Casanova

Casanova

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova is the name of the man who was famous for his persuasiveness. A short part of his life he lived in Venice, the city where the movie is taking place. Casanova (Heath Ledger) is notorious amoungst women in Venice, he doesn´t care if he stays with a married woman or a nun. So it´s not a surpirse that he is pursuited by the church, which is not quite happy with the debauched situation in this city anyway. Casanova has to find a wife within four (I think it was four, maybe five) days or he will be banished. He is not very choosey and finds a beautiful girl who wants to marry him soon, but then he meets Francesca Bruni (Sienna Miller), an intelligent and educated young woman, and falls for her. What now? This film is very clean, not surprising and after I have seen Heath Ledger as Joker in "The Dark Knight" I was a bit disapointed, this charakter here has not the fire, the life and the passion that I know Heath Ledger is able to give the figures. It´s  very light entertainment, not deep or touching, you don´t even really feel with the charakters because it´s too much slapstick and the whole story is brought up in a superficial way.

Untitled

Pornorama

 

...oder die Bekenntnisse der mannstollen Näherin Rita Brauchts. (I am sorry, but this is not possible to translate:) As you can probably guess, the main topic is sex. It´s in the 60s and the story is taking place in Germany. The revolution did reach the place München-Ramersdorf, Bennie Köpke (Tom Schilling) is making a apprenticeship as a cameraman at the police. He does this for his mother who has worries enough with his older brother Freddi (Benno Fürmann) who has always problems with money. So he has now, that´s why Freddi persuades Bennie to make a movie, because he desperately needs the money. And what kind of movies you can make money with is obvious, sex movies, particularly at this time just in the rumours of the sexual revolution. This happens just after Bennie met Luzi (Karoline Herfurth) for whom he falls immediately. Luzi is on the rebellion side, lives in a activist-commune and should never find out that he belongs to the enemies (the police). The caotic film crew consisits amongst others out of a female main actor who can´t speak German (because the language of love ist always italian) and who doesn´t want to undress (the first sex movie without sex, "geht gar nicht" (not possible)). The lightning idea for the story comes from Luzi, after she and Bennie went , for a creative input, to a therapist for marries couples. It´s light and funny entertainment, playing in a not-suprising way with clichees, but nevertheless I was laughing a lot about all the small obstacles that are put in their way while the crew is shooting in a very improvisational way the film.

 

In Bruges

In Bruges

 

Bruges is an old city, one of the best achieved cities from the middle ages. It´s beautiful but a bit dismal, it´s foggy and a bit like a dream. Like the movie. Sometimes you have the feeling to dive in some sureal dimension and on the other hand there are these touching moments when it hits you from the back. For example when Rey (Colin Farell) lays in his bed, his face is not moving and then he starts crying without a sound or a change of expression and somehow you realise how deep his despair must be. Or when Rey and his friend Ken (Brendan Gleeson) sit on the bench talking about nonsense and suddenly, out of nothing, Rey can´t stand it anymore, being guilty of the murder of a child, saying that it will only end when he ends. Within the helplessness of the the main actor there are these very funny scences, that fit so good without leaving the tragic focus of the story. Tragedy and humor are closly and sensitive interlocked. On the other hand there are very drastic and brutal situations, we see the killings, the open wounds, the blood. Bruges is a stage for characters that have a story to tell, not in words but in gestures and looks. Harry (Ralph Fienesse), the agressive boss of Rey an Ken who is highly convinced by his principles and can´t say one sentence without swearing. The "good" girl that is a drug dealer, the gnome that wants to be characterized as a dwarf. The black jokes are trailed through the whole movie, not one precarios topic is left out. There are jokes about black and white people, about gnomes, about homesexuals, about fat people,...and so on. Sometimes I was laughing just because I was schocked. But even when it is loud somehow there stays this sad silence in the back.

 

 

Fight Club

Fight Club

First I have to say: Great. I love it. Brutal, creative, crazy, funny, bloody, agressive. It starts with : "People always ask me if I know Tyler Durden". We see a pistol and after that scene a man who has breasts like a women because of hormons he has to take. But wait, "back up. Let me start earlier". Edward Norton, the narrator, couldn´t sleep for six months. Nobody can help him, so he starts getting addicted to self-help-groups (in one of them he meets the guy with the breast). He has one every day, where he can let go for the first time. That´s when he meets Marla Singer. "Marla's philosophy of life was that she might die at any moment. The tragedy, she said, was that she didn't." The narrator has a boring life, where his big sense is to find the right furnitures who express his personality, defines him as a person. He meets Tyler in a plain, he comes home, his apparment is burned, so he calls Tyler and they drink some beer (I think it was beer). "What are we (...)? (...) Consumers. (...) We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession." Tyler is a charismatic and radical guy, he knows what he wants, he does want he wants, he has no fear, because: Only when you arrive at the zero-point you are completely free. Pain gets a new dimension, it´s the proof that you live, you can feel that you are alive. All the agressive emotions that are held behind in society are accepted and you can express them in the "fight club". The central point in this movie is the crack with the moral of our modern civilisation, the fight against social conventions. The dialogs are dazzling, very intelligent, critical. And ladies: Bratt Pitt is so...wow in this movie. His body is beautiful, just a pleasure to look at. But of course this wasn´t the reason to watch the film, well, at least not the only one.

 

 

 

Let the Right One In / L

Let the Right One In / Lat den rätte komma in

 

First I have to say: I like vampire-movies. I´ve seen a lot of them. So when this one started (as usual in the Sneak:) I was surprised. In the beginning it´s not clear what all this is about. We get to know Oscar first, he lives alone with his mother somewhere in Sweden. Oscar is twelve years old, an outsider at school and he gets bullied by his classmate Conny and his friends. But Oscar can´t defend himself.  One night he meets Eli in the garden, she and a man (whose relationship to her is not clear, is he her father? Anyway he kills people for Eli, let them bleed out and takes the blood for her to drink it) just moved inside the house, they are neighbours now. Eli is twelve, already for a long time, and she makes clear that she and Oscar could never become friends, but slowly they develope a fragile sympathy to each other. She pukes from sweets, can´t stand the sunlight and people vanish that she had killed before. Once she asks Oscar: Would you still like me even if I was not a girl? And Oscar says yes. He finds out that Eli is a vampire, she shows him how to defend himself and my God, he is really the calmness in person, he doesn´t care that she even once kills a man right in front of him. Quite fearless. I have to say, this movie needs to get used to. It´s a swedish one and that´s probably the reason for many weird scenes, one thing I like particularly about scandinavian films. It´s very calm, very slow, too slow for my taste. The soundtrack is nice, the actors are great and Eli is sometimes a girl but sometimes she is a completely different creature. And I must say, it wasn´t very thrilling. But a very different kind of horror-vampire mixture.