In July: Im Juli, and more

Wham! (2023)

Netflix, original English
The real star of this documentary is Andrew Ridgeley’s mum, who kept a series of scrapbooks detailing her son’s career from the day the two best friends signed their first record deal to their farewell concert. Clippings and boarding passes and Polaroids and names and dates.

At the time of the events recollected, I was eight years old and living with parents who thought following popular music was a waste of time, in a rural Iowa village that voted to exclude MTV from the municipal cable package. TL;DR: everything presented, outside of the “Careless Whisper” video, which I saw as an adult, was new information for me. I was surprised to learn the music press was garbage even in the early 80s; I thought the garbageness started later. I also appreciated getting some backstory about “Last Christmas“.

This is ultimately a story about friendship and canary-yellow sports clothes, and I recommend it to anyone who likes British 80s music.

The Time of Their Lives (1946)

YouTube, original English
A strange Abbot and Costello picture, where they work kind of separately. Costello is a tinker from the Revolutionary War era, a patriot who has a letter of commendation from George Washington, but gets accidentally shot as a traitor, thrown in a well, and condemned to haunt the property of the real traitor, along with the traitor dude’s fiancée. In the present day (1946), they haunt the descendent who rebuilt the house looking for that letter.

I did not laugh as much as with Bud Abbot and Lou Costello in Hollywood, but the special effects (no CGI!) were great.

(IMDB says Gordon Lightfoot referenced this movie in “If You Could Read My Mind“, and I’m not going to check it because I need it to be true.)

Im Juli (2000)

DVD (own), original Deutsch with other local languages

An arthouse film from director Fatih Akins, who has made a lot of pictures about the Turkish-German experience. Moritz Bleibtreu (Lola) stars as uptight Hamburg physics teacher Daniel, who plans to spend the summer vacation reading on his balcony. Luckily(?) a hippie with box braids Juli, “like the month” (played by Christiane Paul, who has mostly worked in TV) who sees him walk by the flea market every day has taken an interest in him. She sells him a ring with a sun on it, tells him the love of his life will be wearing a sun when they meet, and directs him to a music venue she plans to be at later that night–where he meets a Turkish girl wearing a dress with a sun on it. After a chaste but intense night on the beach, Daniel drives her to the airport to catch a flight to Istanbul, then decides to drive there because he wants to meet her again. On the way out of town he picks up a hitchhiker–oh, it’s you, Juli, oh, and you’re going to Istanbul too?–and they make their way southeast in a series of increasingly bizarre misadventures. After the car breaks down in Bavaria, they decide to just follow the Danube, despite Daniel’s objection that Serbia is still a war zone. They hitch, they stow away, they steal a car and sell off bits of it for gas money. Occasionally they get separated. Daniel is picked up by a Yugoslavian woman and roofied in a Budapest bazaar, then by a man from Berlin taking his dead uncle back to be buried in his homeland.

In the end they both reach Istanbul, and since it’s a rom-com you know what happens next.

Europe has changed a lot since this movie was made, and even since I first saw it in 2007, and I don’t want to think about that too much. Great colors, music, and scenery, though; funny dialog. I should have rewatched it sooner.

A Perfect World (1993)

Cable (Warner Film), original English
Kevin Costner stars as “Butch”, an escaped convict in 1960s (pre-assassination) Texas, whose accomplice takes 8-year-old Phillip as hostage (then tries to molest him, so Butch shoots him in the face. Fair play.). He gets chased by Clint Eastwood, the Texas Ranger who sent him to prison unfairly years before, and Laura Dern, a PhD criminologist the good ol’ boy Rangers won’t take seriously. They meet, and steal from, a lot of small-town and Texas farm folk, before the inevitable conclusion is reached (no spoilers: in the opening scene, before the story begins, we are shown Butch’s dead body).

Phillip’s father was absent, and Butch was cool, so the two develop a relationship as events fold. The last half hour was very intense. Really nice cinematography.

Jezebel (1938)

Cable (Warner Film), original English
I was surprised this popped up–I’d read about Warner’s attack on TCM, and the recent “Sunday afternoon classics” have all been color films–but it was on my list since Sunset Blvd so hey, Schwein gehabt. TBH, I didn’t understand why New Orleans society was scandalized by her dress and not by her being out alone with a man in a carriage with no chaperone; from what I know of the times that seems like the bigger transgression.

Hey, isn’t that…?: Aunt Belle was played by Fay Bainter, the mom in the Dana Andrews version of State Fair. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the role.

Autumn Girl (2021)

Netflix, English
The first Polish movie I have ever seen with a happy ending. It’s a biopic of 1960s film and music star Kalina Jedrusik–whom I assure you I only know from reading the blurb, I am not claiming to know any single thing about popular entertainers behind the Iron Curtain–during a time when she was fired from her job in live television by a Comrade because she refused to bang him. It’s a musical, so the colors are bright and middle-aged women out buying bread break out in coordinated dances, but it’s enjoyable despite being kitschy. The songs were not dubbed, but translations were provided in the subtitles.

The star, Maria Debska, played the Nazi-era murdered Jewess in Black Mercedes, but with the change in hair and costume I didn’t even notice she was the same woman. I can keep my conceit that “foreign films are easier because I can’t associate the actors with their previous roles”.

Murder by Television (1935)

YouTube, original English
I am so incredibly spoiled by arte showing me remasters…this one appears to have been digitized from a copy of a copy of a copy cobbled together from damaged bits. But it was *available*. Thank you, PizzaFlix!

Bela Lugosi is a detective solving a drawing-room murder mystery; it’s not really a thriller and it’s not supernatural at all (the first killing is done with a technological device and the second with a knife). Mostly interesting as a glimpse into the time it was filmed.

Austria 2 Australia (2020)

Netflix, original Deutsch
My least favorite subgenre of European arthouse travel film–and naturally, one Mr Radish really enjoys–is “a pair of entitled western European kids take a lot of video selfies while they bike/walk/hitchhike through a bunch of developing/hostile countries and expect the locals to feed them and save their asses” (the category may be called something else at the BIFF). There were a lot of these films made after the invention of the video-screen phone, until the Covid-19 lockdowns.

These two young men from Linz really loved Pakistan, where they didn’t even *notice* there were no women in any of the public life or fun parties they attended. The high point of the film was the sobbing halfway through a ten-day trek across an uninhabited Australian desert they intentionally chose instead of a scenic ride along the coast with sufficient drinking water. Tja.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)

Cable (Sony AXN), original English
Palate cleanser. Saw it about ten years ago; forgot most of the un-memed jokes, laughed my ass off.

Wir sind im Auftrag des Herrn unterwegs.

Elwood

The Blues Brothers (1980)

arte, Deutsch (songs in original)
When you notice The Blues Brothers is on, you watch it. arte shows it every year, because it deserves to be seen every year. This was the original version released in West German cinemas back in the day, and both the translations and the synchronizations could be better–modern German voice actors can make the “th” sound, the man who voiced Cab Calloway introducing Ze Blues Bruzzers could not–but all the R&B greats’ performances are presented in their original voices. That’s the main thing for me, and TBH–I could chant most of the original dialog from memory.

I laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Having most of it committed to memory didn’t make it less funny.

And car crashes that you know are not CGI just hit differently. Muahaha.

Notable screen appearance: Mr X as a state trooper.

(I’ll never forget the time I realized part of the chase scene at the end was filmed in Milwaukee.)

Dan Aykroyd Unplugged on UFOs (2005)

YouTube, original English
I was thinking about watching more Aykroyd stuff, then this popped up in my feed. *spooky music* The filmmaker’s style annoyed me: it’s a conversation, but his questions were clearly re-recorded later, and it’s very repetitive. But Aykroyd is knowledgeable about the phenomenon, and explains it all calmly and clearly.

Been some interesting developments since this was filmed.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Netflix, original English
Surprisingly decent for a Netflix original. Christian Bale plays a retired NYC detective brought in to solve a murder at West Point when Edgar Allen Poe was a cadet, so sometime in the 1840s. I thought it was going to be a straight crime-solving movie, but the plot veers into poetry and the history of the occult. Beautiful outdoors scenery, rather dark interiors (fits to the time period); I can’t make any notes about the historical accuracy of the uniforms but the women’s clothes and hair looked mostly good.

Mr Radish thought the ending was too gimmicky; I thought it was fine but definitely an anticlimax after a very intense satanic ritual scene.

I should actually read some Poe and/or look for some 20th century film adaptations.

If you like to watch the credits: I counted 11 names just for setting up the green screens.

Kein Pardon (1993)

Netflix, original Deutsch
German funny man Hape Kerkeling* (who is actually funny) wrote, directed, and headlined this feature film satire of TV comedy. He plays Peter, a gentle young fan of the comedy-music-variety show Witzischkeit kennt keine Grenzen, and its host, who off-camera abuses the staff and harasses the dancers. Peter meets a girl who records sound effects, gets a job at the studio as a gofer, and after a series of mishaps, ends up taking over the hosting job. The fame changes him and estranges him from his family, and in the end he is forced to decide what kind of a man he really wants to be.

While not a box-office success, this film became popular through repeated showings in the ÖRR, and I hear the catchphrases in conversations to this day. Finally, I understand why everybody laughs! Cute movie, with jokes that were actually funny. Worth the time.

*Review of his biopic here.

3 Days in Quiberon (2018)

arte Mediathek, original Deutsch/Französisch
Yet another biopic of actress Romy Schneider (I saw an earlier one last year, but didn’t write about it), a black-and-white letterbox treatment of a weekend she spends in a seaside town with a friend, a photographer who wants to bang her, and a journalist from German magazine Stern, drinking with locals and recording the last interview she gave for German media before her death–basically two hours of people drinking and talking.

Stern still publishes; here’s a photo from that weekend.

I’m not sure this movie needed to be made.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

tubi, original English
My brother had this on VHS, and I am pleased to report that even after more than twenty years since the last viewing, I can still recite all the jokes along with the actors. Rubber costumes beat CGI every day!

What I never knew before yesterday: Splinter was voiced by Elmo. I wish I did not know that.