Remember remember, the movies of November…

The Red Tent (1969)

arte Mediathek, original English*
The advertising made much of Sean Connery playing Norwegian hero Roald Amundsen, but this Italian-Soviet collaboration is ultimately about the survivor guilt the Italian general Umberto Nobile (played by Peter Finch) feels as an old man. An Arctic expedition he led in 1928 caused the deaths of several men after their dirigible crashed, and his friend and rival Amundsen was killed in a rescue attempt. Most of the men–and most importantly, the general’s pet dog–were able to be saved by a Soviet icebreaker, after an amateur radio operator in Siberia heard their radio SOS. This is a true story, told through flashbacks, and it blew my mind.

I found the love story (Claudia Cardinale) unnecessary and distracting (Radish, you grump) from the intense drama, and the dramatic footage of a glacier calving, while impressive, didn’t fit into the story being told

*Italian-Soviet movie in English!

Murder by Death (1976)

arte, Deutsch
Be advised: Violates current standards for movie casting.

A satire/parody of popular detective fiction, written by Neil Simon, and performed by an all-star cast of comedy greats. A rich recluse invites a half-dozen amateur sleuths to a weekend in his creepy house; a murder takes place (maybe) and they try to solve it. I was familiar with all the detectives being parodied except Charlie Chan, whose movies seem to be unavailable in Germany. Hrm.

Anyway. Great attention to detail and the history of the genre and quite funny, but a bit slow in the beginning and if you’re not into early-mid-20th century weird (memory-holed) stuff you might not understand all the quips. Lionel Twain (get it?), played by Truman Capote of all people, has a great speech at the end, after new characters were introduced in the last five pages.

2001: A Space Travesty (2000)

Prime, Deutsch
A German-Canadian Leslie Nielson movie that should have been better than it was. Imagine someone hands you a beautiful pink slice of Leberkäs on a glazed Tim’s Old-Fashioned…but instead of a light lick of sweet brown mustard, it’s floating in a puddle of sharp yellow. And the donut is day old. And it’s actually Vegankäs.

(I laughed at the slapstick, but they work better as a short series of Twitter vids.)

Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)

German Private TV, Deutsch
It feels like Toho saw the success of The Matrix, The Fast and the Furious, and X-Men, and tried to blend them all together to make some yen at the box office. If you like stylized fights between mutated humans on motorcycles, you’ll like this movie. I wanted more rubber monsters. Nice colors.

Far from Heaven (2002)

arte Mediathek, Deutsch
All together now: Period Movies Tell Us More About The Period In Which They Were Made Than The Period They Portray. This is becoming a thing: I hated most of the characters (impossible to hate Dennis Haysbert) and found myself analyzing the use of color.

I have become the auteur I mock.

Undine (2020)

arte Mediathek, original Deutsch
A movie based on an early 19th-century German fairy tale about a water nymph who falls in love with a human man, trades the life of another man to save his, then returns forever to the water. Undine is working as a historical tour guide in Berlin after her rich business dude cheated on her, and meets a charming industrial diver (under water machinery repairs) while giving a tour. They fall deeply and immediately in love. Not long afterwards, he has an accident while on a job and is declared brain dead after 12 minutes without oxygen. If you have read the arte program guide before you settled in with your snacks and your cat, you know what happens next. If like me you haven’t, you will be surprised by the epilogue.

Very beautifully filmed, nice foreshadowing and symbolism throughout, and there is a giant catfish named Gunther. But I was annoyed by the lack of people in Undine’s Berlin–empty cafes, trains, sidewalks, streets–and even more now, upon learning that the film premiered a month before the Great (Verfassungswidrig) Lockdown. I can believe a dude can be brought back from brain death by mythological magic easier than I can believe two people can walk through Berlin completely alone. Tja.

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

arte Mediathek, original English
This one was enjoyable. Louis, whose English duchess mother was shunned by her family after marrying his Italian commoner father, is still eighth in line for the dukedom. One day he realizes that it may be possible to kill them all one by one and take the title for himself. He succeeds undetected, but the shallow young woman who threw him over for his rich friend when he was a poor nobody gets pissy that he rejects her now, when he’s a rich somebody and her husband has lost everything. She tells the authorities he had murdered her husband, who had killed himself. Because she withholds evidence, he is convicted and sentenced to hang for a crime he did not commit. With a wry appreciation of the irony, he writes out his story the night before his scheduled execution, the first of a duke in nearly three hundred years…and, well, NEVER WRITE ANYTHING DOWN.

The old duke and his murdered family members are all played by Alec Guinness–including Agatha the suffragette, whose murder is Niederkaltenkirchen funny. The dialog is snappy and often funny, and the woman Louis marries–the widow of a cousin he murdered–was also interesting as a modern woman trapped in an old world. Good film, good ending.