Now that I’m back home, I’m catching up with the hundreds of photos I shot but didn’t edit or upload, so I likely will be posting
Below are the graves of the Brothers Grimm, which I saw on a detour to Schöneberg. There seemed to be papers at the ground, children’s notes held down by stones. Not sure if that was a particular school trip or some sort of tradition I’m unaware of.
There were so many activities going on all the time in Berlin, that inevitably I was going to miss some of them by only a few days. There was a showing of Don Giovanni that started in mid-march, plus an opera season starting on February 28 with (I believe) The Marriage of Figaro; and just at the end of March, a musical by Eric Woolfson (co-founder of The Alan Parsons Project) on Edgar Allan Poe.
Berlin is very much alive.
This was my first film festival, and it was a very interesting experience. Movies varied greatly in quality, form The Dust of Time to Baraka, passing through things like The Pink Panther 2 (which I did not see, my dad’s exhortations on its behalf notwithstanding). An online order system was available, which you absolutely had to use if you wanted tickets for some of the most wanted showings, like the reissues of 2001 (no, I didn’t get to see it for about 30 seconds, my connection at the hotel was slow). Here’s a brief summary of the films I saw:
Miao Miao was the first movie, and a very good start. It’s Hsiao-tse Cheng first film, and it can easily be described as younger eyes looking through Kar Wai Wong’s glasses (you’d probably like it, Annie). Both lead actresses are perfect for their parts, and while the actor playing Chen Fei mopes around a bit too much, his is a secondary role – it’s the two girls who define and carry the movie.
Baraka I’ve already spoken about, as I have about The Dust of Time.
Meotjin Haru, which was translated as My Dear Enemy, was charming. This time we move from Taiwan to Korea, for a bittersweet movie that has just a couple of dashes of Woody-Allen-when-he-doesn’t-suck for flavor. The two hours went by in a flash.
Adam Resurrected should probably be called Goldblum Resurrected, since it gives him his first brilliant part since The Fly in a movie that is so odd that its closest spiritual cousin is Naked Lunch – only that in this case the oddness comes only from behavior and character, not environment and sphincter-bugs. Willem Dafoe is also great in a very subtle mix of cruelty and weakness, and for a specific scene, an inversion of his role in another movie involving a desert. Goldblum is in general not a great actor, but I do wish he would get these perfectly tailored parts more often.
The Casuarina Cove was a well-done short from Singapore about police entrapment of gay men. Recommended for its focus – director Boo Junfeng (when they said his name I thought he was named like the central character from Ashes of Time) stated before the screening that his intention was to bring to light the entrapment and homophobia issues in Singapore and that’s exactly what the short does, without taking two hours retreading the same ground until nothing will grow on it. Contrast that with End of Love, a 95-minute movie that felt like I was watching Ben-Hur in slow motion – and dubbed to Dutch. When you have little to say, you should be brief about it.
The Turkish production Mommo was very refreshing. It’s a straightforward look at the lives of two very young brothers in a village in Turkey going through a difficult period, and doesn’t make any attempt at shoehorning this into a current plot structure. The movie comes in, shows you the characters, makes you care for them, kicks you in the stomach, and then it’s over – no major turning points every 30 minutes, no grand resolutions, no initially dislikable foils turned allies, no initially likable characters with ulterior motives. It was very refreshing to see a movie that doesn’t attempt to push the same worn-out buttons.
The director and two of the main adult actors were on hand to answer questions, of which I didn’t understand a single word since it was held on Turkish and German.
The Korean Members of the Funeral is well acted and competently photographed, but otherwise pedestrian. Nothing to see here, carry on.
It was amusing to see a reissue of Basil Dearden’s Khartoum, a 1966 movie about manipulative figures using religious zealotry and faced against myopic colonialists convinced of their own righteousness, which if anything tells us that the world never changes (except for the official I will not take it upon this country to police the world bit). Heston is great, but Olivier as The Mahdi felt stilted and fake – funny that I didn’t remember perceiving it like that when I first saw it.
Finally came a presentation of Blindsight, a 2006 documentary about a group of blind Tibetan kids climbing the Himalayas. These are not former athletes who lost their sight, but six random children out of a small support center. Not only are they completely, absolutely blind, but you have to see the way blind people are treated in Tibet, even by their own family. I can only imagine the effect on your self-esteem of having been told throughout your life that you’d better have died, or that you are supposed to take whatever abuse is thrown at you – you deserve it, or you wouldn’t be blind in this life. I should get a copy, stick it in a plank of wood and use it to beat over the head anyone who says something like I can’t stop smoking, it’s too difficult or exercising is hard.
Oh, but they have time, it’s not like they have a job and family… SMACK!
The festival was a great experience, and one that I’m looking forward to repeating. Maybe the next time I won’t take a detour to Hamburg in the middle of it and get to see more films.
I just wish they didn’t hold it in winter.
I’ve really been looking forward to The Dust of Time, the last of two movies starring Willem Dafoe playing at the Berlinale. The first one, Adam Resurrected, is a brilliantly odd piece and probably the last such great part Jeff Goldblum will ever get (the other one being The Fly). This movie… well… let me just put it this way.
De-bullshit-fier: Only Theo Angelopolous knows what this confused, boring set of kitchen-sink scenes is supposed to mean. Dafoe somehow manages to sleepwalk hurriedly through something that should be titled Alzheimer – The Movie.
Four countries produced the movie. It seems that they also took turns writing and editing it.
I’d never seen Ron Fricke’s 1992 documentary Baraka, and only knew about it that it was one of a kind, so I got curious when I saw that the Berlinale was showing it as part of its retrospectives I decided to get a ticket for it. Mark Magidson, the film producer, was there for a Q/A session.
Turns out it wasn’t just a presentation of the film, but the first-ever projection from a new 70mm print. With DTS sound. Displayed on a huge screen.
If you haven’t seen it, the film is basically a slideshow of film vignettes set to music, filmed in about 26 countries. There isn’t a single word of explanation, and the effect of the impeccable montage superimposed with the music is stunning: since it is almost impossible to know immediately where each scene comes from, or what it will switch to in the next few seconds, you spend the whole movie wondering – is that Brazil or Indonesia? Mexico or Morocco? The stratification alternates between the obvious and the obscure, with the latter never detracting from the film, since one of its intentions seems to be precisely to have you question why the image is there and what your preconceptions about it are. Is the tattooed asian a yakuza gangster, or meant to be one, or is he just another example of how we brand ourselves to indicate our tribe, much like the young Australian aboriginals early in the film?
My only regret is I saw it sober.
We have an expression in Costa Rica, vergüenza ajena. It comes to mind when you’re sitting in a theater, and two german women begin calling excitedly konnichiwa! konnichiwa! after the young director and actress of Miao Miao, a Taiwanese film.
An almost obligatory post, but I’ll keep it short. Ledger’s Joker is a brilliant gene-splicing of Alex from A Clockwork Orange and Forrest Gump – all that energy with a completely child-like lack of impulse control. He’s that kid who sets your dog on fire, finds it hilarious, and quickly moves on to even funnier stuff. There is some short, but very direct commentary on warrantless spying and what actions are acceptable in order to stop a madman; as well as what a true leader does when his fight with a lunatic gets out of control and the people get scared and demand someone’s blood. It was just as good as I expected but unexpectedly political, and its timing couldn’t be better.
Oh, and Batman’s in it too.
There’s a comedy coming out called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, about a guy directing a Hamlet adaptation to the horror genre, written by a vampire. Just in case you thought that the Gary Oldman movie and Shadow of the Vampire weren’t meta enough.
So what have I been up to? Working. A lot. Getting a regular dose of Wii with Vero. And reading. A lot.
One of the books I’ve recently gone through is The Medici Effect, also available as free PDF from the author’s site.
I’m glad I managed to fight the impulse to pass on it – the oh-so-clever title and Tony Robbins-like site were a bad augury – by figuring out hell, I can dump it any time if it sucks. It’s a very quick read on creativity, full of interesting anecdotes, interviews and stories from inventors, enterpreneurs and innovators. It can easily summed up as it’s damn near impossible to be creative if you focus too much only one thing, expect immediate success or don’t take any risks. It’s a simple piece of advice that you probably already knew, but which the myriad of examples will help you grok.
I’m reading Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, one of those hip this-changes-everything books, this time detailing how remix culture and digital technology is forcing the market to either adapt and compete with those it labels as pirates for modifying their intellecutual property, or die attempting to fight a distributed, faceless enemy that in many cases does nothing but promote their products.
It’s very readable, and I’m all for anything that promotes adapting quickly to changing times, but at least on the technical side of things it all too often gets the details dead wrong. The errors go from saying Half-Life is a mod of Warcraft, to confusing Stallman’s free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom in an analogy (and ignoring the more important one), to saying that Linus Torvalds founded a company named Linux (ironically ignoring the fact that great things can and do come from outside corporate structure). It gets so many things wrong on the areas I have good knowledge of, that I have to wonder how many of the stories on graffiti or hip-hop are wrong too.
I was suspicious that a book with a title closer to Who Moved My Cheese or The monk who sold his Ferrari would be more style than substance, and it’s unfortunate to have those suspicions confirmed. You’re better off reading Larry Lessig’s Free Culture. On a good example of practicing what you preach, Lessig’s book is available for you to read and distribute online.
Mason’s answer? He lets you remix his logo.