Reviews

The filmmaker made an essay film, showed it at film festivals, received positive feedback — but than didn't found any distribution for theatrical release, because there isn't any audience for these kinds of films, especially in times like these, when it's getting more and more difficult to make people spend their time and money seeing any kinds of films in cinemas anyway. But Hartmann was driven by the need to share the film with an audience on the big screen nonetheless, so he contacted cinemas all across Germany directly, asking them if they were willing to show his work in special screenings. 66 said "yes" and so Hartmann traveled around the country, equipped with a camcorder, filming the cinemas and interviewing its makers, producing a portrait of the German shrinking cinefilic landscape. Most of its few protagonists are well aware that they are most likely to disappear quite soon if they are not getting financed by communal and/or state funding, which is, of course, not very cool for a mind sets defining themselves by their independence in thinking and acting. It doesn't feel right to get money by a welfare state to offer alternative views on and about the exact same welfare state and its cultural mainstream. Either you play a part in this hypocrisy or not. Either you are dead wrong or dead. Alternatives offered by some voices in the film —, which is pleasantly easy to watch, edited with remarkably ease for rhythm and timing, by the way —, is the transformation of the cinema structure leading to multi-functional, cultural spaces (film, theater, cabaret, lectures, etc.), film museums and the complete melting of the distinct, idealistic cinematic filmmakers island into the art worlds'vast oceans and its ever changing waves. 66 KINOS is a relevant documentary and document about the state of the art.

I'd go that far as too say that ANOMALISA is almost as dense and multi layered as the E.T.A. Hoffmann classical story DER SANDMANN, also including the puppet as a major metaphorical figure, the one Sigmund Freud used to explain the Uncanny in his prominent essay. The film can be read as a story about individuality and individualism in our times and/or about a mean psychosis coming alive and/or male and female sexual longings and/or a typical mid-life crisis of a semi-famous man realizing how detached he feels to his entire life and/or a desperate, sincere prayer to a God perceived as the ultimate puppet master doubled in the puppets within the story and double doubled within the dreams of the puppets within the story etc. ANOMALISA is surely a complex little film, but luckily at the same time told very straight forwardly and laid back, almost relaxed, which makes it easy to watch it through — and just beautifully animated from the puppet faces to the lightning choreographies within the virtual, shoe-box like spaces. Sometimes it is funny and sometimes dramatically sad, often it is both at the same time. Almost always it is intellectually stimulating and a pleasure for your eyes and ears.

GET OUT manages to create a clean story line which works on at least three layers at the same time: The manifest, the obvious layer on the surface allowing you to get the „what the …"-effect just before the final act when the latent layer, the what-they-were-really-thinking-layer, gets revealed. And I think it's quite clear that their is a third, thematic layer, dealing with how deep racism sticks within the - what? soul? cultural memory? genetic code? - of these people. And it works as a cinematic experience: it's shocking, it's funny, it's ugly, there is suspense, there are well composed, symbolic pictures, clean again, with no grain and with a well figured out, mostly warm color concept. Still I wasn't very exited when I left the theater and I don't know really why. Was it the acting? No, especially Daniel Kaluuya did an impressing job. The lack of originality? No, there are references to other movies, of course, images one to one resembling the bubble with the Tree of life in space in THE FOUNTAIN, only here it sinks down, while there it's raising, but the idea to show racism as horror within the codes of the genre is actually quite unique and quite brilliant. Is it because it all nevertheless feels too constructed to touch my feelings? Yeah, I think that might be the point. The topic is dirty, but the filmmaking is just way too clean.

At a certain stage in the film Sonja Moonear reflects about djing, saying something like it were about putting people in the state of mind you want them to have. The tricky thing is that you can't just force the mood unto them like turning a switch, you need to transform them slowly, in a way they are not even realizing it. When she says that her hand even moves like a snake crawling through the thicket. The Snake manipulating people, it sounds so f****** evil, especially if you associate it with politics. But if you see a beautiful, inspired woman like Moonear talking about music and dance, any political dimension just seems to fade away. What manipulation? It's magical and sexual, if it works, it's orgasmic. It sets energies free, a very spiritual experience. Yeah, sure, probably it was very sexual and spiritual for Goebbels and Riefenstahl, too, seeing all this massive people formations marching around at the Berlin Olympics 1936. So much unifying energies … The only critical words about the electronic musical scene I realized in 110 minutes is one of the djs stating that there you would of course also be confronted with your own weaknesses when you spend your years mainly in a music studio also reflecting yourself. The critic remains vaguely, just a little drop of negativity in an otherwise surgical clean, but nonetheless praising composition. Is this something like positivist fan boy propaganda praising house music into the Heavens of alternative culture? No, of course not, all these extremely long, extremely geometric, extremely static shots can't be characterized as fascist aesthetics, neither. They are neutral containers holding images in which you can discover all sorts of details and plenty of space-time to project your own thoughts and imaginations into… Well, well, I don't know, I don't even know if it stinks, the whole thing… I know I wished it were shot in 3D, would have added the depths it strangely and terribly lacks.

So what is this? A quite conventional musical documentary embedding a bands history within a bigger history of society and musical appearances and hereby constantly arguing the uniqueness, the coolness and the relevance of The Stooges and their professional anti-professionalism. It has the same sort of bohemian snobbish feeling to it I already found disgusting in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE: all this bitter mystifying praise of the „real", „authentic", „good", „true", etc., artistic stuff within a devilish sell-out Disneyland world is just soo much emphasized that it's actually ridiculing itself.

But at the same time it is a fanboy work and a work of friendship, a film not only about the band, but a film in dedication for the band, a gift, an openly political and explicitly personal attempt to immortalize the musicians, communists, existentialists, drug users and drug abusers around Iggy Pop: „The Stooges Forever!", it says on the gong starting and finishing the film. And this is basically the sole purpose the film is made for and this is what adds quite a bit of intimidating intimacy to it, making it more like a letter to Iggy only masked as this educational musical documentary it is trying to be at its surface. This is no offense: The naive and sincere face under the mask is what turns the film into touching cinema, after all. And the sound, well, the sound made me heart jump around hard every once in a while.

OK, can there be an uncontrollable ghost inhabiting the brain of a otherwise totally synthetic cyborg? Is there space for any anima? I don't no. In GHOST IN THE SHELL there is. What I was more interested in is whether there can be something like a hard to grasp anima within a totally digital 3D sci-fi IMAX production full of neon lights, holograms and bodies materializing and dematerializing in a landscape so obviously made out of ones and zeros? I need that anima to feel any empathy. And I need to feel empathy to lose and find myself within the cinematic world, to have the essential experience of catharsis. It did work for me, despite all the technical fuzz on the surface which is, in this case, the right, adequate form for its underlying, spiritual theme. It did work because of the story and its climatic composition, speeding up to an orgasmic high near the ending and it worked because of the magnificent performance throughout the cast. As long as the story and the actors manage to keep your emotions flowing, the rest becomes a not that important mask. It becomes almost irrelevant noise.

In one prayer Andrew Garfield's character says he heard Gods voice in the silence. After having watched SILENCE I heard no voices of whomsoever, but I was calm and attentive. SILENCE managed to silence my mind. Maybe this is the ideal preparation for contemplation, for prayer, and, ultimately, for death and what it might bring.

There is a clear construct of oppositions like Buddhism vs. Christianity, perception vs. imagination, protectionism vs. imperialism, immanence vs. transcendence or the denial of vs. the faith in the creative power of symbols. But it's hard to figure out the films own attitude regarding these sides, and this is what makes it a work of art in contrast to a work of religious or political propaganda. The conflicts within the story and its characters are numerous and dig deep, and the filmmakers manage to tell them without praising one side and condemning the other side. At the same time it is never cold and analytical, but heart filled with compassion and empathy. This is quite unusual and I can only take my hat off to this kind of old fashioned, humanistic artistry.

There is a branch of historians arguing that Shakespeare actually wasn't a single person, but a collective of writers publishing their work under the name of a fictional persona. I sometimes wonder whether Marvel is today what Shakespeare was back then. There is barely any Marvel movie which isn't a work of great craftsmanship and fun to ingest while retelling classical conflicts of drama in a fresh way reflecting the postmodern or post postmodern or post whatever times we live in.

DOCTOR STRANGE delves deep into the depths of mysticism, catches bits of esoteric knowledge and pseudo knowledge, mystical techniques and philosophic mind over matter conceptions, and cooks a wild, bright, colorful meal out of it back at the surface, spiced up with the usual myriad of references for example pointing to the MATRIX (Kaecillius and consorts walking just like Neo & co), martial arts flicks (the fights, the zooms) and 2001 - A SPACE ODYSEE (the dimensional shifts).

The film uses expressionistic, fat brush strokes so to speak, working with strong contrasts and hyper stylized exaggerations. It does it with charming elegance, never slipping into the muddy traps of ridiculous trash. DOCTOR STRANGE can be an inspiration. I can't help but liking it.

„Hate me, hate me, please, hate me" - it seems like this is the deep and desperate longing of this film and its sick minded ADD protagonist. At least this is my conclusion after bravely having sit through one obviously evil action after the other without leaving the theater, at the end having an overdose of looking at these emotionless faces so obsessively observed throughout the film as if they were a metaphor for the whole tragedy of the human experience. Come on!

Maybe Swanson, that's the guys' name, can be described as a mixture of Philip Seymour Hoffman 's charming resignation shortly before having killed himself of an heroin overdose, Woody Allen having lost even the last bits of hopes about the human nature and the infantile anti-humor of Sacha Baron Cohen and his excessive focus on everything vulgar.

For me this in its essence a childish provocation of an explicitly religious nature. Maybe God will come back if we just make Him hate us in the most disgusting ways we think of. If He hates us and shows us his hate, at least this means that He exists and cares about us. Come on!

Oh Jarmusch - every few years arrives a new Jim Jarmusch film in the art-house cinemas. I'm glad it still does. This one, PATERSON, got an Amazon logo on it, which feels strange to me but is of no relevance, really. Like every poetic film it is open to interpretations on various levels or dimensions of meaning, maybe PATERSON tries to push that as far as it gets, which makes perfectly sense, because its protagonist spends a lot of time writing poetry. No matter if you consider him a bus driving poet or a poetry writing bus driver, he is beautifully embodied by Adam Driver. His performance is one of the most brilliant ones I've seen in years, the way he is acting right on the edge between authenticity and masquerade, between embodiment and ironic distancing, is astonishing. You never know whether his appearance (which seems like a twin to Jarmusch himself in terms of look, language and tonality) is seriously naive in its autistic (anti-)hipster attitude, whether its seriously depressed in its most pathetic, and truthful sense, or whether its just a self-distancing, liberating act of self-irony, desperately screaming not be taken serious. That vagueness can be applied not only to the acting, but to every single cinematic element from story to visual grammar to sound, mean, almost violent in its radical nature. Sometimes it warmed my heart, sometimes it made me almost puke. Almost always it's a perfect match between form and function. And that's all I have to say about PATERSON.

Leaving the cinema I was missing the emotional punch I should have felt if the film was supposed to touch me on a level deeper that my intellect.

The latter, the intellect, was all satisfied analyzing the story and the filmmakers formal choices. The set up of a story within a story to explore the interrelations between reality and fiction and their various modes of identification and projection processes was well done. It is a complex narration, but narrated in a way that makes it easy to follow, supported by a clear visual codification. Take for example in the inter cutting sequences binding the books' and the films' reality together: we see Jake Gylenhaal all in hot, red colors and Amy Adams all filtered in blue. The film is full of sharp contrasts like this, giving it a strong expressionistic look and feel. It is moreover performed by a brilliant cast. Especially Michael Shannons' talent is shining quite bright here.

But still: I wasn't emotionally moved at all, so, for me, NOCTURNAL ANIMALS is like a puzzle missing the most important piece.

EVA would have been a great TV movie, well written, smartly laid out, wonderfully arranged and with some nice cgi robots. And there is even a little movie diamond to be found: the bar scene, including a long panning shot — a container full of highly condensed, highly concentrated energy, very powerful.

But to be pleased as a cinema spectator I need something else, and I think what I have been missing the most is the illusion of real feelings between the actors for each other. The chemistry is not right in EVA, all affection seems forced and empty. Basically the only performance I found believable was how Lluís Homar played, well, a robot.

The second thing still bothering me is that the big twist in the middle of the second act wasn't really a twist, because it was all too clear to me that it had to turn out like that. Please, if you want to fool me, fool me without taking me for a fool. Seduce me elegantly, with grace.