In Cinemas: Just Mercy

Michael B. Jordan plays the activist Bryan Stevenson, to whom the script has given a wafer-thin characterization: Stevenson is noble and good. Can he use these characteristics to express something like the anger of the oppressed? No. Films with a message about the suffering of African-Americans have been around since the 1950s. The vast majority of productions pursue one goal: not to offend the white audience with what is called "Black Anger". Black people are enslaved, mistreated or shot by racist cops. Only they must not get angry. They always have to act full of nobility (and for this we hear a gospel choir in the background murmuring softly). Just Mercy" is just like a movie. Nice and easy to digest. A film that tries to create "teachable" moments to win the hearts of the racists. Moreover, the racists in these movies are so profoundly evil that every white viewer has to think: "Thank God I'm not like this guy. Destin Daniel Cretton works with this formula. But at least "Just Mercy" addresses certain topics at all. Is the life of white people worth more than that of black people? How unjust is the justice system? Shown in the case of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), who is on death row for a crime he did not commit. Although more than enough people testify to his alibi, he is sentenced to death by the jury in Alabama. With the help of some cartoon villains like the corrupt sheriff. Ironically, we get to witness a case that would be credible in itself - but is portrayed so weakly that I had to laugh. Cinematic clichés make us even assume that super villains like the sheriff don't belong to an equally corrupt system! Of course Foxx' McMillian is also an extremely shallow character. One that can be wonderfully underlaid with a gospel choir.

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In Cinemas: For Sama

Waad al-Kateab is a 26 year old student with a restless urge to comment. She comments on the individual fate of the Syrian war more intimately than anyone else ever has. In a war that is becoming increasingly complex and violent, she is armed with nothing but a smartphone. In 2012, she planned to finish her studies in Aleppo. Back then, the "Arab Spring" was still raging; there was plenty of hope. It was destroyed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Syria sank into chaos and war. The revolution seemed like a distant fantasy. Then al-Kateab decided to stay and not to leave like so many others. She decided to fight for a better future. Then she began her documentary. Almost as if she was putting together a kind of photo album of horror. One that she dedicated to her daughter Sama. Of course, there's also her fear of being killed herself. So For Sama can also be considered a legacy. Here begins the journey of the freedom fighter al-Kateab and her husband Hamza. The pictures are overwhelming! They break through the "fourth wall" to the audience. The people affected appear right before our eyes. They address themselves to us. A mother who just lost her child. She asks why she is being filmed at such a moment of unending tragedy. We do not hear the answer. But this mother will be part of a story that must one day be told. To remember her. and all the other victims of the war. Then we see two brothers taking the dead body of their third brother to the hospital. We see bombed streets and at some point air raids seem like a normal thing. Mass funerals, the work of the many, many volunteers and a freshly born baby. For Sama is the most important humanistic film of the year! All these tragedies and small miracles of humanity are captured by the autodidact al-Kateab. And she always believes in the positive! We often experience war through a family perspective as we have never seen it before. For example, when mothers try to present war to their children as something normal. Domestic life continues to take place amidst deadly threats. One year after the shooting was finished, al-Kateab held out together with Hamza - but in the end, Syria, where even hospitals are being destroyed, is no place to raise a child. In the end, the family manages to escape. Their unrelenting footage saved them! A brave act of resistance! It will remain until the day Sama can watch it.

Charles Burnett - Killer Of Sheep

Nothing is more difficult than the depiction of normal life in a movie. Especially because we are used to "storytelling" from so many other works: ...patterns of narration and certain actions that come up again and again. Or do film characters behave like real people? Charles Burnett, however, shows the normal everyday routine. He demonstrates a life in poverty that leaves people no freedom of choice. He shows the life of a family from Watts, which is bound by strong values but without opportunities. The life of this family ends in nowhere. Just like the movie. Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) works in the slaughterhouse. He works to the point of exhaustion. In the evening, at home, he repairs the sink and the like. His wife (Kaycee Moore) is beautiful but tired. When Stan comes home, she freshens up her make-up for him (which he doesn't even notice). In a casual sequence of episodes we get to know her children, her neighbours, her life. We see nothing and everything at the same time. Filmed in black and white, which gives us a feeling of resignation. This is how Killer Of Sheep became a classic - which hardly anyone knows. Take a test and enter it on Netflix. Of course no hit. Our colleague Thomas Groh, however, created the DVD version in a cardboard cover for our video store. As a USA import with a regional code 1, which you can see with a code free player (for example a very cheap DVD player) or by getting instructions on DVD-sucht.de. Burnett's movie was made as a graduation film. For no money. That's why you could hardly see it already in 1978. You can find the whole story of its creation on www.killerofsheep.com. Now when you watch our DVD, you should be prepared. Relaxed. One scene follows the other with no apparent pattern. In addition, the music of the great Dinah Washington is played, because on a deeper level Killer Of Sheep also wants to be a film about African-American music. Music by and about Afro-Americans. Again and again the life of the adults is interrupted by the playing children. But they are playing in a wasteland full of garbage! A child is beaten and bleeds. Stan's work is also bloody, because he kills sheep in the slaughterhouse. A terrible job. Stan slits their throats and watches the blood flow out. Then two strangers come and try to implicate Stan in a crime. They are sent away. Charles Burnett himself grew up in Watts. He's one of America's greatest filmmakers, but not one who ever made a hit. Like no other, he is able to capture the empty hot summer days in Mississippi. When the windows are open and the dust settles in. A life in the ghetto, but not the ghetto with guns and drugs that we know from other films. The ghetto is a place for good, hard-working people who try to make ends meet, raise their children and get some sleep.

FREE ON YOUTUBE Momo

FREE ON YOUTUBE  Once upon a time ... the poet rode the train. On a slow train. That pleases the author of the Momo novel - Michael Ende - because his poet has time. The poet who reads the Times, that's Michael Ende himself. Then, all of a sudden, an old man sits opposite him. The old man looks like John Huston. He introduces himself as Master Hora. He smiles wisely and seems omniscient. Almost like a god. Hora now tells the fable of Momo and the grey masters who steal time. When I was a child the novel was published - and I loved it! Later I read Momo again. I still loved Momo and incidentally I noticed how intelligently Michael Ende constructed his story. In 1986 producer Horst Wendlandt brought the story to the big screen. This German producer film was certainly not easy for the author. Anyone who reads interviews with him quickly notices that the novelist doesn't like the cinema. He prefers the slow art of writing. Momo is an orphan. She lives on the edge of town. Where the poor people live. Everyone likes Momo because she's such a good listener. Everything is peaceful and leisurely - until the grey gentlemen appear. They spread hecticness everywhere and the quarter develops uncomfortably. Suddenly everything is poured with concrete. You eat fast food and work all day long. A kind of fantasy Italy, which is changing into a modern metropolis. Momo is played by Radost Bokel. She looks like a girl, but is basically not a being of flesh and blood. Even her name seems like an allegory. The guardian of time is called Secundus Minutius Hora. He is the guardian of the paper hourflower. From its leaves the grey gentlemen roll cigars. That's why they steal time from us, drive us to work more and faster. So they smoke up our lost time. Only Momo can save us. She walks around like Diogenes. barefoot, in a man's jacket. Only Momo knows that such a time blossoms in the heart of every man. It measures our life time. If it withers, we die. That is why the grey men are such an insidious, even murderous organisation! They have no life force of their own, only their cigars. With our stolen time. Too much cultural pessimism? Too much criticism of civilization? But Momo is a fantasy tale! In it, the enchanted kingdom, which looks like Italy, is on the verge of extinction. The enemy is a kind of zombie army. Like a wave, they sweep over the kingdom in secret and absorb it. In between is Momo. She discovers the secret of the time flower and the weakness of the grey masters. Only the faith of Momo can change fate! Like in every very good fantasy fairy tale, Momo plays in a world of her own with her very own rules. But the focus is always on the story! And that's why you can see the film again and again!

FREE ON YOUTUBE Terence Davies - The Long Day Closes

FREE ON YOUTUBE  In the early 90s I rode my bike all over Berlin in search of films by Terence Davies. It goes like this: You stop by Hardy's video store on Brüsseler Strasse and the Video Inn, Kreuzberg. You look in Negativeland at Helmholtzplatz and in Filmgalerie 451, Torstrasse. And if none of the video stores has a Davis VHS in its program, then you go to Mittenwalder Strasse. To the Videodrom. Or you can start your own cinema. Fortunately, life is much easier now! After all, there's the internet and especially lesser-known films like The Long Day Closes like to run freely on YouTube. The very first DVD of Davis' near classic was released on Criterion. Including a beautiful book about the work of Davis. Already during the opening credits you can recognize the theme of the film: a dimly lit flower container withering before our eyes. In addition a minuet by Boccherini. Somehow the cheerful music seems to be indifferent to whether the withered flowers fall to its sounds. Because sounds never age! The Long Day Closes is the best film by Davis and yet forgotten today. Perfectly and with great meticulousness photographed! A film that seems to evaporate before our eyes. Almost like a state of mind. The portrait of a family life, almost free of associations. Can one even speak of narrative cinema anymore? It's about the first gay rebellion or the revulsion of death. But none of this is ever expressed in an obvious way. The Long Day Closes is a cinematic mystery. A work that whispers its message to us and only reaches those who really want to listen. In the center is eleven-year-old Bud (Leigh McCormack), the youngest son of a working class family from Liverpool. It is the 50s. The family often and gladly goes to the cinema. It is a beloved ritual of the family. Bud's brothers will soon marry - as was the custom at the time. Bud loves his mother to death while his father is away. Bud discovers beauty in the bodies of other men. Anyone who has seen Davis' trilogy before will quickly understand Bud is the boy in the trilogy. And then we understand that Bud has just freed himself from his father's abuse. We know that Bud will grow up to be Terence Davies...

FREE ON YOUTUBE Flashdance

Sure, we all love Flashdance and yet the movie could be much better! It's almost as if real life has overtaken Hollywood here! Who has seen the biography of Jeniifer Beals? A model from Chicago, discovered by a famous photographer, who finally fights her way up, goes to Yale and studies acting in New York? Beals plays Alex and she also has to fight her way to the top. Right at the beginning, when Irene Cara's theme song begins (and Irene Cara also comes from the street and walked a rocky road!), Alex is given certain attributes. She rides her bike to work early in the morning, stroking a cat that crosses her path. On a kind of disco construction site we experience Alex in a male profession: she is a welder. In the evening Alex is in the club, where she causes a furore as a dancer. Beals is really a fresh and talented actress, but the team around director Adrian Lyne doesn't make it easy for her. The script, written by some authors like the infamous Joe Eszterhas, looks like the sellout at Hollywood's supermarket. You just steal something from a whole bunch of movie classics. It's too bad that nobody has worked out Alex's character. Character? As described, one should rather speak of certain attributes. She, the Go Go dancer falls in love with her Porsche driving boss, then she visits her mentor, trains in a factory loft in Pittsburgh and is watched by her drooling dog. Alex has a variety of skills, for example she can fish her bra out from under her sweatshirt without taking it off. Again and again there are interruptions by the great dance scenes. Meanwhile Alex dreams of ballet, even though she works in the most typical working class bar in film history. What the script can't do, the soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder does. And the naturally appearing Jennifer Beals! You are missing Flashdance emotions! But for me this is also a film that I remember from my childhood. A film like a time machine. Flashdance is deeply and intimately connected to the 80s and that's why we love it so much!

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FREE ON YOUTUBE Nur eine Frau

FREE ON YOUTUBE That's enough this time. When I looked at "Only one woman", I felt worried afterwards. Not because of the pain inflicted on the young Turk Aynur. Rather because of the emptiness of the images behind the depicted violence. I realized that I was not interested in the German view of a Turkish tragedy. "Only one woman" seems to me like a series of empty moments. I might as well read the "Spiegel". The plot: On the sidewalk in front of a Kreuzberg apartment building lies a corpse. "That's me"; says the voice from the off. "My brother shot me". It is the voice of Harun Aynur Sürücü telling her own story. Like an elegy and that's the sound of Sherry Hormann's film. The case of Sürücü, who still remembers it, brought about a media spectacle. Turkish honor killing. Then came the book "Ehrenmord" by Matthias Deiss. We notice; not without risk to film such a case. Especially tricky: A German author and a German director give Sürücü their own voice. The plot is structured chronologically. It begins in 1998. We know the story. The 15-year-old Aynur, who of course wears a KOPFTUCH, has to leave high school at the request of her parents. She is WITHDRAWED in Turkey. High pregnant, she flees from her brutal husband back to Kreuzberg. Back to the family, who lives in a 3 room apartment crowded together. Aynur has to take the baby to the storeroom. There, of course, she also learns MISSBRAUCH from her brother. We notice that all the themes we expect from a migration drama are set. But where did Matthias Deiss and Sherry Hormann get their knowledge about the inner life of a Turkish family from? Sure it wasn't compiled from various newspaper articles? Well, only one woman can be seen as a family psychogram. With a strong leading actress: Almila Bagriacik. It is thanks to her that Aynur is not only a victim, but also a strong woman (as always in such migration dramas). What remains? An abundantly confused film; a hollow spectacle that pretends to be able to contribute something to the theme. But it can't.

FREE ON YOUTUBE Hannah Takes The Stairs 

FREE ON YOUTUBE Isn't Greta Gerwig great? She looks so open-minded and reasonable. We almost think we know her. Gerwig could sit in a hip cafe in Neukölln on Monday morning. With a well-dressed Penguin book in his hand. Type: Pleasant, smart university graduate who has no benefit for the job market. Gerwig looks real. Not like the typical Hollywood actress, who is polished on all corners and edges. In some pictures Gerwig looks like a student, then again as beautiful as a real movie star! Aaaach, isn't she great? And her film direction? Mumblecore? What was it like with "Mumblecore"? Films produced on an incredibly low budget. It plays non-actors or semi-professionals or something like that. Everything (or almost everything) is improvised. The semi-professional actors appear as students, unemployed artists or young employees in low-paid jobs. Mostly they sit around somewhere (for example in a cafe) and talk about their relationship problems. Hannah Takes The Stairs is set in Chicago. It's summer. Greta Gerwig works for a media company and suffers from her narcissistic boyfriend and his affairs with neurotic students. A perfect example for the "genre" of Mumblecore! Hannahs (Gerwig) biggest wish is: "I wanted to be the funny one". Isn't she? I mean: Yes, she is neurotic, sarcastic and quite cute. Her odyssey through modern relationship life was conceived as a non-film by director/screenwriter/editor Joe Swanberg. A collaboration of all greats of Mumblecore like Gerwig or Bujalski. Mark Duplass, also a Mumblecore size, plays Mike, with whom Hannah finally dares a relationship. Of course, everything culminates in the break-up talk. Next come Paul (Bujalski) and Matt (Kent Osborne), a talented writer and a trumpet player (just like Hannah). However, the movie is a bit melancholic, despite the joy of the unfinished. Not only because of Hannah's feelings, but also because everyone involved is now working for the industry. Mumblecore - today more of a nostalgic term.

German Movies 1930-33

It is probably in the DNA of the Germans that they are reluctant to accept new technologies. Waiting to see if the new is any good. That's the way it is today in the face of digitalization and that's the way it was in the 20s of the last century. For a long time the Germans were reluctant to introduce sound film. It wasn't until the beginning of the 30s - when the Americans were producing almost exclusively sound films - that there was a changeover. Before that the world economic crisis of 1929 hit the German film business hard: mass unemployment, decrease of the audience figures as well as the increase of the production costs for movies. It was only a question of time till the UFA and Bavaria should be nationalized. And who took the NSDAP seriously in 1930, which had already founded its own film department? Would we take such a department seriously today? As early as 1930, preparations were being made to impose a performance ban on "non-Aryan" films. Nevertheless, the cinematic art in Germany experienced a brief blossoming in the years between 1930 and 1932. A second flowering, it must be noted. The times were uncertain, whether social or political. But times that favour artistic projects. Some filmmakers resorted to the themes and stylistic devices of Expressionism, but most of the films made around 1930 already looked quite different. The dilemma: many artists had an aversion to war and tyranny, but were unable to articulate themselves. Even though real films had been made with the so-called "New Objectivity". Fritz Lang followed up his crime movies of the 20's with "M" (1930) and "The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse" (1933). In "M" a child murderer is hunted and caught by the underworld and the police. Didn't this main character resemble the Cesare from "Caligari"? He is not responsible for his actions. A secret power compels him to do so. Dr. Mabuse is also a descendant of Caligari. A schizophrenic psychiatrist leads a secret organization, but even follows the orders of the insane Mabuse. Both films illustrate how strong organized crime had become in Berlin. Soon it would lead to state terror... In "M" the underworld associations call themselves "organs of healthy public feeling". In the end they judge the child murderer together with the police. Were there real German stars during this wedding of German cinema? A paradox that the American Josef von Sternberg of all people created THE German world star par excellence with his only German film "The Blue Angel" (1930): Marlene Dietrich. "The Blue Angel" was in the tradition of expressionist cinema. The environment served as a metaphor for a landscape of the soul. Professor Unrat looks like a descendant of Murnau's "The Last Laugh". A prisoner of his urges. Dietrich's Lola, on the other hand, seems like the embodiment of destructive sexuality. Always forgotten: Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who made three great films in the early '30s. He overcame the neutrality of the "Neue Sachlichkeit". At last someone dared to tackle contemporary historical themes! "Westfront 1918" (1930) may not be very well-known with you anymore but it can be regarded as Pabst's masterpiece! A war film that does not glorify war. The war appears as pure horror. Brecht's "The 3 Penny Opera" (1931) renounces all realism. It takes place in a stylized London, whereby quite a few claim that it is precisely this high gloss aesthetic that betrays the spirit of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Not a Threepenny Opera! "Kameradschaft" (1931) is about a mine accident, which in turn reminds us of the First World War. Later, Pabst was to work for the Hitler regime... Leontine Sagan's "Girl in Uniform" (1931) is still popular in our video store. It tells the story of a student who raves about her teacher. But the strict rules of the boarding school drive the student to the brink of suicide. One of the so-called "driving movies", but one that takes its milieu seriously. "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1931) by Pier Jutzi combines feature film action with documentary sequences - like Alfred Döblin's novel. Unlike the novel, however, Jutzi's film remains strangely neutral. "That's life for you". Really? The only communist film of his time was "Kulhe Wampe" (1932) by Slatan Dudow. Bertolt Brecht wrote the script, Hanns Eisler composed the music. It shows a picture of misery: after a family is evicted from its apartment, they move into an arbour. Don't we know this problem today? In addition - while the Great Depression was running its course - entertainment films were produced. Luis Trenker's "The Rebel" (1932) or "Mountains in Flames" (1931), but above all comedies and operettas. May one call Wilhelm Thiele's "Die Drei von der Tankstelle" (1930) the first musical ever? The only filmmaker who continued her style of the Weimar Republic during the NS era