February Movie Log

I was going to ignore the Berlinale again this year, but they’ve given the stage over to scuzzballs calling for the mass murder of Jews again this year citing a “commitment to free expression.”

There is no right to free expression in Germany. People here are only allowed to express the opinions of the parties in power, and they will call the police and ruin your life if you express any thought they don’t like (and giggle about it amongst themselves).

Since the police weren’t called on the filth on stage, and the German government will continue to fund the event, we know the parties in power agree with their words.

I am angry about this.

Soapbox over, now to the movie reviews:

Echte Bauern singen besser (Real Farmers Sing Better) (2019)

BR, original Deutsch
Typical German tax-funded TV pointless/predictable mid-week movie, starring Sebastian Bezzel of the Eberhofer film franchise, and two actors who played RAF terrorists in The Baader Meinhof Complex (which I’ve been “meaning to see again” for about five years now). Bezzel plays two roles: A middle-aged drugged-out Berlin rock star seeking a comeback, and his doppelganger, a middle-aged farmer from Brandenburg (northeast of Berlin, AKA nowhere near Bavaria) who lives with his parents and gave up singing years before. When the rock star ends up in court-mandated rehab, his assistant finds the farmer, begs him to help her out by impersonating her boss, gives him a makeover with the help of a *cough* magic Bagger-Vance voice coach *cough*, and schedules a show. Meanwhile in the rehab, the rock star is getting sober and learning how to relate to humanity.

“We can turn this off,” said Mr Radish twenty minutes after he turned it on, but by that point I was invested in counting the clichés.

Good B-roll of pre-pandemic Berlin, if you’re into that sort of thing.

The Round-up (1920)

YouTube (PizzaFlix), original English
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s feature film debut. He wasn’t the main character, but he provided some comic relief in a sad story about a cowboy who was attacked by bandits, then had his girl stolen away by his best friend while he was recovering in a hospital far from home.

Super title cards in this one.

Hey, that looks like: Buster Keaton, in an uncredited cameo.

Live a Little, Love a Little (1968)

Cable (Warner Film), original English
At least there were some professional dancers in this one.

A surreal Elvis vehicle (Albert, the giant dog who tries to eat him in the opening scene, turns into a man at the beginning of a sequence of interpretative dance) featuring an immature and possibly mentally-ill woman who lies to the men she leaches off of as the love interest. Elvis’s character isn’t much better. He’s a womanizing photographer who takes two full-time jobs, one at a raunchy men’s magazine and one at an upscale housewife magazine. I felt a bit sorry for the studio employees who had to edit this crap into something semi-coherent.

At least the sets and costumes had some glamour, and good supporting work from Dick Sargent and Rudy Vallee, which reminds me I need to listen to more music.

Der Heilige Berg (The Holy Mountain) (1926)

arte Mediathek, original Deutsch
From arte’s rotating “European classics” collection, a beautiful example of the German 1920s “mountain climbing film” genre, which was insanely popular at the time. Leni Riefenstahl, who was a dancer before going behind the camera, plays Diotima, a dancer giving shows at a hotel in the Swiss Alps. She’s engaged to a professional mountain climber named Karl, played by Luis Trenker, but also starts a thing with an admirer from the audience who turns out to be his best friend Vigo. Upon learning this, Karl decides to take Vigo on a climb up the infamous Nordwand, the most dangerous climb up the Eiger, also known as the “Wall of Death”–in the short daylight of winter, in a blizzard. As one does.

This movie was written and directed by a geologist named Arnold Fanck, and all the climbing footage was shot up in the mountains on location. Trenker was born in Südtirol, served in WWI, and after the war was an architect and an Olympic bobsledder before his climbing skills got him into the film industry in the late 1920s. After WWII, he had several shows in the BR about his homeland and the mountains. Here he explains how the filmmaking was done in the mountains, and look how casual he is about the danger! “That black spot, that’s Whosit’s body, he slipped.”

(Mr Radish saw these Trenker TV spots as a child, and that’s the only reason he assented to spending his evening watching a Stummfilm. Heh.)

There is a whole five-minute sequence that is nothing but Diotima playing with baby animals by a mountain cabin that could have been a YouTube or a TikTok, and somehow knowing that baby animal videos have delighted audiences since the beginning of moving images makes me feel better about humans in general. (There are also hundreds of moving animal images at Pre-Cinema History.) There is also a twenty-minute sequence of a cross-country ski race that is mostly just men skiing, making this also a classic of the sports genre. I didn’t need modern dance sequences, but that’s my taste and not a criticism of the film itself.

TL;DR: Excellent. Go watch it.

Pollock (2000)

DVD (library), original English
I swear I looked for this one at the library for nine years, even checking the catalog, and it wasn’t there. One day when I was looking for something else, I found it.

A rewatch; I got it in a red envelope when I lived in Iowa shortly after reading the book it was based on, so this time I looked at how at the paintings, and how Jackson Pollock made them, were filmed and presented to us. Absolute recommendation if you share my thing for artist biopics.

Violent and sad, but superbly shot and acted (Ed Harris directs himself). I’m still not sure what I think of Val Kilmer playing DeKooning.

Juggernaut (1974)

arte Mediathek, original English
Another Mr Radish pick; I had low expectations but it turned out to be a very good British suspense film (tragedy but no explicit gore) that also serves as a time capsule with an all-star cast (Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Harris). Someone has placed a series of bombs on a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic, and will set them off if he’s not given a half-million pounds. Bomb experts are parachuted out onto the ship during a terrible storm. The story unfolds from the perspective of passengers, crew, British intelligence officials, and the experts.

Spent some time trying to figure out why I knew the fat American politician cruising with his wife: He played Comiskey in Eight Men Out. But I couldn’t place the female lead: she had been the lead in Sweet Bird of Youth, which I saw in January but was too lazy to write about.

Milli Vanilli (2023)

Cable (GEO), original English/Deutsch
Listing said “Spielfilm” and not “Doku”, so I thought this was going to be the biopic teased on IMDB, but it was the MTV documentary film, retelling the story from the perspective of Fabrice Moran and the singers on the recordings (Rob Pilatus died in 1998, so he was represented by Fab and his adoptive sister). Extremely well-made, with original VHS recordings of their early Munich days and shows. I felt sad for days.

Towards the end, there’s a sequence where Fab, sitting in front of a blank background, just looks into the camera for a whole minute, and this basic 19th-century film technique works so much harder on the audience than all the modern filter crap on the internets.

After the sequence about Rob Pilatus’ funeral in Munich, where I said, “Hey, that looks like the Waldfriedhof!” (everyone needs a hobby), I looked him up at Find-A-Grave, and his gravesite has been “ausgelöscht“, “dissolved”, because the practice here is to rent a space and if the lease isn’t renewed, the plot can be rented to someone else. Just an extra level of tragedy to the story. (Fab is alive and well, married to a beautiful Dutch woman and they have three kids together.)

Delirious (1991)

tubi, original English
After last month’s disappointing Ackroyd/Belushi offering, I was cautious, but this John Candy send-up of the soap opera genre was decent. He plays a scriptwriter, in the middle of a dispute with his producers over the fate of a cast member he’s crushing on hard. After a meet-cute where he injures the actress coming in to replace his crush (I grimaced as I typed that), he wrecks his car and wakes up inside the soap he writes for, with all its clichés. When her realizes his life is in danger, he also realizes he can change the story by typing out a new screenplay on his typewriter.

Good physical comedy, good makeup and practical effects, dialog a little hokey (as befits soap-opera writing, I guess), somewhat predictable happy ending, fun casting (Robert Wagner and pre-L&O Jerry Orbach). I see how it wasn’t good enough to become a classic from the era, but I was entertained in an unironic way.

Hey, isn’t that: Talia Winters, here as the stereotypical nurse-in-love-with-the-doctor-who-will-stop-at-nothing-to-get-him.

Queen Kelly (1929)

YouTube, English
When I saw Sunset Blvd. I thought, “Hey, I should track down that movie where Erich von Stroheim directed Gloria Swanson.” I spent nearly three years searching for a copy with title cards in a language I can read. Now that works created and registered in 1929 are in the public domain the US, one claiming to be the most complete version popped up immediately. Go fig.

I was surprised to learn this was an American film, since the signs in the convent were in German.
Swanson herself felt miscast as an orphan in a convent school–she was visibly too old to play a young teen–but what’s the point of running your own production company if you can’t give yourself the roles you want? On an outing, she throws her panties at a man jeering at her, who turns out to be a prince scheduled to marry the queen the next day. He decides that’s true love, so he burns down the convent and kidnaps her to the palace, where he seduces her with food and deflowers her. Of course the queen finds out, threatens to kill her, and when she escapes back to the convent she’s packed off to her aunt in German East Africa. Who is a whore. And has sold her niece into marriage to her elderly and disgusting pimp.

It was never finished; the ending is explained in title cards and still photos, and that was a let-down after what felt like hours of long shots of faces contorting in lieu of dialogue, but also a relief because this crap had gone on long enough.

If you want to enjoy a von Stroheim flick, see The Merry Widow instead. He finished it, and there’s cute baby animals.

Cat content: Queen Regina V carries her white Persian with her everywhere, also using it to cover her naked body in some scenes. The unnamed feline is the best part of this show.

Elvis (2022)

Netflix, original English
I was worried I was going to hate it, but it was extremely well-made. There is a lot of CGI, but it’s meant to feel unreal, the whole crazy story careening out of control. Thematically, it was a good follow-up to the Milli Vanilli Doku, with the greedy old business man taking advantage of young, naive talent.

I was also very impressed by the actors who portrayed the Black musicians in Memphis. Brilliant performances, I want to see and hear more.

Plushie game also on point.

There is archival footage of Elvis’s last concert at the end of the film, and I cried watching it. I can’t remember the last time I cried watching a movie.

TL;DR: If you haven’t seen it, go check it out.