Even as the champagne was still flowing across the nation in celebration of Barack Obama’s historic victory, protests were raging in California after Proposition 8, defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, passed with nary a hitch. By chance this was also the week I finally got around to watching Fatih Akin’s stunning follow-up to his rightly lauded Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, recently released on DVD. It’s hard to believe Akin, the biggest talent to come out of German cinema since Fassbinder, is only 35 years old. Indeed, the depth of the script, the subtlety of the Turkish score, the nuanced camerawork and self-assured editing are that of a master director. As is the poignancy with which Akin invests the breathtaking lesbian love story, which both connects the first and last parts of his international trilogy, and is the beating heart of the film. If those same-sex marriage advocates are ever in need of a cautionary tale that could serve as a Prop 8 teaching tool, “Lotte’s Death” (as part two is titled) is it.
Ry Russo-Young, who many will remember from her role in Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs, was a prize winner at two of the last three SXSWs - she won the jury award for best experimental film for her Psycho deconstruction Marion at the 2006 fest and shared a special jury prize for Orphans at the 2007 edition. Orphans hits DVD next week via David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s brand new label Carnivalesque Films. She chatted with us this week about Why Does Herr R Run Amok?, what working with the band “The Virgins” on her new film You Won’t Miss Me was like and why concert films aren’t really for her unless Amy Winehouse or The Rolling Stones are in them. …Read more
Via CNN via Anne Thompson comes the full lineup for The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, the film festival thrown by recent Oscar winner Tilda Swinton and guest programmed by her and Joel Coen, starting this Friday in “Nairn in the North East of Scotland, a seaside town where Chaplin used to holiday and which has a balmy microclimate and vistas across the Moray Firth to the Black Isle, Cromarty and Sutherland.”
If you think that’s a lot to swallow, look at the line-up. Busby Berkeley’s Dames! Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant! Stuff by David Lynch and Roman Polanski, world premieres, an entire day devoted to singing! And, a mandate that the audience make a lot of noise at the end of each film. From the Ballerina website’s News page:
The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain:
The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, disapproving world. The second is about the two lovers, having conquered the world, dealing with what poison it has left in each other’s system. Nina sings a song for each “film.”
I’m generally a big fan of the YouTube musical montage/tribute’s ability to condense an entire film experience into a concentrated crack hit of pop-scored pure emotion. The second half of this clip especially nails the devastating strangeness of the film’s final moments.
“Three people will think this is half as funny as I do,” Jim Emerson disclaims, but I’m one of them: he put together 2 lists, one of actors in Fassbinder films and one of NPR presenters, mixed them up, and asked his readers to spot which are which. Then, Ali Arikan produced an audio version.
Kevin Kelly was unimpressed with Dreams With Sharp Teeth, the Harlan Ellison doc that premiered at SXSW. At i09, he calls it “a big fluff piece that basically fails to explain his cranky, world-hating genius.”
Joel Heller links to the five trailers produced by David Wilson and Boxcar Films for this year’s True/False Film Festival. Also: some of the SXSW 2008 Burger Hut revival trailers, starring Kent Osbourne, Nathan Zellner, Kevin Bewersdorff and several other friends of the festival, can be found here and here.
God knows, I should have made a New Year’s Resolution that would have actually bettered my day-to-day quality of life, but instead, I made a New Year’s Resolution to become fully versed in the work of two filmmakers with whom my overall level of familiarity is, really, shameful: Pier Paulo Pasolini, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Because Fassbinder’s work is generally much easier to find on DVD, I’ve decided to start with him and move on to Pasolini after I’ve watched everything I can get my hands on. So as I watch his films, I’ll write about them here. I’ve made a conscious decision not to research the films before I watch them in order to offer my spontaneous impressions, so it’s probably best to look at each installment of this project as more of a close reading/viewing diary than a review, per se.
Petra Von Kant (Margit Carstensen) is a “fashion designer” who spends half the day in bed meticulously adjusting her face paint and having long conversations with guests while her live-in assistant Marlene (Irm Hermann) finishes her sketches. Petra is addict-thin and a bit mannish; in the film’s first act of three (all of which take place entirely in Petra’s stifling apartment), she hides her own thin hair under a wig that’s very late-Judy Garland. Marlene has Dietrich hair and a Deitrich air, but with the face of a Marion Davies or a Clara Bow. She’s obviously slumming––she’s obviously inherently too good for housework––and from the first scene, it’s obvious that she’s chosen to be here instead of somewhere better, because there’s something about the power balance between her and Petra that Marlene likes.
Nikal Saval has an admittedly cranky but masterful takedown of I’m Not There at N + 1. Calling Todd Haynes’ pastiche the Worst Movie of 2007, Saval scratches particularly aggressively at Haynes’ habitual referencing and naked larceny: “Haynes is drowning in his film school education, just as his audience is drowning in allusions, and not a single original idea floats by to rescue him or us.”
Erin at Steady Diet of Film has a helpful translation of what Jason Reitman, John Sayles, Adam Shankman and Joe Wright were REALLY saying on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Shootout. Useful information gleaned: Reitman, who “hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he’s homeless,” has a masterful death stare, but Sayles is not impressed.
Lots to report today on the Berlinale front, including the news that Martin Scorsese’s long-delayed Rolling Stones doc Shine A Light will finally make its premiere at the festival–and on opening night, no less. David Hudson has tworoundups.
Interview with Christopher Smith director of Severance, a fall-down-funny-then-cover-your-eyes slasher flick opening in theaters tonight. The FilmCouch group reloads discussion on what makes a villain from FilmCouch 18, and somehow draws a connection between American Beauty and Star Wars. A 33 year old German film is more relevant today than ever–Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), by New German Cinema pioneer Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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“Three people will think this is half as funny as I do,” 
Nikal Saval
