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Berlinale 2013, day 5 (the value of continuity)

drrt

Before Midnight
USA, Greece 2013, Richard Linklater, 108′

9 years after their last encounter, Jesse and Céline are married with adorable twin girls and spending the summer in Greece. Much talking is done.

TL;DR Just watch it, it’s what you expect.

Of course, most of the time they talk. The first third is banal middle aged banter with their Greek friends over dinner, which even though it is banal is absolutely enjoyable as they all are wonderfully candid and just like in any movie with at least one French/Italian/Spanish/Greek/etc. person everything devolves into talk about sex and gender. The second third is extremely reminiscent of the first two movies: after they have learned that their friends have gifted them one night of freedom from the kids at a hotel they walk through the beautifully cliché village to the hotel. Doing what? Talking of course. Then for the remainder, just when they are about to have sex they get into a really big fundamental argument. It seems a little strange that they argue about things like her doing the housework on top of working, etc. That is so last century. Or at least it should be for civilised Europeans. So even though the dialogue sometimes seems a little dated it is exactly what you expected: Another great entry in the row of “Before…” movies. Let’s see what they will come up with in 9 years.

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Berlinale 2013, day 4 (the value of working days)

So this day was great for getting tickets as people finally went back to work.

drrt

Narco Cultura
USA 2012, Shaul Schwarz, 103′

The documentary follows the lives of two people, one living as a crime investigator in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico right along the border next to El Paso and the leader of a band profiting among others of the rising wave of Movimiento Alterado, a glorification of the cartels that has spawned in recent years.

TL;DR drugs (or rather cartels) are really really really bad, m’kay?

I am thoroughly disgusted by the matter documented. I mean that in the best possible way. The documentary is shot in a very modern photographic style (the director is a professional photographer after all) with tilt-shift and the like and in an attempt to stay balanced switches between the two main themes. One is the crime scene investigator living in Ciudad Juarez. It shows how the whole town and especially what is left of law enforcement is either paid off by the cartel or has to live in fear for their lives, a feeling that has completely crippled all recreational and business activity in Juarez which in turn fuels the ranks of the cartel with young jobless men. The other is the very successful young leader of BuKnas de Culiacan, a group writing and performing Narco Corridos which are basically cartel-glorifying folk songs. After watching this, it is nauseating to look at their very real myspace page, you kind of want to believe that all this surreal “culture” around the cartels does not exist in reality. I also wonder how many fans of their facebook page are dead due to cartel violence, that would the juiciest irony. It is so surreal to watch the part about BuKnas because you have this guy in his mid-twenties with a wife and two small kids sing about cartel life and killing while he is sitting in L.A. and being safe. Then you see their concerts all over the U.S. and Mexico where loads of people just adore them and sing the lyrics as if it is “Barbie Girl”. The level of hypocrisy in those people was indescribably revolting. Of course after those scenes the director cuts back to Juarez to show the practically dead city which is kind of cheap as a technique but you wonder if it is even possible to further embellish the tragedy and idiocy going on. Definitely watch this if you get a hold of it, it shook me up quite a bit as you can see.

drrt

Sakura namiki no mankai no shita ni (Cold Bloom, ?????????)
Japan 2012, Atsushi Funahashi, 119′

Kenji and Shiori are a young married couple working together in a small factory near the Touhoku coast, not very far from the place where the tsunami and nuclear accident happened in 2011. Due to the situation the small supplier of automotive parts struggles together with the bigger companies. One day after the quite skilled Kenji has helped land a big deal with another company he is accidentally killed by Takumi, a coworker and the deals falls through. Almost everybody including Shiori hates Takumi from this point on and blames him for the decline of the factory. The more cruel and lazy workers actually start bullying him but slowly Shiori falls for the man who killed her husband.

TL;DR love in the strangest places

Regular Asian art cinema at its best. The director has become really good at creating moods and choosing great shots, other than that there is really not much to say about the technical aspects. It feels very refreshing that the story does not have cheap cop-outs, I would call it both the saddest and most drama-free love story ever, the dreary mood is sometimes suffocating, but the hopeful and beautiful moments are done wonderfully and have a nice contrast to the rest. Definitely recommend it both as a story and as a document to sentiments of small-town Touhoku post-3/11.

Christoph Terhechte, the section chief of the Berlinale Forum must be a weeaboo. Not only is he able to pronounce all the Japanese names correctly, he has also made sure that Atsushi Funahashi premieres all his movies at the Berlinale. Last year we had Nuclear Nation, the cancelled love story mentioned there is actually this movie and earlier I watched Yanaka Boshoku. Funahashi said that he loves coming here and it somehow feels homey with the audience and their strong interest in his small movies, as he calls them. As was already said, in 2011 he had to cancel the movie because the location was literally gone and funding for all filming in Japan was stopped. Only after he made Nuclear Nation he was able to scrape together funding again and do the movie he planned. He says that the basic plot, which is about the inexplicable 180-degree-turns we sometimes make with our feelings towards people, stayed unchanged however most of the dreary and dark atmosphere in the movie only appeared during this attempt of making the film while trying to convey the situation people in northeast Japan have to face after the catastrophes.

drrt

Kujira no machi (The Town of Whales, ??????)
Japan 2012, Keiko Tsuruoka, 70′

Machi, Tomohiko and Hotaru are childhood friends, attending high school together somewhere in the rural outskirts of Tokyo. One day while they try to decide what to do through summer break, Machi receives peaches from a friend of her missing brother. They decide to go to Tokyo to find her brother. That Hotaru loves Tomohiko who loves Machi does not really help though.

TL;DR Kids. Not the ones from Brooklyn doing drugs and fucking around, though.

Stylistically unremarkable but for a first feature (it was the director’s graduation work) very solid cute little coming-of-age movie. Though it may not be too refined the atmosphere and characters are nicely fleshed out and though they are typical kids in puberty and sometimes a little annoying and childish you can easily feel sympathetic with them and enjoy their little adventure in Tokyo.

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Berlinale 2012, day 4 (Marching)

Oh boy, I think half of ex-Yugoslavia came to watch Parada. Half the theatre laughed at distinctly different timings: One half to the subtitles, the other to the spoken dialogue. I’ll brag a little and say that I fell into the latter category a few times.

drrt

Parada
Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia 2011, Srdjan Dragojevic, 115′

A Serbian small-time gangster and war veteran wants to marry his girlfriend and somehow ends up needing to protect his gay wedding planner who wants to organise a gay pride parade in Belgrad even though groups of nationalists and skinheads have promised to destroy any attempt at doing so. He rounds up an impossible troupe of Croatians, Muslim Bosnians and Kosovarians and in the process learns a lot about life.

Seldom have you seen a movie that rides so much on every possible stereotype for joke material, be it homosexuals, nationalist skinheads, trashy girlfriends or any of the Yugoslavian people. It is very easy for such a film to turn positively revolting with banality. “Parada” however absolutely avoids this, because none of those groups is spared and while everyone dishes out on each other, they also take all “abuse” with a big heap of self-irony as they get to know each other. It was full of lovely little details, such as one scene where the Serb and the Croat make a cross: Catholics (Slovenians and Croats) first touch the left shoulder, while Orthodox (Serbs) will touch the right shoulder first. It showed quite realistically that people bond over the most banal things and that this is really all it takes sometimes. Our gangster’s evolution was just lovely, he starts out like a typical macho gangster but almost from the first minute it is absolutely clear that he really is a good person at heart and just needs a good thorough reality check. All of it beautifully transported the endearingly naive hope that somehow everything will work out if we just stop hating each other and start to listen.

drrt

Highway
Nepal, USA 2011, Deepak Rauniyar. 80′

A man and his wife have trouble conceiving. He travels into the mountains to talk with a healer. He receives a potion but it will only work for 36 hours so now he has to return as quickly as possible to Kathmandu. The bus he travels on is full of people who also need to be somewhere for various reasons, but progress is slow with road blockades, accidents, traffic jams and an ageing bus.

A very solid first work. The shots and colours make for great visuals, helped by the either exotic or plain beautiful sights of Nepal. The music is mostly fitting; not every piece feels right, sometimes it is a little off but it does never really hurts the atmosphere. Throughout the journey we learn about the passengers; who they are, what makes them take up the arduous journey to Kathmandu. The stories and their placement manage to tell just about enough to be interesting but are always short enough not to take away the feeling of a road movie. For anyone who has at least a little curiosity it is a quite rewarding look into a few typical issues of life in modern Nepal

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Berlinale 2011, day 9 (fangirls encore)

Hyun Bin again. The Korean girl-mob was civil until, completely unannounced, the director was followed by Hyun Bin coming on stage for the Q&A. Girls of all ages went wild, even some non-Koreans in-the-know and the rest of the audience immediately applied their best WTF-face. The poor director stated that he’s quite nervous with so many people staring intently at him but then added that the vast majority is probably looking at Hyun Bin so he feels a little less burdened.

drrt

Man Chu (Late Autumn, ??)
South Korea, Hong Kong, China, USA 2010, Kim Tae-Yong, 113′

Anna, a foreign-born Chinese woman spending a term in prison for murdering her husband gets bailed out for three days to attend her mother’s funeral in Seattle. On the way, she meets Hoon, a Korean call-boy who immediately takes an interest in her and they end up spending her time in Seattle together.

Beautiful disconnected people, walking through beautiful shots in a beautiful scenery. This movie feels more western than any wannabe-American action blockbuster Asia ever produced. Nonetheless it is a very charming piece about two people aimlessly disconnected from the reality around them, walking around in a beautifully foggy Seattle (including a Farmer’s Market, ahaha…) Maybe not a big revelation as a movie, but I can think of hundreds of movies I would have been less inclined to watch.