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Berlinale 2015, Day 3 (Tokyo-ga)

At the Berlinale, there is almost nothing as great as being able to stay seated in a cinema for two movies in a row. I know it sounds silly but I absolutely love this. Sadly, they threw us out for a moment to do some testing (on the last day at another “staying seated” situation, I saw them do these tests and there really was no reason to throw us out for that), but at least we were able to save ourselves the best seats and get back in again first.
With that said, when we were standing in front of the line, all three of us left the line at some point to go to the restroom, and all of us walked through the line to get back in front without anyone complaining. 6451 says this must be the confident “I belong to the front of the line” face we were making.
By the way, every single time I managed to schedule myself to be able to stay seated in the cinema, it was in CinemaxX 8. Seems like that one is like my Berlinale movie theater.

drrt

Tokyo-ga
Germany/USA 1985, Wim Wenders, 93′

Wim Wenders goes to Japan trying to walk in Ozu’s footsteps. He gets to interview Chishu Ryu and Ozu’s longtime cameraman, and he films Japan with the eyes of someone who, well, has never seen Japan before. Oh and he makes Werner Herzog say a few deprecating words on Tokyo and gets a super short shot of Chris Marker too, which is very telling because “Tokyo-ga” looks like a better “Sans soleil” rather than a documentary on Ozu.

I think 6451 was mostly bored in the film, and I am not actually sure if he has seen any Ozu films. As a fan of Ozu’s late films (most of the material is actually about “Tokyo Monogatari” and his later stuff), having seen all but two of his colour films, I was excited to see how his collaborators view his work. Simply put, they treat him like a God or something, and Chishu Ryu, who seems like an awesome actor and a genuinely soft person, talks about how he only learned from Ozu and how they had a father-son relationship despite being basically the same age. His cameraman was similar: Ozu had full control about how the camera had to look and how the shot had to be made, so for most of the film I thought all he did was to set up the camera and carry it around. Then he finally mentioned how he had control over the lighting, which I thought was pretty nice, and I think Ozu is gravely overlooking the importance of that. The way everybody spoke about him like he was an authoritative, beloved boss of all was rather weird. I know that directors have a lot of power (and heard that Mankiewicz slept with his actresses, Bergman had relationships with them, Cukor talked to them and Preminger essentially enslaved them), but this reverence in front of Ozu disturbed me a little.
Nevertheless, I was elated to get to know more about the way Ozu worked and have to conclude again that he was simply a genius. I am a huge fan of the posed calmness of his films and hearing all these people talking about film-making technicalities makes me want to make a movie.

Other than the Ozu parts, most of “Tokyo-ga” was about what a shitty place Tokyo turned into. Wenders really got into studying the weirdest aspects of Japan, like its pachinko parlors, the young folk in Harajuku and so on. Much more than Chris Marker, he seems to have a good eye for these weirdnesses, but to me it was actually rather off-putting. This really is the perspective of an outsider who looks at Japanese people like they are zoo animals and acts like a little kid who says “Look mommy, the big panda just moved!” I think 6451 was rather excited to see Werner Herzog in the film, but the stuff he talked about was confusing at best. There was one aspect that I really liked, which is how Wenders visited a factory for restaurant display food. I liked learning about how these little models are made, and I enjoyed his comment about how their lunch break consists of the workers sitting together at a table in their workshop, eating food that looks just like all the fake food surrounding them. I laughed a little at that one.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 3 (Yolanda and the Thief)

It’s only been 4 days since the Berlinale is over, but it feels like the world has changed a whole lot. O being sick, Chinese New Year, losing my phone (and retrieving it) and the sudden realization that I have put my life on hold for 2 weeks and now have to recover and return to normal. It’s strangely difficult to me to put myself into the mindset of myself of just 9 days ago, when 6451 was still there and most of my worries revolved around the Berlinale. It’s like that was a completely different life, and now I find it quite joyful to relive it through these blog posts.

In fact, my biggest worry of the day was that we might not get into “Yolanda and the Thief” and then we would have to find something to do during that time slot. It all worked out well and we got our tickets, but in retrospect the alternative (a nice dinner) wouldn’t have been so bad. In the end, it was one of the best days of the Berlinale because the three of us were able to watch films together (by that definition, day 3 and 4 were the only actual mini-PIFF portion of the Berlinale!) and I was not yet sick that day. In case you are wondering, of course I am still sick but thankfully less so than O.

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Yolanda and the Thief
USA 1945, Vincente Minnelli, 108′

Fred Astaire is a crook and runs from the police to a country with no extradition treaty with the US. There, he tries to scam Yolanda, the richest heiress of the country, by pretending to her guardian angel and by the way also over her heart. A bunch of silly situations and some great dance scenes ensue.

To be honest, I have never actually seen a Vincente Minnelli movie but have wanted to do so ever since last year’s Berlinale when John Michael McDonagh commented that the Zoo Palast has lavish “Vincente Minnelli curtains”. Now that I have seen “Yolanda and the Thief”, I totally agree with that assessment. The film had a somewhat strange look due to the fake exoticism of the decor but oh everything is wonderfully lavish and so suited for a musical. Even the dream sequences were imaginative and awesome.

Before almost every film, there is some idiot introducing it and this time, we had some guy who kept harping over and over on how “Yolanda and the Thief” is a bad but good-looking film, how Lucille Bremer lacks Judy Garland’s warmth (whatever that is) and the charisma to become a star, and how we should not have high expectations for the film. Nonsense. OK, the movie doesn’t really make sense at times and the story may not be the most, but that is just how musicals are. Also, Lucille Bremer is an absolute beauty in my book, and she did a reall good job in her role except for the fact that, well, Fred Astaire outdances her any second. It’s a little tough when the guy dances so much better than the girl (and it makes me wonder how Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers look together), but that is OK – their dance scenes were still awesome and the very last one was the highlight of the film and singlehandedly made it worthwhile our time. I overheard a conversation by the staff, where one woman said how she didn’t see the film but was able to catch that dance scene and she loved it. So yeah, Gorp, I am officially cured of my dislike against musical films; I now totally love the genre, especially when Fred Astaire and dance scenes are involved.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 3 (The Diary of a Teenage Girl)

So O got sick and this ends my crazy blogging spree. I also deliberately postponed all those backlogged films because I had this incredible urge to write about the Berlinale – and I am genuinely hoping that I will finish blogging for this year before March starts, which is another month bringing much excitement and stress, with O’s birthday and a trip to S’pore coming up. But there is much to do: More trips to plan, many many e-mails to write and a mess of a room to clean up.

This is day 3 of the Berlinale already, because on day 2 I lost my student ID which also had my ticket for public transportation. I called 6451 and was unable to make it to Ototo. Afterwards we spent 4 hours at the opera seeing “Tannhäuser” so technically there also was no day 2 of the Berlinale. Instead, day 3 was relatively busy. It is interesting to note that, while 6451 managed to see 5 films per day twice, I never watched more than 3 films on one day except for the last day when I re-watched “Paris, Texas”. Since I do not plan to reblog “Paris, Texas” (my old review was actually not so bad), I technically also will never blog about more than 3 films per day, but this is where Pixelmatsch will come in with his films, hoho.
Speaking of Pixelmatsch, he actually did see a film on day 2. I was “Koza” which he recommended so I ended up seeing it by myself later on.

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl
USA 2014, Marielle Heller, 102′

Living in 1970s San Francisco, Minnie’s mother is Kristen Wiig with an alternative, laissez-faire, drug- and smoke-filled life who is divorced from some stuck-up lawyer (I think?) and dates a younger (30ish?) dude, Monroe, played by Alexander Skarsgard. Minnie hits it off with Monroe at age 15 and gradually falls in love with him, so melodrama and a lot of sex scenes ensue. At the same time, she struggles with discovering her sexuality, her general boredom with life and the world and her aspirations to become a comic artist.

Who would not have a crush on Alexander Skarsgard? He is styled to look like a wimp in this film, but boy how good-looking is he? Nevertheless, I applaud him for his willingness to play such an asshole. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” is one of the few films I am expecting to come out in theaters later, but I still wanted to see it. I was strangely intrigued by the story, and the Generation films only cost 4 euros so that is another reason for me to see it. I am glad I did because 6451 also liked the film.

To be honest, I actually really liked the sex scenes, especially the one with Minnie’s younger boyfriend, just to how much of a failure he is. I could relate to his statement that she is a very passionate person to the point of being creepy, and Minnie is generally very relatable to me. I complained to 6451 that her character is ultimately an asshole too, especially when she decides to dump Monroe the very moment he shows her his vulnerability and confesses his love, but he rightfully commented that it may be morally wrong but ultimately it’s very human and realistic. In that regard, the whole movie is amazingly done for its realism.
Needless to say, I really like the graphic novel inserts and Minnie’s art which I thought looked absolutely awesome and not all that disturbing at all.

Nevertheless, you won’t find “Diary” very high up in my rankings. The characters were far from being likable, the plot was strangely generic even though it tries to show the complicatedness of feelings, there just was something juvenile about the whole film and not necessarily in a good way. (Did the mom really have to find her diary? That part was just so so cheap.) I can’t even really explain it, but to me the film lacked depth, both in its story and its execution.

By the way, I really liked Minnie’s actress. She is exactly the right kind of ugly for the role, her huge, cow-like eyes and the pursed lips are just awesome. I loved watching her and I wonder if she will become more popular as an actress from here on.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 1 (Love, Theft and other Entanglements)

As I mentioned before, my first Berlinale day was actually a very, very full one. I saw 3 films and one opera and by the end of the day, I was of course positively tired. This was the first film of the Berlinale I saw with Loris, and it ended up being a good start into a satisfying Berlinale. This was also the only Panorama film I saw (Pixelmatsch saw “Que horas ela volta?” and 6451 saw “Tell spring not to come this year”) if you don’t count “Ode to my father” which ran in the Panorama Special. I was genuinely hoping that it would win the Panorama audience prize, but in the end “Que horas ela volta?” got it, which was also nice.

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Al-Hob wa Al-Sariqa wa Mashakel Ukhra (Love, Theft and Other Entanglements)
Palestine 2015, Muayad Alayan, 93′

The story revolves around Mousa who steals a car, not realizing that it belongs to the Palestine militia and holds a kidnapped Israeli soldier they want to use to exchange for prisoners. Being threatened by both the Israeli and the Palestine militia, Mousa is now a whole new world of trouble adding to his old ones (being the lover of a married woman, not having a job, needing money to leave the country) and he spends much of the film escaping one tricky situation into another.

The cinema was packed, probably because the idea of watching a film from Palestine is intriguing (and to be honest, it was one of the reasons we saw it too). We were happy that the film seemed like fun, and it really was. It had fun and, from what I could tell, not overly Western humor, with lots of slapstick but also in the way the characters interacted with each other. We laughed a lot whole lot throughout the film.

I was mostly a fan of the relationship between the protagonist and the Israeli soldier. I loved those little moments in which they struck up a friendship, both being simple men and ultimately just a tiny screw in the big whole machine of war and politics. In comparison to that, I absolutely did not care about the women. I would have been perfectly happy if she only appeared in the very first scene of the story to show how Mousa has a generally unstable life (including an unstable, mostly meaningless affair), only to never show up again. Sadly she never really gained any depth as a character, and anything related to her was just ultimately less interesting. Loris likes to joke about how the film would have been perfect if it had skipped on the love and it was only “theft and other entanglements” and I wholeheartedly agree. Also, why did they have to put that strange make-up and hairdo on her, only to prettify her immensely in the last scene of the film?

They had a Q&A session at the end of the film, and boy that was painful. It was so late that I just wanted to leave, but out of curiosity we stayed a little. Ultimately the filmmakers did an amazing job fending the stupid questions. When they were asked about politics, they told little anecdotes about how they got “caught” with the actor wearing an Israeli uniform tied up at the back of the trunk and had to explain what it was all about. Then one of them had a “toy” gun as stage prop in his backpack and forgot about how it was there when they were being checked. They talked about the irony that while the whole area was heavily militarized, people were still immensely afraid of normal people carrying guns. It was actually a very well-done Q&A with a bunch of very likable, competent people for whom politics may be complicated emotionally, but it can also be taken with a grain of salt even in their dire situation. With a main character who screams “You took away our country” to his Israeli interrogator, the film actually makes a very good case for the political problems of Palestine. It’s not all that complicated really – they simply took away their country, and not only it is difficult to fight, it’s difficult to even survive as a person with some sort of dignity.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 1 (The River)

Work and university meant that the Queen and I watched sometimes different movies, sometimes the same ones on different dates (Koza!). This movie was me and our lovely 6451 who made good use of my couch and appreciated it beautifully! <3

drrt

The River
USA 1951, Jean Renoir, 99′

Insecure, poetic teenage Harriet lives with her parents, too many sisters and a little brother in a comfortable estate near the Ganges, somewhere in Bengal. Her neighbour invites his cousin Captain John, an American war veteran, to live with him on his plantation. Soon she, her slightly older best friend and the neighbour’s half-Indian daughter compete fo the handsome young man’s attention.

This movie is a thing of beauty! India itself is ridiculously colourful and Renoir really wanted to show this, what better use could there be for Technicolor? While there are no special, dramatic filming techniques, all shots are professionally crafted and the colour palette while not exaggerated like in some other Technicolor movies of the time, is rich and vivid and really helps convey the exotic beauty of India. The Indian Tourism Board must have been proud! The colourful saris and temples draw you in, together with the lush nature, but the sensible grading never makes the colours overbearing or pop too much.

The English families in this movies are an interesting bunch. Usually you would dismiss the story as colonialist fantasy and certainly there are elements like that in the movie. However they seem more like modern day expats: The children mingle with the local kids, the house celebrates a weird mix of Christianity and Hinduism, the indian nanny is basically family and of course the neighbour is a proper indophile with his half-Indian daughter. In those respects they are even better integrated than current-day expats. The story itself is a little dated with the main motive stressing how a handsome, charismatic man like Captain John is every woman’s secret goal in life. All in all however you can ignore this weird philosophy and just appreciate the movie as a beautiful, colourful ode to affluent life in rural India.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 1 (You’re ugly too)

6451 didn’t get into “Jahrgang 45” (good for him, in the end) so Loris kindly gave him his ticket for “You’re ugly too”. He figured we were going to go to see an opera and another movie later that day anyways, which is already a lot for one day. So in the end, another ‘tradition’ continued: I went to the premiere of an Irish film in the Zoopalast and, most surprisingly, got an autograph from the actor of the protagonist. Last year it was Brendan Gleeson, this year it was Aidan Gillen. Just like last year, he was sitting there in front and I just went and asked. Since I was reading “Dead Souls” on my tablet, I did not carry a book with me, but ever since Pip gave me a bunch of notebooks, I always have one with me which came in handy today. Yay! Also, they are doing something with Aidan Gillen’s face. He always plays these rugged, wrinkly characters (“You’re ugly too” is no different) that I was shocked when I stood in front of him. I honestly wondered whether I got the right person because his face was so young and smooth looking, like he’s a 25 year old with gray hair. I was baffled.

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You’re ugly too
Ireland 2014, Mark Noonan, 81′

Stacey is your average 12 year old – kind of pretty, foul-mouthed, sarcastic and a bit of a know-it-all. When she becomes an orphan, her uncle Will gets let out of prison to take care of her. At first, they don’t make a good match. She is suspicious of him and his unwillingness to tell her why he went to prison, and he lives a somewhat shitty life in a trailer park. He has alcohol and drug problems, has trouble finding a job and it’s not easy for him to approach Stacey’s cynical character. They befriend a neighboring family and Will and the wife fall in love. But then Stacey finds out what Will did, and after she runs away, Will’s ability to take care of Stacey is being doubted by the authorities.

To be honest, there is not much to say about the film. It easily reminded me of St. Vincent because you also have a child and an older guy who on the surface seems like a butt but actually is a good person. Thankfully there are a bunch of differences: Stacey is less normal (much more funny and cynical, but also more complicated) and Will is not just some grumpy old dude. On the one hand, he has actual issues, on the other hand, he genuinely loves Stacey. This makes for more genuine human interaction, and while I didn’t always think it was believable how they became closer (there was way more on that with Will and that neighbor), I think they had a lot of great chemistry together. It was ultimately a very funny, enjoyable film.

They had a Q&A afterwards and the kids asked some amazing questions. “Do they get married at the end?” (referring to Will and said neighbor) was one of these. Noonan kept the ending deliberately vague, and you don’t know if Will and Stacey end up living together or not. The kids voiced that their optimism about that, Mark Noonan was vague in his answer but Aidan Gillen (haha) pretty much shot them off and said that he thinks the main character has too many alcohol and drug and depression issues to take care of Stacey and she knows that. Oh it’s so like Aidan Gillen to prefer gloomy characters, but personally I thought that the family bond between the two came through at the end. They may not be able to live together, but there is love. Another question I really liked was: “How did you come up with the idea for the movie?” Noonan said he was chatting with Aidan Gillen’s mom who complained about he’s always evil and his films are always so serious and wanted to see him in a comedy. So here we are, a role basically written for Littlefinger.
With that said, it was Lauren Kinsella’s birthday (coincidence or was the birthday actually 3 days ago?) and I was impressed by how proper she looked and spoke. She is totally a professional and very good with the media, so she is probably actually a very good actress.

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Berlinale 2015, Day 1 (Jahrgang 45)

As the Berlinale ends, the Berlinale begins! (The blogging, that is.) Have you been looking forward to my our coverage of the Berlinale this year? It was a very split up business. 6451 came to visit and saw a bunch of films that Pixelmatsch and I couldn’t see. I also ended up seeing a lot of films with Loris while Pixelmatsch had a bigger focus on other Japanese films. (Between the two of us, we saw every single movie from this list except for “Wonderful World End” and “Little Forest” which we expect to be able to see later on anyways.) Finally, Pixelmatsch and I went to different screenings of some films (“Koza”, “End of Winter”) because of his work scheduling. All in all, we all went to the Berlinale but sadly didn’t see each other that much. Also, since O was sick and Pixelmatsch and 6451 went to see Lucia di Lammermoor on Friday, technically this Berlinale started on Saturday and will therefore have 9 instead of 10 days.

This time, my Berlinale did not start out with an exceptionally good film (it was a decent copy of French Nouvelle Vague at best) nor was it Japanese. That is OK, because it meant the Berlinale only got better afterwards.

drrt

Jahrgang 45
German Democratic Republic 1966/1990, Jürgen Böttcher, 94′

Idle young dude has a boring steady job, got married at 21 and now that he is on vacation from work, he wants to leave his boring wife again. Actually she isn’t even that boring, she just matured and took a genuine interest her profession of being a nurse. The entire world (his mentor, his parents, his friends who also are hot for the wife) advise him against divorcing, even at work his boss meddles into the affair. After a bunch of immature affairs (moving out, trying to seduce his ex-girlfriend, making a jealousy scene at a club and fighting afterwards), dude has a moment of epiphany when seeing another couple being lovey-dovey together and reconciles with his wife.

You can probably tell that I wasn’t particularly enamored with the story nor with its characters. In a relationship movie, I am especially not fond of these stories where clearly one party is in the wrong whereas the other one just deals with it. Antoine Doinel is a prime example for that, and if I think about it, most of those French Nouvelle Vague films have the same problem. In this case, however, the relationship is the main focus of the story and it kind of missed its mark for me. It lacks both the passion and the seductive light-heartedness that I know so well from films like “Jules et Jim” or “Une femme est une femme”. Only the exceedingly pretty ex-girlfriend kind of exuded that air, but she was such a stupidly one-sided character. I am also not much into the portrayal of these people. I don’t have much love for that bored, idle youth of the time, especially from today’s point of view: that is the generation who easily got jobs after lazing around forever, wasted money like crazy and is now making the younger generation pay taxes for their convenient retirement, so no thank you. Nevertheless there is one thing to be said about this film – it’s so darn good-looking! I think I’m just jealous of that generation which was free, politically naive and so effortlessly stylish. I drooled over those 60s hairstyles and dresses, over their lives in their pretty tiny apartments and the fun at their dance clubs. The film may be a shameless copy of Godard and Truffaut’s early work almost a decade earlier down to their camera angles, jump cuts and styling, but it was a good copy. I simply liked how it looked, and the humorous scenes in the film were much fun.

Oh yeah, before the film started the director also held a long-winded, annoyingly sappy speech about how he touched he is and how never thought the movie would ever come out after it failed to pass censorship in 1966 etc. etc. Can’t they save that for after the movie? Younger directors all have the decency to first show the film before going on about themselves. So embarrassing.

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If I lose my hearing, I would like a Google Glass with real-life subtitling

drrt

Amour

First of all, I need to talk a little bit about the circumstances in which I watched this movie. (If you don’t want to read this, skip to paragraph 2.) It was on a Delta flight from Minnesota to Amsterdam, 8 hours on the plane alone with 20 month old O on my lap, which was most likely the worst flight I have ever had. The flight attendants scolded me for walking down the aisle, so I put O into my lap against his wishes and he kicked his legs in response. Needless to say, the flight attendants scolded me for that again. “Ma’am, it’s your responsibility to control your child.” Hello? Did she expect me to hold his legs at all times? Does she have any idea what kind of crying would ensue? (The solution would have been to let that annoying lady before me sit somewhere else, which incidentally was what they did when her husband suddenly had a heart problem during the flight.) Then one of them forgot me when serving water, which pretty much has never happened to me before in my life. Since we really needed water I confronted the flight attendant who proceeded to lie to my face about how she looked at me and I said “nothing”. Yeah, right, after being thirsty forever and waiting for her to finally reach my row I said “nothing” to her? (Apparently this was their MO, they also failed to give my neighbor sugar for her tea, and when she asked for it, they failed to give her an item to stir the tea). Actually, I don’t even want to think about this anymore (that is how much that experience horrified me), but I also find it important to keep this in mind just in case I go through another hellish flight again. Ironically, Delta is supposed to be one of the better airlines for travelling with children (and to be fair, things went really, really well on the way there, just like our Newark-Berlin trip with Delta last year), but this crew just killed me. To be honest, I am used to people being really smitten with O on airplanes. He is the cute, doe-eyed, puffy-cheeked, super quiet obedient type who gets compliments by strangers on his good behavior a lot, and I tend to be pretty amenable to his needs in order to prevent tantrums (i.e. if he is bored, he gets to walk down the aisle a bit), so in this case I refuse to believe that we were the problem. It was their problem for sure.
We are flying Air France next time, by the way, so we will see how it goes with a European airline, which are supposed to be better. This is not a surprise. People in Europe fly much less with their children, while in the US (especially those flights in the middle of the country) average one child per row, so it is comparably easier to be nice if, say, a flight of 600 people only has 3 children like O instead of 20.

I also had another problem, which kind of relates to those incredulous flight attendants. The flight status thingy was broken and I could not reach my phone. On a good flight, I could ask the flight attendants passing by about the time, and they would tell me. This time, the guy grumpily said “we have been in the air for half an hour” which made me realize that the asking nicely thing is not going to work. Fast forward a few hours later, O fell asleep and I wanted something to tell me how long he has been sleeping. So I decided to watch a movie and my choice fell on “Amour”. I had no headphones (and I wanted to monitor O’s sleep) so I actually watched the entire film without sound.

The weirdest aspect about watching this film without any sound is that I also could not be emotionally influenced by the music choices. I have absolutely no idea how the piano playing sounded like, I don’t know how the voices of the people sounded like and I don’t know if the crucial scenes in the film even contained any music. As a result, my impression of this litte chamber piece entirely relies upon the dialogue as translated subtitles and the visuals. Considering that, “Amour” left an astonishing impression on me, I was glued to the screen and felt with the characters intensely. While it’s a long time ahead till we have to seriously think about aging and declining health, the premise of the film and the way Haneke presented the human drama of caring for a loved one who can only get worse and worse deeply spoke to me. Heck, how can it not speak to anyone? (It may not if you don’t love people, I suppose.) I feel silly for this posting to be more about why I watched “Amour” without sound than about “Amour” itself, but I also don’t think that this film needs a lot of words. It’s basically perfection. Also, Emmanuelle Riva’s frail, wrinkle-ridden face is about the most beautiful face I have ever seen. (Sure, she was hot as a young woman too, but actually less beautiful.) I think that face and her dignified beauty at old age make the film even stronger, because much of her suffering comes from her character not being able to preserve her dignity.

I think I would watch the film over and over again, and I definitely should see it one more time with sound, huh?

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Did you know that I never watched the third Lord of the Rings movie?

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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

I never watched the third part because my love for the whole thing was strangely waning. I read the books (and the Silmarillion and so much secondary literature, including a lot of Tolkien’s language nerding stuff), but two years later, when the last film came out, I was not dating the person anymore who I watched the first movie with and was really turned off by the idea of a one-hour long good-bye scene. (Actually the person I dated afterwards was also into Lord of the Rings and owned all three films in the extended edition, but my disinterest in spending 3 hours on them was stronger.) I still loved the book and didn’t want it ruined by the film (which “The Two Towers” did a little bit). I never forgave the franchise of making the Aragorn-Arwen lovestory so incredibly awkward, and the awkwardness certainly has not improved in “The Hobbit”.

Actually by the third instalment of “The Hobbit”, I was resigned to the fact that it would involve a really awkward love story, and obviously it did. I knew that Kili would die (whoever didn’t want to be spoiled about this one deserved it, because you should have read the books ;) ) and the part surrounding his death was then terribly predictable. Predictability was a general problem in this film because they needed to tie the ends and they needed to do it according to the book. So we were served a few lovely action scenes (albeit I preferred the ones from movies 1 and 2) and all these storylines you were always wondering about before were brought to a somewhat satisfying end. That’s what the last “Hobbit” movie was: satisfying. They were a lot of “ugh this is so stupid” moments but I left the movie theater with some feeling of closure, which is more than I could have expected from the first film.

But most of all, the movie makes me feel so old! It’s been so long since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, and I have such fond feelings of that time. It’s mostly because of this nostalgia that I insisted on watching the last film in theaters (I was so busy during that time, we definitely would not have otherwise), and I am actually glad that Pip only saw the first two (which were definitely superior films). If they turned the Silmarillion into movies, I would definitely watch it.

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Jessica Paré is sexier in a schoolgirl outfit than in “Zou Bisou Bisou”

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Lost and Delirious

Ahh, the Berlinale is coming up but I still have two movies from last year to blog (and a huge backlog of e-mails I have not worked on at all). What is wrong with me these days? I have to admit that real life is quite overwhelming, and writing a more or less lengthy e-mail to Pip every day does not inspire me to write even more. It’s like I poured my brain’s entire content into those e-mails and afterwards I just do not want to produce written words anymore. Well, now that my excitement for the Berlinale is rising, I am a little more motivated to not get way too far behind with my backlogs.

Ironically, after watching “Lost and Delirious” I actually spent a lot of time thinking about it. Perhaps the end was shown in an overly dramatic way (I mean come on, that bird?), but there was something about the film that made me deeply emphasize with its characters. I could easily get behind Paulie’s desperation and her straight-forward heartbreak over being broken up with by the girl she loves and who so clearly loves her too (albeit in a dick-ish way – Tory pretty much broke every single break-up etiquette rule, especially the post-break-up-I-still-have-feelings-for-you scene was horrifying to me). But they are teenagers, they behave like teenagers and there is something so strangely true in the somewhat clichéd portrait of their feelings. When we were in Paris, I was fairly close to 307 who I now sadly completely lost contact to (and no I have not really gotten over it), and she said “Lost and Delirious” was her favorite movie. I can totally see why the film spoke to her.

I thought it was odd that the narrator of the story does absolutely nothing in this film. She’s the mousiest character I have ever seen on screen (heck they even named her “mouse”!) and contributes nothing more than looks of shock and a pretty face (I think Mischa Barton is totally hot here in a demure-hot kind of way). It seems that she is a much more interesting character in the book, that she has funny monologues with herself and such – this is the kind of case where the movie version should just have completely kicked that character out if it’s unable to do it justice. I thought the film made a lot of.

Oh yeah, and Jessica Parés boobies are so darn huge and shockingly well-shaped. I thought she was very, very good-looking as object of desire in this film. If you are into her that way, “Lost and Delirious” is a must, otherwise it was an interesting watch and the abundant feelings of teenage love lingered with me for a bit, but I would not necessarily recommend the film.