New year, new list!
Detailed research has become a chore and I hate chores, so in the future I may be brief. As always, you are encouraged to leave your objections in the comments. 😉
La vérité (The Truth) (1960)
arte Mediathek, Deutsch
I was surprised arte could only scrounge up two Brigitte Bardot films to show after her death, although I probably shouldn’t have been, and only one had subtitles in German. Mr Radish objected strongly to a French black and white movie, but I have not forgotten being forced to watch Le salaire de la peur last fall.
It was actually really good, a courtroom drama interspersed with flashbacks to the months leading up to the murder of a rich young music student. Bardot plays a good-time girl *cough* who accompanies her serious musician sister to Paris, where the sister will study at a conservatory. The sister begins dating the aforementioned rich young man, and they spend a lot of time together doing sweet-romance things fully clothed, but he can’t keep his hands off Bardot (yes, you get to see her butt in this one). But he still intends to marry the conventional sister, and after a lot of drama, Bardot’s character shoots him. The trial is not to determine guilt, as she admits to the shooting, but to decide if it was pre-meditated murder.
It’s a good story (sad ending) with interesting supporting characters, and an interesting glimpse into the post-war Paris party milieu, that I’m pretty sure no longer exists.
My MIL, who loves French films in the original French and saw this one in the theater when it was new, later told us that Bardot and the director, one Henri-Georges Clouzot, hated working with each other and had a lot of screaming matches on the set. I couldn’t really see that in the final cut, but there was a lot of screaming between the characters, so maybe she used it. In the end, Mr Radish was forced to admit I chose a good movie. *thbbbbth*
The Gold Rush (1942)
arte Mediathek, original English
“1942” is not a typo; arte showed us the “revival” with narration by Charlie Chaplin replacing the title cards.
The Tramp (which he calls the “little fellow”) is seeking his fortune in the 1890s Klondike. As in every film, he meets some good people, some shady/sinister people, some animals, and gets the girl in the end (although she was awfully mean to him when she thought he was poor). He also performs the iconic “dance of the bread rolls” in a daydream sequence.
I enjoyed it, but I think I liked the original better.
Schweinskopf al dente (2016)
BR, original Deutsch
I broke my “never start watching a movie that has already begun” rule because when I turned the TV on, they were showing the opening credits. Plus, I’ve seen it a couple of times.
Fun new thing! The wife of Eberhofer’s boss was “on a Kur“–think a stint in a celebrity wellness spa, with less spa and more exercise–and when the killer went to visit her, I recognized the courtyard. They’re at Schloss Höhenried, where Mr Radish was the past two summers.
I thought I had a better picture, but this will have to do.
Fargo (1996)
arte Mediathek, original English
Saw this one quite a few times last century (lol), but it’s been awhile. Enjoyed the accents and the weather, laughed at the bits that have become memes. The cinematography also impressed me (see featured image).
I’m not sure if I didn’t know this, or if I had forgotten this, but check this out:
The Three Caballeros (1944)
Disney+, original English, Portuguese, Spanish
Until it popped up, I was completely unaware of this WWII-era montage of bird-related animations starring Donald Duck, with some live-action footage of artists from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina mixed in. I am told it was commissioned by the War Department to help familiarize Americans with our allies to the south, between scenes of Donald chasing women in bikinis. Hrm.
Nice animation in different styles; some of the audio was in Spanish and Portuguese with no English or German subtitles, so I had no idea what was going on in those segments. I particularly enjoyed a segment explaining a Mexican custom of children going door to door with statues of Mary and Joseph, being turned away until they reach the house that says yes, and they are invited in for a Christmas party.
Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
Disney+, original English
I have previously mentioned repeated forced viewings of terrible Disney live-action films when I was a kid; this is not one of them. I only saw it once, on television, and I liked it, but then I was never allowed to check it out of the library (there was a per-family limit on video cassettes and my mother did the choosing). And then I kind of forgot about it for many years. When I saw it pop up on my tablet, I couldn’t remember why I liked it, only that I did.
Two theories: 1) Siblings Tia and Tony get some revenge after being bullied by the other orphans for being “weird.” Definitely appealing. 2) Winkie.
And I enjoyed it again, although it’s definitely a time capsule; today’s villains have too much technology to need hayseeds in pickup trucks to chase down their prey. Good adult cast, with a cameo by the Duke boys’ Uncle Jesse.
Muppets Most Wanted (2014)
Disney+, original English
I wanted to like it, and I did have a few laughs at Berlin and at the gulag’s variety show. But I found myself wishing I had chosen to rewatch a 20th-century Muppet movie instead. Just no heart in this one.
Ricky Gervais was funny, and so was Danny Trejo, but there were more one-line celebrity cameos than Muppets, and the Piggy-forcing-Kermit-into-marriage plotline was gross.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
Disney+, original English
Elaborate steam-punk style sets and all-star cast, but still a time capsule. Incredible underwater filming for the time.
The Aristocats (1970)
Disney+, original English
Somehow as a child of the 80s, I never saw Uncle Walt’s last animated children’s film, a cat rom-com and travel adventure, never made it into my childhood (I only knew Zsa Zsa Gabor as a punchline). The animation was simple but pleasant, the animals were meme-able, but 1) it was set in 1910 but full of anachronisms that give it a dated feel and 2) a main human character abused the horse, and that made me uncomfortable.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)
Disney+, original English
I only got through six seasons of this animated TV show before Mr Radish killed our Disney subscription, so I probably missed some of the one-off characters and jokes. It’s basically a quadruple-length episode, easily watchable, “hey, that’s the guy from that one episode!”, no notes.
Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven) (1964)
arte Mediathek, original German
After I wrote “I feel bad that I didn’t watch the whole collection in the arte Mediathek before they took it down” I made an effort this month with the Konrad Wolf films from DEFA, the East German film company (I enjoy their Easterns). I’m not sure if it paid off.
Ostensibly a doomed-love story, this one is pretty much straight-up “East Germany is superior to West Germany” propaganda. The female lead works in a factory, where her boss doesn’t care how much actual work gets done because they get paid the same no matter what (he is later punished for this, and then becomes gravely ill; lesson learnt). The male lead is a chemist who grows tired of being told he can only research what the government prioritizes, develops some ties to a company in West Germany that promises him freedom to research things with commercial potential, and eventually moves there. He asks his girl to join him, but after an montage of the horror of West Berliners walking free, drinking coffees, enjoying music, buying books, etc., she realizes she can never live in such a dehumanizing place and she moves back to East Germany, where she falls into a deep depression. If only her man had understood how good it was at home!
Mildly interesting: Wolf is still using the narrator he used in Lissy (see below) to deliver the lesson to the audience.
Lissy (1957)
arte Mediathek, original German
Rant: I am watching an East German movie in Germany where all characters are Germans speaking German and there subtitles in five languages, but none of them are German.
The titular Lissy is a young woman from a normal working-class family working as a cigarette girl in a large café in 1930s Berlin, but she wants a more glamourous life. When she gets knocked up by one of the men she is seeing, she forces him into marriage after failing to find an abortionist, and they into a normal office-class family life. But then he loses his job and has trouble finding another one (the Great Depression was worldwide). Lissy’s petty-thief brother, a Communist out of conviction, keeps them fed, but all their furniture is repossessed and the landlady threatens eviction. The husband is convinced by a friend to join the NSDAP with the promise of perks after they come into power, and when they do he’s elevated to a fairly high-status position. Lissy goes from sitting on the floor with her son, surrounded by wash lines, to bossing around staff, decorating a gigantic apartment with luxury furniture, and hosting dinner parties for assorted Party functionaries. Finally, the life she always felt she deserved.
And then the lesson of the film kicks in, aided by an annoying male voiceover. We see Lissy in her new fine clothes visiting Communist friends–here I criticize the story-telling, we should have seen these friends from her old life when she was living her old life–on a night they are attacked by the SA and several of them are shot and/or arrested. Later she witnesses some Jewish neighbors being harassed and then arrested, and then finally her brother, who joined the Party for some reason I couldn’t quite understand, is killed. Oh no! Maybe the price of her glamourous luxury life too high! But it’s too late. Ende.
I’m watching this shaking my head at all the obvious propaganda (clearly intended to disguise the fact that the SED recruited former NSDAP members because they’re two sides of the same socialist coin), but apparently at the time this was considered subtle, and the awful, thoughtless, selfish Lissy was considered a sympathetic character. The past is a different planet.
Sterne (Stars) (1959)
arte Mediathek, original German/Bulgarian
Not complaining about the English subtitles on this one, since I don’t understand Bulgarian.
You know the film will make you sad for days when the first scene is a box car crammed full of human beings, but I kept going, and it was the best script of the four Konrad Wolf films arte offered.
A German sergeant the locals call “Walter” (we are informed by Wolf’s usual narrator) is stationed in a Bulgarian village and tasked with keeping a group of Greek Jews behind barbed wire so they can be sent to Auschwitz, which they believe is a place where they will be given jobs on farms. Walter wants to be an artist, doesn’t really care about the agenda, but also doesn’t care enough to oppose it. He won’t bust the local anti-German partisans, but he won’t help them, either. His boss is a coarse, vulgar man who does care about the agenda, when he can find time for it between wine and whores. Walter meets a teacher named Ruth when she asks him for a doctor for a woman giving birth, and over a week or so they have a lot of conversations about life, death, art, love, evil, etc.
Ruth knows Auschwitz is not an agricultural commune. Eventually Walter knows it, too. His boss tells them the Jews will be transported out in two days; Walter and Ruth make a plan. The boss lied.
Find a copy of it if you can; IMDB tells me it was just screened at a California film festival with a abominably-formatted website showing a picture of two supporting characters instead of Walter and Ruth.
(I could have taken more screenshots myself, I suppose; this is a doll made by a Jewish family living in this Bulgarian village, stamped “Jewish-produced goods” so people know not to buy it.)
Solo Sunny (1980)
arte Mediathek, original German
The titular Sunny is a young singer with a traveling revue who plays modest gigs (think farmers’ association banquets) around East Germany. She’s being courted by a man she doesn’t really care for but enjoys the perks he gets from his government connections; men on her tour sexually abuse her and she tolerates it because she wants to sing instead of being assigned to a factory; the neighbors in her really crappy apartment house complain about all the men coming in and out when she’s home. Eventually she falls in love with a “philosopher” who doesn’t love her back, gets replaced by a younger girl in her revue, and makes a half-ass suicide attempt (in her friend’s new apartment on the 10th floor she takes too many pain killers instead of jumping off the balcony).
There’s a decent ending, as she completes her psychiatric rehabilitation and auditions for a new band that plays better music, but the main reason to watch this movie is East German director Konrad Wolf is showing you late 1970s East Germany as he saw it on the fringes (with some pro forma praise of Communism in the dialog to get it approved by the censors), with all its peeling paint, and how awful the system was for anyone who wanted to run their own lives. Best example: Sunny’s apartment was in an 19th-century building and didn’t have a toilet, she had to share one on a different level with all the neighbors. Her running water was a single faucet. Her friend who had completed more education and did an assigned job, was allowed a new, modern apartment (we mock the Plattenbau, but none of us would choose the shared-toilet building if given a choice between the two).
I can’t say I enjoyed this one, but it was worth the watch, and it seems Wolf changed during the 1970s, he’s less of a cheerleader for the East German government than previously. I was unable to determine why.
A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
arte Mediathek, original English
Ah, now some comedy, I thought, because I am dumb like that.
Another Chaplin-in-exile picture, starring Marlon Brando as the son of a wealthy oilman disappointed to lose the SecState nomination, and Sophia Loren as a stateless person who claimed to be an exiled Russian countess (which would have made her well over sixty but she was clearly mid-30s…) but was forced into sex work in Hong Kong to support herself. Brando’s on a long luxury ship voyage back to the US mainland with stops in Japan and Hawaii, one of his cronies hires some escorts for their last evening in Hong Kong, and Loren hides in his stateroom until the ship leaves port.
Upon discovering the stowaway, he threatens to call the ship’s purser to get her thrown off, but she persuades him to keep hiding her. The rest of the story is an unfunny romp through plans to facilitate her illegal entry into the United States, including a sham marriage to Brando’s naturalized English butler, while keeping her and her true identity hidden from the rest of the ship and Brando’s wife (Tippi Hedren, in her first post-Hitchcock outing). Eventually the countess just jumps off the ship and swims to Hawaii. Problem solved, she’s in! New problem: she’s fallen in love with Brando, the next ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who is expected to move there with his wife. Easy solution:He’s rich, he’ll just give up the position to stay in Hawaii with her.
What a load of gob shite, Mr Chaplin. And arte clearly didn’t choose to air this terrible box-office-flop critically-panned film for its artistic or cultural significance. *eyebrows*
RadishFlix fave Dame Margaret Rutherford had a poignant cameo as a wealthy old lady who travels with teddy bears. Not enough to save this piece.
The Naked Gun (2025)
Paramount+, original English
Someone whose opinion I respect said it wasn’t bad, so we gave it a shot and I enjoyed it. It’s not really a reboot, Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin, Jr., but it follows the same formula and uses the same styles of physical comedy and wordplay. CCH Pounder made a great department head (as usual), and Pamela Anderson was enjoyable as the love interest. I laughed a lot. I needed the laughs. I didn’t care for the CGI owl, as I felt it didn’t fit the franchise, but as I type this I realize it may have been a parody of the Harry Potter franchise. aha!
Until next month!
