelberg, having incredible wealthy parents, living in a castle. She graduated from High School (with the help of some bribery from her parents) and does not want to study economics (as her parents want her to do) but rather go to New York to become a chef. In order to force her parents letting her go abroad, she picks up a proletarian boy from neighbouring Mannheim--aspiring boxer Ossi--pretending him to be her boyfriend. Well, if this premise sounds as if it doesn't make much sense or if you ask yourself who nowadays is living in a castle, those are the more credible parts of this movie. Every single person in this movie is heavily clichéd, the dialogues unnatural and the jokes lame. Surprisingly, taking the director's background into account, the story is very poorly written. I did not care for any of the characters nor the love story (mild spoiler: yes, they do actually fall in love). Overall, quite a disappointment.

I am giving 10 stars for completely subjective reasons. I watched this movie when it came out in the 80's and loved it immediately. After having watched it several times, I almost forgot about it and when I stumbled across a copy in the in Internet (2019), I watched it again--and I am still loving it! Mickey (a very hot Keith Carradine) comes to a nameless town after having escaped from a psychiatric hospital (diagnosed as a pathological liar). He goes to a bar named "Eve's" because he once was married to the previous owner, who had killed herself. He falls in love with the current owner, also named Eve (a very hot Lesley Ann Warren). He also meets other women, most importantly Nancy (a wonderful Geniviéve Bujold), who works as a radio sex therapist "Dr Nancy Love", giving advice to lonely hearts while she herself has some issues, specifically never having had a relationship and suffering from a sort of bipolar disease. The whole movie feels sort of manneristic, e.g. the film starts with a street scene that looks so obviously shot on a stage it could almost be a musical. Apropos music: the story is driven by a superb soundtrack by Teddy Pendergrass. The movie is about love, sex, truth, and deception. What I love about it is the mixture of art house movie (director Alan Rudolph is a protege of Robert Altman) and very emotional love stories. I you have a chance to watch this movie--do it, you won't regret it!

A strange movie I saw at the SXSW movie festival. The claim of Jessica Oreck's movie is, "A true story, set in the future". It is based on the 3-years siege of Stalingrad in World War II, when under the siege of the German army, more than on fourth of the population starved to death. The movie contains a lot of authentic voices from survivors of the siege, but the film takes place "in the near future". The look and feel of the movie, however, is more of a 60s Soviet-era--small, torn-down Ikea-less flats, old CRT monitors, shabby clothing. In the film, the city (of course, then called "Leningrad" again) is under siege. The main protagonists, a young couple of biologists--Alyssa and Maksim--work at the world famous N.I. Valivov institute, a resource for mankind's genetic treasure of plants and seeds. The institute was founded in 1921 and, indeed, the scientists under the 1943-45 siege were rather starving to death than eating the bank's precious plants and seeds. A strange, and impressive film, mostly shot in b/w at the authentic locations in Russian language. With minimal resources, the director (about whom I know little) re-enacts a story about Leningrad's citizens' suffering and bravery.