Muxmäuschenstill (again)

I remembered Tanja watched this movie and tonight, as she was out watching an apparently poor German football performance, and thus I couldn't talk to her, I watched the mux-movie, remembering she found it shockingly real and disturbing, for which I was in the mood. Anyhow, I had expected it to be more funny, it being announced as a movie about an idealist. But Mux is very serious indeed about making the world (Germany and its fast drivers, rapists and drug addicts) a better place (where people drive slow, don't have sex [for fear of exploitation] and drink beer with the elderly in ocre-coloured Berliner Eckkneipen). Kant is on his bedside table, but Mux is mixing up respect with threat and fear about 60 times every day, when he convicts and humiliates yet another 60 wrongdoers, taking some money from them on the occasion to finance his idealistic business. The business is strikingly well-run, considering Mux used to be a philosophy student, all documented videos of wrongdoers are in alphabetical order. Mux is terribly prim. He can talk the girl of his choice into his dreams for a while, but then this smart teenager notices quickly his "komisch" (strange/funny) side and takes off with a fellow teenager who's better at letting out his sensuality. Mux is terribly concrete, too. Clean from the outside, that's what he's trying to make the world. Unfortunately, the "unsachlich" ("unobjective") voice in his head doesn't shut up. Moviewise, that's a nice move: as irrational and scary as his acts seem, he becomes quite understandable as a character... scared, aggressive in spite of his "decision" to be objective... the scary counterpart to being oh so reasonable. Oh, another nice movie technique: Many parts show what is being seen through Gerd's video camera: the real crimes that we all wish to "do something against". His formerly jobless bum-companion Gerd remains an obedient helper most of the time, glad at every cake he is being offered. His scant portrait shows a simple character that couldn't hurt a fly, especially as opposed to Mux, of course. In the end when Mux offers him a "higher position" in what is by now a big company of strengthening responsibility, he straightens his posture and smiles. In the end, carrying his securing endeavours to Italy (for personal reasons that he doesn't admit to himself), Mux gets run over by a fast car he effectfully wishes to slow down, a martyr for his silly mission. As an outro, we hear in his testament that he doesn't know other words than those of that mission, which we have been hearing all through the movie. At least not outside of his head, he doesn't.

Eastern Promises

Anna Naomi Watts is a nurse. She works in Russia in a hospital. On Christmas a girl of 14 years gives birth to a child and dies. Anna takes the diary of the girl. It is written in russian language that Anna can´t understand. So she asks her uncle, a Wodka drinking silent man. But he doesn´feel like it. So Anna give the copie of the diary to a man called Kirill, who is, as we will find out later, one of the heads of the Russian Mafia. But to be honest, I had a strange feeling about him the first time Anna meets him :-)Her uncle has started to translate the diary in between, and what he finds out about Prostitution, Pornography and human trafficking is not funny. The same thing is what the Russian Mafia thinks. And anyway, what is about this somehow smart and somehow scary guy Nikolai Luschin. His role is not clear at all. I liked this movie very much. And I also liked the actors. The cool, inaccessibly, smart Nickolai, the despereate, moral Anna, the unscrupulous but grandfather like looking Kirill, and so on. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the end.