Schwarze Katze weißer Kater/ Black cat white male cat

We have: three mafia bosses, one grandson of a mafia boss who falls is love with a girl but his father, the son on one of the mafia bosses got cheated by another mafia boss and now his son, the grandson of the one mafia boss, has to marry a girl he doesn´t love. She wants to marry someone she loves, he loves another girl. And in the end everything happens like we don´t expect it, or maybe we do? Well, that´s more or less how this movie is, crazy, unexpectd, funny, wild. I didn´t have time to take a breath. And the soundtrack is gorgeous. Wow, I love it.

Some like it hot

I watched another sweet classic: Marilyn Monroe is half naive, half sensual, and half cunning. The two pals dressing up as women stick together through thick and thin and don't care much when Marilyn Monroe switches from one to the other. Arguing is their hobby anyway. The dressing up is completely unbelievable and I wonder: could they get away with it because people didn't look as closely back then or just the movies were more theatrical? Oh, and I fall for Billy Wilder slapstick dialogues and chases. But what I liked best was how the bass guy - who becomes the loved one of a millionaire - looks and laughs like my (female) literature professor. Could she be dressing up?

Kung Fu Panda

This is one of the movies you catch when you visit the "sneak preview". When it started I thought I won´t make it till the end. My first impression was: A chinese movie, full of life philisophy stuff and wise slogans, computer animated and with animals. So the worst mixture you can imagine. But it turned out to be a realy funny movie, which wasn´t interested in any realism whatsoever, and a fat, hungry hero (the panda called Po). Po grew up as the son of a nudle cook. But is this all? He dreams of an adventures life as a Kung Fu fighter, and his wish becomes fullfilled by accident (ah no, this "by accident" doesnt exists, as the wise turtle was saying). Our hero isn´t quite the kind of Kung Fu student the mouse like teacher was expecting, but something has to happen, because the dangerous, revenge claiming snow leopard Tai Lung has broke out of prison. What I took from this movie? Well, there is no secret ingredient.

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.

The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965)

Last night Charlton Heston died at age 84. He is not an actor I fancy much but I wanted to watch 'The Agony...' for a long time. The movie itself I find very weak, somewhere near a documentary with all the poor and pretentious talk I can imagine. 'I'll die for my work' - Michelangelo exhibits mood swings worthy of some capricious wench rather then a passionate and focused artist. Read the book - it is much better.

The Last Hit Man (2008)

There's been a few like this in the past years - the killer and his daughter - or how interesting it is to kill for a living and love at the same time. Nothing very special about this movie, maybe some loose ends (the old man missed his date, the daughter didn't fall for the new guy, what the H is Todd doing there at all?) but I liked these. I also liked the first scene - what happens before the credits. Like an essay sums up the whole thing and I would stop right there - the movie doesn't really get any better then this abstract. I would be probably horrified should I take this movie seriously - the possible range of issues that it touches is so great and so heavy that it has no time to do it. It's like one of my essays - too much ambition and too little space. It turns out that if reality is complex one way to deal with it is to focus on fewer aspects. I don't generally agree but I can see the point here - it really does take time to deal with issues.

Perfect Hideout (2008)

The movie would be a perfect example of how the mouse eats the cat. It is not because the mouse is so stupid and the cat so strong that there is no possible comparison - the cat simply has to commit suicide. Surely there are secondary stories going around and the plot goes like this (spoiler warning!): A couple is ready to make a new life for themselves, moving to some other country and starting anew. Before they go to the airport a mafia-type guy calls the boy and asks for 'the money back'. The amount of money is so huge that 'the boy' wants to rob a small shop to cover for it. During the chocolate bar rubbery a young angelic cop comes in and is shot it the fight that starts. Running from the little shop 'the boy' and his hysterical and emotionally labile girlfriend have a fight so the car ends up in a ditch. Only after do they kiss and make up and start looking for a car which they find in front of a rich house. Trying to get the keys they manage to enter the house and a surprised scream of 'the girl' in front of an espresso machine calls Victor-' the guy from upstairs' - whom they 'kidnap'. Long story short - Victor is more dangerous then even I imagined. Please watch a Stan Laurel movie before and after this one - they are the same - stupidity drives the plot - there is no real action - In a movie with serious crime and issues that doesn't appear to be a parody - But it is.

Aces 'N Eights (2008)

2008 Western! People didn't get enough of westerns and they do more. Please watch the oldies again and spend the money on some serious stuff. "Aces 'N Eights" has some rough camera and gratuitous violence but it really doesn't get close neither to the Eastwood ones nor to modern sculpture like "The Assassination of Jesse James...". I missed the rhetoric of progress so much - "with the railway not only trains but the rule of law comes about". Sure you have to die a bit and we killed these other people but it will come. "And if you touch that gun and kill me you won't get a ticket to this train". I'm so impressed, this is such low propaganda that I cannot imagine serious people ever taking it into account. And don't forget "It (the railway) is bigger then you or me". Fuck off! Ah...and if I hear once more from a sad woman standing in front of man "What happened to us?" I'm going to eat some industrial sugar - I know it's bad for me but I cannot resist. It's 2008, wake up "Nothing happened" to us other then we're terribly bored by this line.

The bank job (2008)

Random action flick with one moment to remember - picture this: the middle of a harry business involving royal family sex, a bank job, drungs, politics and the violence that go together. The leader of the pack (just out of the bank) comes home to wife and children for a brief update. He manages to tell her that things are worse than what she saw on TV one of their friends being dead and all. Guess what she says: I hear there was also a woman in the bank. Did you sleep with her? Yeap - that would have been really serious.