FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Claude Sautet - Un Coeur En Hiver 

There are people who can't love. Why is unclear. Something is missing. They were simply born without this gift. In other areas they may be complete. But the gift to love is missing. Irreparable. Claude Sautet's "Un Coeur En Hiver" is the story of such a man. His name is Stephane (Daniel Auteuil) and he is a talented violin maker. Stephane admires Maxime (Andre Dussollier), for whom he also works. They are friends. Or is it not? In any case, Maxime's social skills serve Stephane as a shield against the world. In return, Maxime benefits from Stephen's extraordinary skill. A symbiosis. One day the beautiful violinist Camille (porcelain face Emmanuelle Beart) enters the shop. She needs help with her instrument. Soon she has an appointment with Maxime. Stephane observes this from a distance. Then Camille talks to Stephane about her instrument, but also about her life. Stephane is a good listener. And Camille has fallen in love with him. She is together with Maxime. She has to leave him and make an appointment with his partner. Stephane feels flattered. Yes, he desires Camille. That would be a nice ending for a French triangle story. Only Stephane doesn't stand up for Camille. He is not impotent in the physical sense. He lacks the gift to love. Claude Sautet shows this short story with great intensity. We become aware of how simple love is portrayed in the vast majority of films. And how annoying! Man meets woman. They fall in love. There is a conflict, then they reconcile. Rolltitel. But Stephane has needs that go beyond love. Needs like the convenience of staying alone. His daily routine. That counts more for him than the risk of an intimate relationship.

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Easy A 

What is the morale of Easy A? Don't sleep with anyone, but tell everyone you're doing it with everyone? We have to get involved in a very American film that comes up with virginal Jesus fanatics - but above all with a tremendously likeable Emma Stone. Olive Penderghast (Stone) is an inconspicuous girl in high school. Although we are in East Ojai, California, the biggest surprise of the movie is that virginity has the highest priority at this school! Olive is ashamed to have spent the whole weekend alone at home and improvises for her best friend the tale of a date with an older student. To increase her own popularity, she crowns this story with the loss of her virginity. A seemingly sure thing, because nobody knows her one-night stand at the university. But Olive is overheard by Marianne, an honest religious classmate. She tells Olive's story all around as a warning: "Not to end like the spoiled Olive! Easy A now plays through this basic idea in different variations. Olive's parents Dill and Rosemary (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson), who are as quirky as they are open, also find out about the news. Throughout the film they seem like Olive's strongest support, but also a bit like a parallel world from the time of the'68 revolution. There's been a lot of changes at school for Olive: She is no longer the girl that nobody notices (quite unimaginable with a beauty like Emma Stone!), but the one who has experience with sex! Olive is starting to take advantage of her popularity. Her best friend Brandon is gay. Everyone knows this and yet Brandon tries to hide it to live "normally". During a party she arranges a fake sex date for her boyfriend, so that he will also find recognition as an experienced young man in the future. It's hard to believe a gay man in California couldn't do that today! But let's just imagine this East Ojai as a place that serves primarily to make this high school comedy possible. Olive starts to lend her fictional sexuality to others: To the fat, the outsiders, those who perceive their school days as a nightmare. Thanks to Olive, they rise to men with sex experience. (Why is nobody really surprised that she only sleeps with gays and nerds?). Easy A works in itself, because we are well introduced into this East Ojai world. Overnight, Olive gains the power to improve the reputation of others and help those in need. Even the trust teacher (and wife of Olive's favorite teacher) is among her clients because she slept with a student and now suffers from chlamydia. From now on Olive borrows the "A" from Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter. Similar to the novel character, Olive will get to know the dark side of people... In the course of the plot, Olive suffers from the increasing gossip and the fact that her life is unfortunately not staged like an 80s teen comedy. Easy A, this is the first role that really suits Emma Stone! Until then they had been underestimated - wrongly so, because you can only do justice to an actor when you get the right role.

Reality Stays Outside - Realität Bleibt Draussen 

SOOOON!!!! OUR OWN MOVIE ABOUT OUR BAR: REALITÄT BLEIBT DRAUSSEN! - REALITY STAYS OUTSIDE! Ich liebe Kreuzberg und mein Leben in Kreuzberg! Das war aber nicht immer so: Früher, als ich noch klein war und wir in einer eingemauerten Stadt lebten, da hatte ich Angst vor Kreuzberg. Dort war alles grau und die Häuser ganz verwahrlost. Und wenn du in die Hinterhöfe geguckt hast, dann hast du immer noch die Einschusslöcher aus dem 2. Weltkrieg gesehen. Eigentlich sah Kreuzberg genauso aus wie Ost Berlin. So dachte ich. Ich meine, das war 1985. Ich hatte immer diese Vorstellung, dass hinter solchen grauen Fassaden auch böse Menschen leben mussten. In Wahrheit lebten dahinter aber keine bösen Menschen, sondern Menschen, die einfach nicht so viel verdienten. Mein Vater hat mir das mal erklärt. In Kreuzberg war man immer umgeben von der Mauer. Ganz im Osten von West-Berlin. Und niemand wollte so nahe bei den Russen leben. So zogen alle weg, rückten nach Westen – zumindest innerhalb der West-Berliner Insel. Dann kamen die sogenannten Gastarbeiter. Die konnten ja dort leben. Jedenfalls endete Kreuzberg irgendwie immer an der Mauer. Sogar 20 Jahre später sah Kreuzberg noch so aus als ob die 80er nie aufgehört hätten. Eine Gegend, in der die berüchtigten SO36 Boys herrschten. Hauptberuf der 36 Boys: Rauben, prügeln, kaputt machen. Das war also Kreuzberg. Heute höre ich oft diese mittelalten Männer, die behaupten, früher und damals da gabs noch das richtige Kreuzberg. Und dieselben mittelalten Männer haben das damals auch schon erzählt. Mir war das eh egal. Ich lebte in meiner eigenen Welt und die bestand sowieso nur daraus, Filme zu glotzen. Meine eigene kleine Nerd Welt inmitten von Filmen! Und ich wusste, irgendwann würde diese Welt nicht mehr nur in meiner Fantasie existieren! - I love Kreuzberg and my life in Kreuzberg! But it wasn't always like that: In the past, when I was little and we lived in a walled-in city, I was afraid of Kreuzberg. Everything there was gray and the houses were run-down. And when you looked into the backyards you could still see the bullet holes from the Second World War. Kreuzberg actually looked just like East Berlin. That's what I thought. I mean, that was 1985. I always had this idea that bad people had to live behind such gray facades. had to live behind such gray facades. In reality, however, there weren't bad people living behind them, but people who simply didn't earn that much. earned that much. My father once explained this to me. In Kreuzberg, you were always surrounded by the wall. Right in the East of West Berlin. And nobody wanted to live so close to the Russians. So everyone moved away, moved west - at least within the West Berlin island. Then came the so-called guest workers. They could live there. In any case, Kreuzberg somehow always ended at the Wall. Even 20 years later, Kreuzberg still looked as if the 80s had never ended. A neighborhood, where the infamous SO36 Boys ruled. The 36 Boys' main occupation: robbing, beating, destroying destroy. So that was Kreuzberg. Today, I often hear these middle-aged men claiming that back in the day and back then there was still the real Kreuzberg. And these same middle-aged men said that back then told that back then too. I didn't care anyway. I lived in my own world and that only consisted of watching movies anyway. My own little nerd world surrounded by movies! And I knew that at some point this world would no longer only exist in my imagination! 

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Transamerica 

Transamerica presents Felicity Huffman as a man who feels compelled to become a woman. Only a week after the operation, Bree (as she is now called) learns that she had become a father 17 years earlier. "There was this one girl in college," Bree remembers, but also points out that the whole story was so tragic lesbian that she wouldn't count. But now she counts: Bree has to get to know her son and embarks on a journey from L.A. to New York. There she meets Toby (Kevin Zegers), who wants to become a porn star. This career choice is embarrassing for Bree, a ladylike middle-class conservative. She convinces Tobey to go back to L.A. with her. I suspect most transgender people have little interest in homosexuality. Bree has overpowered little sex as she earns the money for her operation with two jobs. Bree is not a particularly exciting person anyway. She spends a lot of time improving Tobey's grammar and is dressed like a housewife. 

The Edge Of Seventeen 

Do you like teen comedies that don't tax your intelligence? Like The Edge Of Seventeen? Then this is your film list! - Sure, I'm a child of the 80s. Maybe that's why I became a video librarian? Of course I still know the best dialogue from the teen comedies of the time - although I forget pretty much everything else. The brain just works in a miraculous way. The Edge Of Seventeen feels like an homage to the 80s with biting humour and a big bittersweet heart. Kelly Fremon Craig, who makes her directorial debut as well as writing the film, seems to remember all the difficult, angst-filled moments of being a teenager. That narcissistic phase where everything that happens to you seems so insanely important! The worst thing: to create an identity, to survive school! In this sense, The Edge Of Seventeen is much darker than its 80s role models. 

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE The Guard 

It's a fact: if you put Brendan Gleeson in any role, he'll bring it to life. In this case, he plays a cop, the Gaelic word for policeman being guarda. His name is Sgt Gerry Boyle and we meet him as he searches a victim's clothes for drugs and quickly pockets everything. Boyle is not a bad cop, just a bad one. At least he loves his mum, which is a good sign. Her name is Eileen Boyle (Fionnula Flanagan) and she's dying, but whenever Boyle visits her, she comes back to life. And when they talk, they basically say the F-word incessantly, as if it were a sentence sign. Boyle drinks while he works. He never overstays his welcome and makes friends with prostitutes. But all this takes an unpleasant turn for Boyle when the straight-laced McBride (Rory Keenan) is transferred from Dublin to the country. He, of all people, is to become Boyle's partner (and Boyle hates everything from Dublin). A big drugs deal is on the cards. Half a million is at stake, give or take, and the FBI sends Everett (Don Cheadle) to Ireland. Everett is an even worse partner! Boyle, moreover, is not a real racist, but he is naive in his dealings with black people. He believes that Everett must be an expert on life in the ghetto, as Boyle has seen on television. Gleeson's gift as an actor lies precisely in his ability to make all these outrageous statements.

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Ida 

We travel back to Poland around 1960, to a rural area. There is a rather remote monastery where 18-year-old novice Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) lives. Little is said behind the walls, neither while eating, nor during Anna's work on a statue of Christ. Have Anna take her vows in a few days. But before she returns to the city to visit her Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). We experience her with curious eyes in the tram and finally Anna faces her exact opposite: Wanda drinks, loves men and wants nothing to do with family. Wanda explains to Anna that her real name is Ida and she is Jewish. But her parents were murdered. Although she would rather send Anna back to the monastery, Wanda decides to search for the traces of her relatives with her niece. Ida is a journey into the past: that of the German occupation, but also into the dark Stalin era.