Merry Merry Movies of May

Month started out with another three weeks of rain and low temperatures.

I’ll try not to natter on too long.

Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962) and Winnetou und das Halbblut Apanatschi (1966)

zdf_neo, original Deutsch
The Winnetou/Old Shatterhand movies–a series of Westerns based on the books of German author Karl May. With these two, I have seen all of the originals starring Lew Barker and Pierre Brice. They are long on exciting scenes of shoot-outs, trick-riding, and hand-to-hand combat, short on accurate costuming, and generally a good way to pass an afternoon when the Biergarten is closed because it’s pouring down rain.

A very young Götz Georg, TV’s Schimanski–oops, wrong link, try this one–plays Fred, who is in love with a colonel’s daughter named Eileen in the first film, and Jeff, who is in love with the Apache Apanatschi in the second film. A lot can happen in four years, I guess. (Apanatschi was played by prolific Bavarian actress Uschi Glas, whose accent is so strong she was dubbed over for the German release of this movie. She had a habit of riding out from the farm in a shirt and 60s-style headband of one color, then being out on the trail in a shirt and headband of a completely different color. Ahem.)

Summertime (1955)

arte Mediathek, original English with French subtitles
Another “old American woman travels to Italy and falls in love” film, but this time it’s Katherine Hepburn as a spinster secretary from Ohio, and the feeling is mutual. As she sits in Piazza San Marco, her eyes meet the eyes of Rossano Brazzi (the doomed Count from The Barefoot Contessa), and sparks fly, unnerving her. She accidently stumbles into his shop the next day, he woos her, and as she considers giving in, she accidently learns he’s married with children, albeit living apart from his family. Drama. They have a fling that had to be edited to satisfy the Production Code Administration, until she returns to Ohio.

I enjoyed this one; lots of stunning footage of Venice before Massentourismus, great music, beautiful clothes, the obligatory kid sidekick had good comedy chops.

Hey I know that guy: Arthur Dales plays an American artist cheating on his new wife in an entwining subplot that sets up the ending.

Mindhorn (2016)

Netflix, original English
The first 5-10 minutes were very funny. That didn’t last.

The real star of this one was the Isle of Man. Beautiful scenery.

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)

ARD one, original English
I first saw this movie on a black and white television in an unfinished basement, approximately age 5, and loved it! What an exciting adventure! The song from the credits stuck in my head for years. I may have seen it again in color a few years later; despite thinking about it from time to time, I did not see it again until now.

The hand-painted watercolor backgrounds to the animation are stunning.

The concept of 8-10 year-old city children bussed out to “Camp Remote” and sent on a rafting trip in the mountains, high enough it snows at night, without any proper cold-weather equipment, maps, or adults, is deeply disturbing. Of course summer camp shouldn’t be a canned and sanitized theme park, but some gloves and a guide who knows the river would not have hurt their psychosocial development–especially compared to wandering around an unfamiliar mountain, lost and scared, in a violent storm.

Ignoring all that–pretend to be 8 years old–it was still a bit disappointing. Our Heroes, divided into the girls’ raft and the boys’ raft, are in a race against a tent full of one-dimensional bullies (including a cat with a spiked collar), who cheat at every available opportunity, their tactics often sending the Peanuts gang into mortal danger. On the girls’ raft (sporting a feminist emblem as the flag), Peppermint Patty sets herself up as the leader and spends a good 15 of the film’s 75 minutes shouting about democracy and demands a vote be taken with a secret ballot every time a decision needs to be made, for example when the boys need to be rescued from drowning. There are occasional bits of magic–Snoopy’s inner tube has the same magic cargo capacity as his doghouse, Woodstock is delightful–but the film was a bit of a slog.

And Snoopy punches the cat in the face with his fist. Very uncharacteristic.

The highlight–and I definitely missed the reference the first time around–was Snoopy rolling in as Easy Rider (although I am with Henry Fonda on that film).

OK, I lied about not nattering on.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

DVD (library), original English
I gave this one a chance based on a favorable review from someone whose taste I trust. It’s very, very good. The original story was incorporated into a whole new story, with new characters. Very heavy on the CGI, but the story was character-driven and the ending was satisfying. Go see it.

Hey, isn’t that…!: Skoda, from the Law and Orders.

Deutschland aus dem All (2023)

arte Mediathek, original Deutsch
We watch a lot of documentaries filmed with helicopters and drones; this one added satellite footage so they could show changes to a region over time. The most interesting part was the coal fields–over time they move, because the pits get covered up and repurposed.

I wanted a little more satellite data and a little less ground footage, but I understand the former is more expensive to license…

R.I.P.D. (2013)

Netflix, original English
Insomnia fluff film. I was here for Jeff Daniels, who did not disappoint. Did not recognize Mary-Louise Parker, even though I just saw her in Portrait of a Lady. The CGI sequence where Ryan Reynolds dies in an inferno of police raid gone wrong was pretty stunning; I scrolled back and watched it twice.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)

arte Mediathek, original English
I liked this one a lot better than the first one, which we saw in January. More slapstick, fewer old men creeping on young girls. The Oktoberfest scenes were filmed on location.

Depicting Gerald Ford as obsessed with Michigan football was probably supposed to be an insult, but these days that’s just quaintly quirky.

Knowing Julie Andrews was married to Blake Edwards made the opening credits even more fun.

My Blue Heaven (1990)

Cable (Warner Film), original English
Gangster movie meets rom com meets baseball kids. Steve Martin plays a mobster in the Witness Production program, who can’t stay out of crime (“As I am not trained to do anything else”). It was cute; great music, funny dance scenes, good dialog. I particularly enjoyed the use of title cards to explain the scenes, in lieu of a narrator.

As a society, we do not appreciate Rick Moranis enough.

I need a system for ensuring the bottom pancake gets the same amount of syrup as the top pancake.

X-Files connection: Col. Belt

Hopfensommer (2010)

ARD, original (Bayerisch) Deutsch
Typical German gov’t-TV movie–a scenic corner of the country, a popular vintage TV actor, and ham-fisted social commentary. This story takes place in the beautiful Hallertau valley, in Landkreis Pfaffenhofen, with West German (1980s) star Elmar Wepper playing a stubbornly proud hops grower who suffers a heart attack about a week before the harvest. His mother calls their estranged son Karl, who works as a Braumeister in Munich, to come help out. She’s also trying to fix him up with Leni, the single mother of twins who works her ex-husband’s hops farm next door all alone, but he’s already met and fallen for a Munich stripper named Sophie, who’s come out to the countryside for a picnic with her daughter.

Dad doesn’t want Karl helping; Karl wants to switch over to heritage hops varieties the next season, because small new craft breweries will pay more money for novelty than the industrial brewers are willing to pay for the usual. I was honestly a bit surprised by this scene; I thought the craft-beer discussions came later in Germany. (Dad comes around to Karl’s thinking after the second heart attack.)

Happy endings all around, except for poor Leni–Karl chooses Sophie after SURPRISE! she reveals she also grew up on a hops farm that went out of business after a bad harvest in the 1990s. Das Erste Deutschen Fernsehen, ladies and gentlemen.

…also their Maria Himmelfahrt party is by a church I swear I have seen as we have driven by, touring the Hopfenland. I have been haunting Google Maps instead of watching movies. I will find it.

Weißbier im Blut (2021)

Netflix, original (Bayerisch) Deutsch
Heimatkrimis, murder mysteries that take place in Bavaria, seem pretty popular at the library and the bookstores, and here is another one that has been turned into a dark comedy movie courtesy of the Bavarian taxpayers. (It’s just such a weird system, I can’t get used to the idea that this is normal.)

Kreuzeder, played by Sigi Zimmerschied, who is Eberhofer’s boss, is a long-time police detective who has given up on the job and life in general, when he’s called to investigate a gruesome thresher killing on a farm outside Passau (beautiful long shots of the city, btw). The farm is facing foreclosure; the son is mentally disturbed and obsessed with certain television hero characters. After a second killing on the farm, Kreuzeder has an idea who the killer may be, but has some doubts on what justice might actually entail; his boss sends him to a psychiatrist who needs nearly as much help as he does. In a subplot, he frees the middle-aged waitress at the Kneipe where he drinks his meals from her sexually abusive employer. The case is settled after the third killing confirms the killer’s identity.

Happyish ending; there’s a few threads left untied for a sequel but the farm is saved.

There was a terrifying scene where the teenage daughter of the farmer tells Kreuzeder there’s no point in being trained to do any sort of work, because the artificial intelligence and the robots are going to take over and humans will be kept as pets. I don’t need that sort of reality in my entertainment.

Simon (1980)

Cable (Warner Film), original English
Another weird sci-fi film with an acclaimed cast that I had never heard of. Alan Arkin is a psychology professor recruited under false pretenses by a cabal of scientists–including Vizzini, and Willie from ALF–and brainwashed into thinking he’s an extra-terrestrial placed on this planet to fix it. His girlfriend sees him on television and breaks him out; they end up in a commune devoted to the worship of The Sacred Box (television, but they do not speak its name). He uses their broadcast equipment to take over all three channels and tell Americans how to act–low-level, Twitter-wag stuff, like “politicians should be forced to wear funny hats so we can identify them in public” and “plastic ketchup packets are evil”. The army is called in to shoot him “back” into space–on a space shuttle! real footage of a space shuttle!–but he foils the plot and escapes to Canada.

Film is forty years old and uncomfortably relevant to today–ETs, conniving scientists, government incompetence, cults formed around media personalities–and it was funny as well as insightful, good puns, sight gags, physical comedy. I don’t know why it didn’t get traction back in the day. Seek it out.

(T)Raumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 (2004)

Netflix, original Deutsch
A parody of Star Trek/Star Wars prequels/Shrek/Back To the Future–and probably a half-dozen other sci-fi and fantasy movies–from Bully Herbig and friends. Costumes, background gags, and gender-bending, it features some original songs from Stephan Raab.

Bit of a cult classic, and I recognized some lines/gags from other contemporary German pop culture I have consumed–“Kapitän Kork und Spuck” were referenced in Weißbier Im Blut–but I didn’t like it as much as I expected to like it, and I’m not sure what to do with that.

The Fog (1980)

arte Mediathek, original English
Low-budget paranormal revenge horror film featuring scream queens Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh, now considered a classic and beloved by fans of the genre. I couldn’t get into it. The constant electric screeches, obviously intended to set a mood, were too jarring, and most of the main characters were unlikeable. The wood-paneled station wagon got my attention, though.

Could it be remade with social media replacing the radio?

Home Run (2013)

Cable (Sony AXN), original English
“Hey, there’s a baseball movie,” said Mr Radish, as we settled in with our beers for Friday Night At Home With The Cat. It was more of a Movie With A Message, about finding healing through a Christ-based 12-step recovery program, with a baseball underlay. Major leaguer and alcoholic Cory Brand gets a two-month suspension from his team after a drunken outburst during a game in which an honorary bat boy, conveniently his brother’s newly adopted son, is injured on camera. His agent, played by Vivica Fox, the only name I recognized, sends him back to his stereotypically escaped-from small hometown for a PR apology, and the second thing he does is DUI and send his brother to the hospital. She signs him up for the town’s only addiction-recovery program, Celebrate Recovery, with orders to attend all the meetings for eight weeks, and forces him to take over his brother’s spot as coach of his nephew’s comically bad little league baseball team.

Of course, it’s a small town, so the co-coach is the woman he knocked up before leaving for the minors the day after high school, recently widowed by the war, and he gets to mentor the son who doesn’t know who he is. As the summer progresses, he reconnects with his family, works through the childhood abuse that led him to alcoholism, finds Christ, and leads the Bulldogs to a winning season.

Happy endings all around, but getting there was difficult; many of the testimonies from the 12-step meetings were adapted from actual Celebrate Recovery members’ testimonies. People survive a lot of terrible things done to them by other people…. When I realized this is a real program being shown, I started wondering what church made this movie–Saddleback, which I only recognize from their involvement in the 2012 presidential election. Would I have watched it, if I’d looked it up first and found that info? I don’t know. But I enjoyed it. With my beer.

Accidental Truth: UFO Revelations (2023)

YouTube, original English
Documentary on UFOs and the US government, suggesting the current investigations into “UAP” have been designed to memory-hole things the government did in the 20th Century. Good interviews; graphics a bit cheesy. Narrated by Matthew Modine, who will play Vannevar Bush in an upcoming biopic of Robert Oppenheimer. If you followed the NASA hearing, give it a shot. (You will have to rent it from your favorite service, as the YouTube video I saw has been removed as a copyright violation, oops.)

Ludwig (1973)

arte Mediathek, Deutsch
It was four hours and this post is already too long. I have a lot to say about der Kini, sooner or later…