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An error has ocurred. Please try again- Götz Spielmann
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/959
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/kelly-reichardts-five-favorite-films/
Der Filmdienst ist die älteste Zeitschrift für Filmkritik in Deutschland. Im Oktober 1947 erschien zum ersten Mal der Filmdienst der Jugend, der von Studenten aus der katholischen Jugendarbeit herausgegeben wurde. 1949 entstand die Katholische Filmkommission für Deutschland, die für die Filmbewertung der Katholischen Kirche zuständig war. Die Kommission übernahm den Filmdienst der Jugend und benannte die Zeitschrift 1949 in film-dienst um. Sie erschien bis Dezember 2017 alle 14 Tage. 2016 wurde bekannt, dass die Printausgabe aus wirtschaftlichen Gründen eingestellt und durch ein reines Online-Angebot ersetzt wird.
English translation: The "Kinotipp der Katholischen Filmkritik" is a label used by Filmdienst to highlight films that address religious themes in a special way, tell of human hardships, worries and hopes and formulate answers to existential questions.
Filmdienst is the oldest magazine for film criticism in Germany. In October 1947, the "Filmdienst der Jugend" [Filmdienst of the Youth] appeared for the first time, edited by students from Catholic youth work. In 1949, the Catholic Film Commission for Germany came into being, which was responsible for film evaluation for the Catholic Church. The commission took over the Filmdienst der Jugend and renamed the magazine film-dienst in 1949. It appeared every 14 days until December 2017. In 2016 it was announced that the print edition would be discontinued for economic reasons and replaced by an online-only offering.
Milestones: What can I say? When John Douglas is playing the saxophone while his friend uses the pottery wheel and they both are singing I cried. That combined with the ridiculously beautiful cinematography put me in a mindset I wasn't aware cinema can take me too. It gave me memories I never had.
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday: The silence and precision of the gags is almost avant-garde. Monsieur Hulot is clumsily precise and when the vacation ends on this film, I was left feeling like I’d met a good friend.
Meantime: This movie is so complex in ways movies don’t reach for anymore. It is an emotional ball of mess and all of the characters are trying to detangle themselves or make it worse. The window changing scene alone has so many different points of view and shifting biases that I couldn’t help but laugh (also because it is very funny). The jangly score adds to it all.
Broadway Danny Rose: Somehow this is the movie I always see when it plays on TV or in theatres. I always know what is going to happen and I know every joke, yet I laugh and smile through the whole film. I would say this is a perfect Woody Allen movie. It is missing some of the dirtiness of Husband and Wives, but who cares?
The Super Cops: Stuff happens! I had a good time, not in the conventional way, but in the sense that I really felt like I was getting to know and hang out with Ron Leibman and David Selby. It’s the sloppiness of the film and their police work that makes this so much fun. I never wanted it to end so I just watched it again.
City Lights: This is Chaplin’s most perfect film. It has the grace and skill of a Buster Keaton film and the pathos of Chaplin’s own work leading to a final shot for the ages. The skating and boxing scenes show some on-point physical humour, and little details like the slamming of a car door or using a Rolls Royce to beat a bum to a cigarette butt make this film amazing. The journeys we go on and the emotions we feel along the way make this one step above everything else.
Kings of the Road: This adult adult Alice in the Cities had me with the title card. When it comes up I got goosebumps. It might’ve been the saxophone or Rüdiger Vogler and his portable 45 player. There was only one direction the movie could go in and yet I was hoping the roads lasted long enough. I’ve never seen a movie that really shows what it’s like to develop a friendship. And to top it off, who else could pull off a motorcycle scene like this?
A Man Escaped: Not quite sure what to say about this movie other than it’s one of the top five movies ever made. When they touch the ground at the end, I feel like I’ve been escaping with them. Never has a movie that gives away its ending the title been more suspenseful. The spoon slot, the little broom, the handkerchief pulley system… Like Fontaine, Bresson is the master.
Nashville: Nashville is so jam-packed with information it is a pleasure to sit and watch for over two hours. I got lost in the people and music. It is strange because I sit back and think, ‘How the hell did he do it?’ There are real people and you really feel like you experience everything with them. He uses full songs and concerts and yet even within the concerts there’s emotions going on. The ‘I’m easy’ scene says it all. But so does the striptease scene, or when Barabra Jean has a nervous breakdown, or…
https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/900
- Ulrich Seidl
https://www2.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/1189
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Série noire: Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma (1986)
Not pure BS but still unbearable BS
Watched this at the opening of the UNDERDOX Film Festival 2017 in Munich, where it was the opening film.
It is a very experimental film, with a lot of dissolve transitions, rewinding, music loops - nice little playful ideas. It is about a production company and the production process and focuses on the people involved. This film is very abstract, there is not straightforward storytelling. Even though I like experimental, abstract films - as long as they are good - I found this film highly exhausting, in a bad way. It is boring, it exhausts itself in its meta levels, the intended (funny) overacting of the actors becomes too repetitive - it is a nuance. This should only be watched by people who will blindly believe that everything Godard made is brilliant and who take pride from having watched this hard to find, formerly lost and rediscovered, supposed gem.
In a nutshell: this film is not pure BS, because there certainly remains some quality in it, and the rough idea and intend have the odeur of a somewhat worthy abstraction, but it is overall still unbearable BS.
Der König von Berlin (2017)
just right for low standards
Watched this at the Munich Film Fest the other day. I would never have gone watch a film for TV at a film festival where they show top quality films from around the world, BUT a friend asked me to come along AND, more importantly, I realised that the director of this film, Lars Kraume, also made Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (aka The People vs. Fritz Bauer (2015)), which I think was an exceptionally good film.
Anyways, whilst The People vs. Fritz Bauer has a good script and good direction, Der König von Berlin clearly lacks a decent script. The film is filled with very cheap laughs, and sometimes surprisingly old, beaten jokes that can only work with an undemanding audience. The story, the plot is alright, most of the characters are like caricatures,or stereotypes, which at times is refreshing and nice and funny, but too often this drifts too far into unoriginality and flatness. The main character, a policeman looks at photos from the murder night. On one photo a son of the victim is seen turning the ring on his finger upside down above a champagne glass - the first thing I thought is "ah, he put poison from the ring into the glass" - but the police man in the film does not realise this, only later when he reviews the photos, and the audience is intended to also only realise this now. Well, that did not work. I could go on forever listing the very poor jokes of the film, but that would be an even greater waste of time than watching the film. Most of the actors are rather good, the set design is very good, especially the headquarters of the Machalik film is fantastic, the direction is solid, but it's just not enough when the the main prerequisite for finding this comedy only slightly amusing is a long and very brain damaging history of glue sniffing addiction. The film hast some undeniable qualities BUT I left the cinema gasping for air, as if, by doing so, I could somehow regain the time that was so painfully cut out of my flesh in that dark big room full of TV people...
Jersey Girl (2004)
Indigestibility and loss of balls
I saw this film half a year ago and it tore me apart. I did not even know it was directed by Kevin Smith until someone told me. I could not believe it.
Jersey girl is full of fake emotions. It is very easy to do an emotional film. It is very difficult to make an emotional film that is good.The art is to connect profoundness with emotions and to make it look real. Intelligence ice coldly, vehemently rejects and even spits in the face of fake pathos. I demand that pathos be heavily spiced with logos, ethos or whatever other dignified spices in order for it to be digestible. Hence what is essential besides a here not existent good script is good acting.
This brings us to the next point. If one wants good acting must not employ Jennifer Lopez. OK, at least she played in "Blood and Wine", "U Turn" and "Out of Sight", but this does not make her a good actress.
With Dogma Kevin Smith did his last good film. That's 11 years ago. After the mentally deficient Jersey Girl I would have to say that this director is blunted, that he sold his soul to the devil of the lowest commercial intellectual-kitsch-hillbilly cinema!
It appears to be a popular fallacy that this film (Jersey Girl) constitutes its film maker's maturation. Maturation could be described as the step from "clerks" to dogma for whatever reason one may want to choose. This sort of maturation however clearly represents the downfall and self-castration of a director.
Who wants maturation? With clerks Smith made an unusual film that actually caused the viewer not only to laugh a lot but also to think about it afterwards because it actually did have some profoundness (how Dante and Randal waste their lives, Randal 's questioning of Dante's indecisiveness and their superiority over all the people that come into their stores and who they make fun of).
Do we want Tarrantino to mature??? When asked by an interviewer why Kill Bill was so violent and why he was still making movies of this kind (at his age) he replied it was because he still had balls and that he did not intend to lose them as long as he was making films.
Kevin Smith lost his balls.