June Movie Post

I think I found the church from last month’s movie, Hopfensummer: St Johannes Evangelist in Hohenkammer. We can all relax now.

Seberg (2019)

Netflix, original English
Content warning: N-word and dog murder
I grew up 13 miles from the hometown of French New Wave Cinema darling Jean Seberg, and it was years after I left before anyone bothered to tell me. Possibly because she dropped out of high school for a life of glamour, and they didn’t want to give us any ideas? Anyway. For awhile there was an annual film festival–and there may still be, but they don’t have any English-language internet presence I can find.

This is actually a movie about the FBI spying on, intimidating, and using the media to ruin the life and career of an American citizen because the brass didn’t like her political activities. The more things stay the same, eh? As portrayed by Kristen Stewart, who is good at wearing clothes, she’s not a sympathetic character at all–arrogant and snobby, enjoys illegal drugs and homewrecking–but no one deserves the treatment she got.

Based on a true story, the film echoes The Lives Of Others, right down to the FBI agent assigned to listen in having second thoughts about the government he works for…except Seberg was able to flee the country. She never recovered from the death of her daughter (who is buried in Marshalltown, near her grandparents), and was found dead of an apparent suicide at age 40.

Meine Freundin Volker (2022)

ARD Mediathek, original Deutsch
I expected a ham-handed social commentary draped in a boa of sequined clichés, and I was not disappointed. Aging Hamburg drag queen Volker headlines a nightclub, and his manager has been currying the favor of the son of a homophobic (obvs) Russian mobster to get money for a US tour. The night the check clears, the son is murdered by the father’s henchmen, and Volker is forced into hiding. A Vorstadtmutti (suburban mom)–but a *good* one, liebe Deutschen, a vegetarian bicycle-commuting primary-school teacher–whose school-principal husband is banging one of their co-workers, rents him a room. She’s just volunteered to supervise the school musical even though she has no musical theater experience, and you can figure out the whole plot from there. After a flurry of Cher, Whitney Houston, tulle, sequins, and weed (she’s a *good* Vorstadtmutti, liebe Deutschen), the Russian mobster is preventing from murdering Volker by Hamburg’s drag community wielding love and social media. The principal’s son Lukas stars in the musical as Cinderella, Mutti leaves her cheating ex to the sidepiece, and Volker and his manager head off to the States as a couple.

The obligatory two-meter-long stage prop penis makes its appearance 83 minutes into the 89-minute film, just as I had nearly given up hope on that particular cliché. Good job, guys.

Old Surehand (1965)

zdf Mediathek, Deutsch
I’m not sure what the original language here is–it’s a West Germany/Yugoslavia production with British and Italian actors in the lead roles. Anyway, it’s a Winnetou spinoff with new characters; Surehand is a white frontiersman who moves between the natives and settlers, always fighting the greedy bankers and railroad guys, just like Shatterhand–both are Bavarian author Karl May’s depiction of himself out in the American West. Standard Balkan Western, fun to watch but don’t ask me about the story in five years.

I’m just here for the scenery and shootouts and trick riding, but I am very disappointed in myself for not recognizing Terence Hill as Toby, the fiancée of Surehand’s niece, who needs to be rescued from the Comanches by Winnetou twice. He’s listed in the opening credits under his real name, but I should have known those eyes…

The One That Got Away (1957)

arte, Deutsch
A British film, based on a true story about the only Nazi POW who managed to escape them and return to action. Hardy Krüger plays von Werra, a pilot and officer captured in 1941 when his plane malfunctions on a run over England. After two unsuccessful attempts to escape–once posing as a Dutch pilot and convincing railroad and airfield employees to help him–he is flown to Canada, where he is able to make his way across the St Lawrence River to “neutral USA” (specifically Ogdensburg, where I saw a War of 1812 re-enactment along the river in 2009…).

It’s just dumb to watch British WWII movies overdubbed in German; everyone sounds the same. But it was still enjoyable, lots of action. You root for the baddie, which was ground-breaking at the time, and intended to help Brits get over their residual hatred of Germans; the war becomes less important than the protagonist’s quest as the film goes on.

Reminder: The next time you drive past Algona, Iowa, stop at the POW Museum.

Have Rocket — Will Travel (1959)

YouTube, original English
The Three Stooges are janitors who succeed where an actual rocket scientist–named Ingrid, who is sexually harassed at work by her boss but ends up marrying him, even though he expects her to give up science to make his babies, wtf, Ingrid?–fails, and launch themselves to Venus. There is a giant tarantula, a talking unicorn, an evil robot, and lots of hammers to the head. Mindlessly enjoyable.

White Zombie (1932)

YouTube, original English

The Good Old Days, when zombies were real people enslaved by evil magicians, not fictional brain-eating monsters…and the true horror came from the fear of being doomed to walk the earth with no soul.

But the real lesson here–when you’re on a passenger ship, and you meet a beautiful girl who is already engaged to someone else, walk away. Do not invite her and her fiancée to your castle. She’s not going to leave him for you, dude.

Marge Bellamy’s costumes are pure Golden Age glamour. Worth a watch just for that, if you’re not a Lugosi fan.

Out of Rosenheim (1987)

DVD (library), original Bavarian-American*
Bavarian actress Marianne Sägebrecht (who you may recognize as the housekeeper from War of the Roses) plays a childless housewife from Rosenheim, abandoned by her husband in the middle of nowhere between LA and Vegas. She makes her way to a wide spot in the road–gas, café, motel, all failing–run by Brenda, a tired and bitter newly-abandoned wife and mother played by CCH Pounder (who you will recognize from a dozen US crime procedurals, including two where she is main recurring cast.) Frau Münchgstettner, with nothing better to do, does some cleaning and fixing around the place, inspires the teenagers, and plays with the unwanted grandbaby. Brenda is resentful and suspicious, but tolerates a paying customer. Frau M forges stolidly on, becoming a muse for a retired Hollywood set painter who lives in a trailer on the site (Jack Palance), and learning to do some magic tricks for the café customers, which brings in big crowds. The sheriff has her deported, because she isn’t allowed to work on her expired tourist visa, and Brenda realizes Frau M has become her best friend.

It was a really good picture, good treatment of women’s friendships and how people from different cultures used to be able to find common ground. I was going to type “but didn’t get a lot of attention in the US” but someone must have liked it because it spawned a short-lived mid-season sitcom starring Whoopi Goldberg on CBS. Huh.

*that’s what it said on the DVD options screen. Really.

Sin (2019)

arte Mediathek, Italian with German subtitles
A biopic–an actual biopic–about Michelangelo, after he returns to Florence after painting the Sistine Chapel. He is broke, his mental health is deteriorating, and he’s all caught up in the feud between the Medicis and Della Roveres, playing them off each other to get more money and better supplies. He’s taking commissions faster than he’s finishing them, obsessed with marble and perfection. As you may already know, things just get worse and worse for him, until in the closing scenes, his favorite assistant is murdered on his wedding night, and M is forced to consider that while he was looking for God in the marble, he only found greed and treachery.

The best scenes of this movie were filmed in Carrara, at an actual quarry where Michelangelo got marble for some of his bigger commissions, and watching dozens of men cut and haul massive blocks of stone with only humans and oxen for power-generation was crazy-amazing. The technical director reportedly worked very closely with local historians to make the technology look right.

Find the Lady (1976)

Netflix, original English
Canadian slapstick comedy featuring a young John Candy, who plays a bumbling cop partnered with a mentor who looks a bit familiar because he had a small recurring role on the Red Green Show twenty years later. They are investigating the kidnapping of a rich man’s niece, a trained opera singer who secretly moonlights as a showgirl in a sleazy dive, but there are three separate simultaneous kidnap plots involving her, and hilarity should ensue.

I hope it was funnier in 1976.

The final act takes place in an old-style fun house, with percussive features and water hazards that have definitely been outlawed. Cartoon violence is somehow always entertaining.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)

Netflix, original English
I don’t like fake biopics. The first half was pretty good, although the abusive father plot felt over-exaggerated even for a parody, but when he started dating Madonna, I got bored, and annoyed, and wished I was watching UHF for the 198th time. Feels like a missed opportunity.

We did enjoy pausing every 30 seconds to point out the cameos, or the movie/celeb being spoofed, or for me to explain something from US pop culture that never made it to West Germany. And I might re-watch to look for some of the Easter Eggs, but I don’t regret not spending a buttload of money last winter to try to see it right away.

Brugge, die Stille (1981)

Netflix, Dutch with English subtitles
I’m not real sure why a Belgian movie based on a 19th-century Flemish novel was released in Dutch…but here we are. The Dutch language sounds sort of German if you squint, and also sort of English if you squint the other way. Goedemorgen! Drives a girl and her cat insane.

The film, set in the 1890s, starts with the death of the wife (wearing perfect movie glamour eyeliner). Before she is buried, he snips a lock cuts off a giant rope of her hair, which he places in a fancy painted reliquary box on a table in the shrine he builds to her in his gatehouse by the canal. One day a few years later, he sees a woman who resembles the dead wife, and follows her. She’s a dancer, and he’s a devout Catholic and class-conscious snob, but she looks like the dead wife. He puts her up in the empty house of his (dead) parents, but makes no attempt to get to know her as a real person, and doesn’t even tell her he was once married. He doesn’t love her, doesn’t want to bring her into his house, def doesn’t want to marry her, but pressures her to give up dancing, be more circumspect in public. She…likes a big free house in a nice neighborhood, I guess; she doesn’t like this treatment but it takes her a long time to decide to leave. Spoiler: Too long; when she sneaks in and finds the gatehouse shrine, he strangles her with the rope of dead wife’s hair.

The dancer has no name of her own.

Great colors, great interiors! Beautiful wallpapers and wood work! And the set dressers who removed all traces of the 20th century from Brugge for filming deserve an award: I was looking for telephone/electric wires (everybody needs a hobby) and only found one conduit with a junction box, near the end of the film.

TL;DR: Well-made but depressing.

Valhalla – The Legend of Thor (2019)

Prime, Deutsch
Danish children’s movie, a low-budget live-action (so much CGI) remake of an animated classic I have never seen/heard of, based on a Norwegian Edda about a human Child of Light who goes to Valhalla and saves the gods from the Fenrir wolf and the giant Jotnar, preventing Ragnarok. It’s nothing like any of the Disney films except some of the characters share names.

It was OK; too much CGI, some of the gods were very low-energy and wooden. The heroine’s older brother was whiny and annoying. The scenery–probably Iceland–was beautiful, but the colors were off somehow. The interesting part was their family life in Midgard, in a tiny hut with a sod roof, eating fish gruel. I’m super-grateful for refrigeration and running water.