FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Kenji Mizoguchi - Ugetsu 

Two brothers, one greedy, the other envious. During a time when the land was devastated by vagabond soldiers, they risk the welfare of their families, risking their lives by pursuing their interests. Kenji Mizoguchi tells her story in this great film - one of the best ever! Although his heroes are rough and uncouth, Ugetsu is a work of elegance and mystery. Even before it becomes clear, we feel that Ugetsu is a work of elegance and mystery: Ugetsu is also a ghost story. Ugetsu is opened by the landscape passing us by, even being rolled up - like a Japanese drawing or a scroll. We see a village. Heavy branches lie on the roofs of the houses so that the wind does not carry the roofs away. We get to know Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter and Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa), a farmer. Shots fired from afar, the army approaches. Genjuro's wife begs him not to ride into town. Not in these times! She asks him to protect her and her son. But with the excitement of a fool, Genjuro insists on the ride. Tobei, just as crazy, insists on accompanying him. Genjuro returns with gold coins. He has captured a factory in the city. His wife, on the other hand, tries to make it clear to him that new clothes could never outweigh her love for him. But Genjuro has only one thing in mind: money, money and even more money. Almost furiously he gets back to work. Tobei meets a great samurai. He would like to ride along, but is chased away as a stupid farmer without armour. Soon the two men decide to go into town again - out of fear for their possessions. This time they want to cross the lake in a boat because it seems safer to them. The scene at the lake, it's the most wonderful one in the whole movie! In front of us a world full of haze and fog. The lonely boatman gives a warning of pirates. Genjuro leaves his wife and child behind at the coast, Tobei accompanies him. In the city Genjuro's work quickly pays off and so he is invited to the castle of the beautiful Lady Wakasa. She is impersonated by Machiko Kyo, one of the greatest Japanese stars ever! Meanwhile Tobei also leaves his family alone. Stupid and clumsy as he is, he kills a samurai and steals a skull. Thanks to this trophy he is honored by the top samurai with a following. The troop's way leads to the house of the Geishas, where Tobei finds out that his wife was raped and abducted by soldiers. She now works as a geisha. Meanwhile Genjuro is spellbound by Lady Wakasa's appearance. Her beauty, which, he says, is unparalleled in the world! Lady Wakasa praises the simplicity and perhaps he should have felt warned because he hears the voice of her dead father. He is whispered to leave his village and marry the beautiful one... Mizoguchi held the theory that a scene should be filmed in a shot. We know this view from great Japanese films of the time with the difference that Mizoguchi's camera never stays. It seems to float, moving through space, which is as beguiling as it is poetic. Morbidly the scenes in Lady Wakasa's castle as a priest sees Genjuro's face. Frightened, he stammers, one would see death in it! Something is there on his skin! They are symbols of an exorcism! Of course Lady Wakasa is a ghost, which we never doubted. Finally we also realize that her castle is in truth a ruin. In Ugetsu, however, there is a second spirit that appears quite unexpectedly. Just at the moment when both men return to their village and hope for forgiveness from their wives for their male blindness... The characters in Ugetsu are down-to-earth. But I would understand it as a comic character. However, the story itself seems to be taken from the old days of Japanese ghost theatre. Unlike western horror movies, Mizoguchi never tries to scare us. It's something else that drives him. Something very kind! At the end we saw a fable, but we also witnessed the ordinary life.

CINEGEEK.DE Best Indie Movies 10s 

German Films 10s - Film List on CINEGEEK.DE 

The great phases of German film during the Expressionism of the 1920s and the New German Cinema of the 1970s seemed strangely mannered and artificial. German films loved unusual colours and lighting ratios, willing to follow their characters to the limits of human behaviour. This deliberately artificial dimension can still be found in the productions of the 10s, albeit only sporadically.

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Alain Resnais - Night And Fog 

Never again! (Please do not misuse this post for anti-Semitic posts and nonsense). On 9.11.38 Nazi gangs rampaged through the streets of Berlin. The so-called Reich Pogrom Night. Over 90 years old he became. His career lasted over six decades and he always had his finger on the pulse of his time: Alain Resnais. He became famous in 1955 with this documentary about the German concentration camps. Even today my father tells me how they showed Night And Fog at the film club. Some long-time members resigned as a result. They felt attacked by the young "Beatnicks" and their disrespectful films. Especially in Germany of the 50s Night And Fog must have been a brutal experience. And it still works today! Resnais was one of the very first to take up the subject of Nazi concentration camps. He invented a new technique to combine black and white images from the archives with color images of the abandoned camps. Right at the beginning we lose the ground under our feet. A supposedly safe room turns into a dangerous one. Crash. Below an idyllic landscape a barbed wire comes to light. Finally this barbed wire is the foreground. If we previously felt a feeling of satisfaction, this is now lost. The narrator comments: "A concentration camp is built like any stadium or a hotel". Even a church can lead to a concentration camp. We understand: Any place can be charged with hate and anger and xenophobia. In the following there will be nothing else but the Holocaust. No way to distract our gaze. The catastrophe becomes tangible and accompanies us through the montage of the film until the present day: "Are their faces really so different than ours?

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE David Lean - Lawrence Of Arabia 

What kind of daring genius did it take to produce this film? An epic four hours long without stars, without a love story and without much action. The hero is the eccentric, even suicidal T.E. Lawrence, who survives an almost impossible journey through the desert. Already safe, he returns to find his friend, who stayed behind. We know the scene. A spot appears far back on the horizon. A spot that becomes a man. Or don't we know this moment at all? If you rent the DVD from us or stream the film you will hardly identify the spot on the TV monitor. I'm sorry, but this is a movie! A 70mm movie! Only in the 70mm format we can get an impression of the vastness of the desert. Lawrence Of Arabia is not a simple historical film. It is a work about the extravagance of the desert. It is proven: Lawrence won the Arabs to fight for the British and against the Turks. Did he do it out of patriotism? The film corrects that. No, rather out of pragmatism. Basically, he rejected the British side and identified with the Arabs. Or is it true that Lawrence was homosexual? Of course, this aspect had to be treated carefully in such an expensive epic in 1962. Peter O'Toole plays Lawrence. A frail beautiful actor. Not an ordinary action hero, but one who still wanted to be recognized. What secret did this Lawrence hide? He speaks in a strange manner, seems as charismatic as he is crazy. How could he get the Arabs to follow him through the desert? O'Toole plays at least one socially and sexually unconventional man. Could such a man win the war against the Turks? He could. Without realizing their rivalries, he allied himself with the desert lords Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn). Strangely enough, the following epic is based less on "plot" than on "feeling". The story is not told in dialogues, but in the recordings of the desert. Epos refers not so much to the elaborate production, but to the unique artistic vision! Unfortunately, we can't offer this vision in our video store. You must try to see it somewhere on 70mm. A task almost as difficult as the production of Lawrence Of Arabia!

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Larry Clark - Bully 

Isn't it a contradiction that films about murder are produced for entertainment purposes? Many films are morally indignant about murder - but nevertheless they try to entertain us. Larry Clark's Bully is different. It takes place in a sad and shabby world. A world of boundless stupidity and cruelty. Based on a true story, Bully is about a high school sadist who bullies the other kids - and a group of teenagers who kill him for it. But it's not about the evil sadist or the subsequent revenge campaign. It's about how the kids as a group do something that none of them are capable of doing individually. It's about the moral vacuum in which they live. Bully plays in the suburbs full of prefabricated houses, shopping malls and boredom. There are amusement arcades, fast food chains and cars that are the only things that promise freedom. One might object that most of us come from the suburbs and grow up happy. But not here. Larry Clark shows a suburban hell with drugs, sex and booze. The kids in it are stupid and violent. Their parents aren't portrayed as evil, by the way. They simply don't exist in the world of these kids. Their names are Marty Puccio (Brad Renfro) and Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl). Since Marty can think, he was tormented by Bobby. Bobby is bad through and through. He rapes two girls in the back seat of his car and we quickly realize that something in his life must have gone very wrong. Marty and Bobby are part of a larger clique that drifts aimlessly through shopping malls or coffee shops. In endless loop. At some point they get the idea that Bobby deserves to die. Just like that. The murder is ruthlessly planned. They hire a contract killer who is a child himself (we know them from Clark's debut Kids). Killing somebody is a hard job, which is done in an extremely chaotic way here. The body has to be disposed of and then the blame begins to be assigned. Remorse, even grief comes into play. And the urge to tell outsiders grows stronger and stronger. In the end Bobby doesn't die for his sins, but because his killers are so bored with life. Clark has been immersed in this world as an artist. Some of his sex scenes may seem too voyeuristic, but at least Clark is believed to know his way around this strange world at every moment. I think that Bully is an important film about children that no one cares about. These teenagers lack the courage and imagination to break out of suburban hell. They're stuck there. Marty and Bobby deserve each other.

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE The Syrian Bride 

It is a deeply human conflict between two peoples who live in the same area and have suffered more than any other people in the world. In order to resolve it, it would require the ability to put oneself humanly into the suffering of the other. Here in Berlin Kreuzberg, however, people like to politicise and talk about Israel as an "apartheid state" etc. etc. This is ugly. That is ugly. We therefore recommend The Syrian Bride. We know Clara Khoury from "Rana's Wedding" (DVD1003) and in it she had a lot of trouble crossing the border from Ramallah to Jerusalem. In The Syrian Bride she is supposed to marry a Syrian soap opera star whom she never met. A romantic comedy without romance. The opening scene is correspondingly gloomy. Mona (Khoury) has defected to Syria and can never return to Israel. She will never see her family again. Mona gets her passport stamped in Israel and then goes over to the Syrian checkpoint. They in turn refuse to accept her passport. At least it has an Israeli stamp! Does the stamp have to be? It has to be. Without it, she cannot emigrate from Israel.