Category: Film

The “Slate” Movie Club: Critic vs. Critic

There’s a lot of stuff that’s great on the internet and one of them is metacriticism, especially when it comes to movies. It allows me to delve into my two writing passions – film and media – at the same time. I don’t think there ever was a time when critics were able to interact with each other as throughly as now. And it’s incredibly interesting.

It took me until this week to come across the “Slate” Movie Club’s Critic vs. Critic series, in which great writers about film (among them one of my recently-discovered favourites Matt Zoller Seitz) discuss their craft. This year, they deal with top ten lists, defend their choices and the making of lists in general.

Dan Kois uses a flowchart to explain why he liked Black Swan. Stephanie Zacharek discusses the misogynism behind panning Somewhere. Matt Zoller Seitz wonders what critics’ scepticism about Inception says about their fears. And that’s just the beginning.

I will only say this once: Read it.

Stuff I learned this week (and last) – #1/11

Mein Lieblingskino hat zugemacht – Bambi und Camera Bad Schwalbach

Ich bin nicht nur ein großer Filmfan sondern auch ein Freund des Kinos. Also schmerzt es mich, mitzuerleben, dass ausgerechnet das Kino, mit dem ich großgeworden bin, das Bambi und Camera Kino in meinem Geburtsort Bad Schwalbach zum Jahresende seine Pforten geschlossen hat.

Das verwundert nicht. Obwohl der kleine Kurort Bad Schwalbach im Untertaunus von dem Problem vieler Provinzkinos verschont geblieben ist, in der nächstgrößeren Stadt ein Multiplex zu haben (Wiesbaden ringt seit Jahren darum, hat es aber nicht auf die Reihe bekommen), war die Geschäftslage, wann immer ich in den letzten Jahren in Bad Schwalbach vorbeischaute, nicht gerade rosig. Inhaber Volker Weis ist mittlerweile 68, seit über 40 Jahren im Geschäft und hat sich den Ruhestand redlich verdient. Das Kino hat er bis zuletzt als Familienbetrieb geführt, mit einigen wenigen Aushilfen – unter anderem, von 2000 bis 2004, mit mir.

Das besondere am Bambi und Camera ist für mich aber nicht nur, dass ich dort vier Jahre Karten verkauft und abgerissen, Popcorn geschaufelt und Getränke verkauft habe (und mich bis heute ärgere, dass ich nicht sofort gesagt habe, dass ich auch Vorführen lernen möchte). Mich hat auch immer beeindruckt, dass mein Ex-Chef das Kino konstant auf dem neuesten Stand gehalten hatte. Beide Säle, das Camera mit 125 Plätzen und das Bambi mit 74, waren mit Dolby 5.1 (das Camera auch mit DTS) ausgestattet, hatten immer saubere Leinwände und keine durchgesessenen Sitze – ganz im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen Kinos in kleinen Orten. Das Foyer wurde zuletzt 2002 renoviert. Zusätzlich gab es persönlichen Service vom Chef: Kurgäste wurden nach den späteren Vorstellungen in ihre Kliniken zurückgefahren. Dass es am Ende nicht mehr für eine Digitalisierung gereicht hat, kann ich angesichts der momentanen Lage gut verstehen.

Auf der Website des Kinos steht derzeit, dass eine Wiedereröffnung unter neuer Leitung geplant ist. Auch im Artikel des “Wiesbadener Kurier” vom 29. Dezember 2010 heißt es, es gebe zwei Bewerber, die “andernorts schon kleinere Kinos [betreiben]” (was sich etwa mit dem deckt, was ich bei meinem letzten Besuch an Weihnachten erfahren konnte). Es besteht also noch Hoffnung, dass die seit 1926 bestehende Kinotradition in Bad Schwalbach nicht stirbt.

Mir tut die Schließung trotzdem leid. Familie Weis war für mich seit über zehn Jahren eine freundschaftliche Bekanntschaft – und auch eine wertvolle Recherchequelle für die Stimmung “an der Basis” in der Kinobranche. Selbst wenn das Bad Schwalbacher Kino wiedereröffnen sollte, für mich wird ein Besuch dort nicht mehr das gleiche sein. Ich wünsche Herrn und Frau Weis, Beate und Stefanie und Ralf dem Vorführer daher auch an dieser Stelle noch einmal alles Gute und hoffe für sie, dass auch die Zeit ohne Kino eine schöne wird.

“Wir sind Überzeugungstäter” – Interview mit Christian Bräuer

Eine der großen Probleme, die die Kinos in den nächsten Jahren überwinden müssen, ist die Einführung digitaler Projektionstechnik, gerade für viele kleine Programmkinos mit einen ambitionierten Programm eine große Hürde. Ich habe mit dem Kinobetreiber Christian Bräuer über den Stand der Digitalisierung und ihre Möglichkeiten gesprochen. Bräuer ist Geschäftsführer der Berliner Yorck-Kinos und Vorsitzender der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kino–Gilde deutscher Filmkunsttheater, des Zusammenschlusses der deutschen Arthouse-Kinos.

Interview lesen auf epd-film.de oder in epd film 1/11.

Real Virtuality’s Favourite Films of 2010

Was 2010 a vintage year for film? Compared to 2009, from which basically only Avatar is still talked about, I guess it was. In the long run, only time will tell of course, but here are the ten films that made the biggest impression on me in all the vintageness.

Note: This list goes by German cinematic release dates. Note 2: Even though I made it into the cinema a lot this year, I still missed some titles, i.e. Enter the Void and Exit through the Gift Shop.

1. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

There are two reasons, why I chose to make this film my film of the year. One is that is truly a revolutionary and daring piece of filmmaking for reasons that The Film Doctor has pointed out. The second is that it really stuck with me emotionally in ways that Inception or The Social Network did not.

2. Inception

You can say almost nothing against this excellent film, except maybe that it’s a bit too cerebral and a bit convoluted. But, well, that’s what happens when you are making a big budget action blockbuster which at the same time serves as an intelligent investigation of the nature of dreams and our ability to delude ourselves. And right now there is only one director able to pull this off: Christopher Nolan.

3. The Social Network

It’s not the story of Facebook, I believe, but it is a very good story. As usual, Fincher succeeds in making the viewer forget just how perfectionist his filmmaking is by enveloping him in a well-told story brought across by excellent performers. That’s what makes the film so strong. It is not however, a testament of our times, I reject this reading.

4. El Secretu de sus ojos

I won’t say it was a worthy Oscar winner (because it was up against Das weiße Band), but it was a worthy nominee. I just liked this film. It was tense and gripping, it was beautifully lit and shot and it was so melodramatic in a good way, about love that transcends time and brings people to do cruel things. It just got me.

5. The Kids are all right

If I was a different kind of person I would probably have all sorts of reservations against this film, but I am not. So I liked the extremely powerful betrayal of a couple going through marriage problems – stripped of all gender prejudices you could have because both partners are women. Around the performances, however, which are easily the biggest asset of the film, there is also some well-composed pictures to look at, which rounds the film off nicely.

6. Crazy Heart

The landscapes and the dreams that surround this tale open up the canvas, the intimate performances and the music close it again. This mixture generates a film that lasts, even more because it’s a fictional story that might just be true.

7. A Single Man

Another performance-driven film that profits from the fact that it is also clothed in beautiful images. I liked the bitterness of it, combined with the technique of using shifting colour saturations to convey emotion, which is something that I hadn’t seen done in quite this way before.

8. Toy Story 3

Ignore the fact that there is a bit too much of everything in the second act of this film as it channels prison break movies of the last five decades. Toy Story 3 more than makes up for it with the emotional climax of the third act and an ending that had me shedding a few lonely tears in the cinema. A very different coming-of-age-story which brillantly finishes a trilogy fifteen years in the making.

9. The Road

It’s a film about a failed civilisation that manages to tell its story without drifting off into the romanticized apocalypse. There is no hint here of a “paradise regained” Adam-and-Eve-notion, just a harrowing sense of survival of the well-adapted. That’s what made the film for me.

10. Gainsbourg

I like innovative approaches to biopics and Gainsbourg is excellent in mixing legend and history. Once M. Gainsbourg is famous, it gets a little tedious watching his seemingly endless decay, but in the end even that felt worthwhile in order to learn how one of France’s most infamous 20th-century-figures might see himself in a movie.

Honorable Mention: Die kommenden Tage

This is not in the Top 10 because it tries to cram a little too much character drama into one film in a way that makes some of the characters unbelievable in the end. But a near-future dystopia from Germany that successfully taps into a lot of the fears which haunt our times, combined with some of the best colour photography I have seen in a German film for years, nevertheless made for a film that I often think back to. Can we please have more films with this scope in Germany?

Let’s see how 2011 will play out. Until then, I wish all my blog readers a good sense of closure for 2010 and a Happy New Year!

Stuff I learned this week – #50/10

5 3D directors – and what we can expect from them

3D is coming at us from several angles at the moment, but has yet to prove that the medium is not the message. I take a look at five directors who drive 3D forward and try to predict what role they will play in the future of stereoscopic filmmaking.

Rise to Power: Made two of the best, action packed Science-Fiction Sequels and created some of the most memorable effects scenes in cinema history with Aliens, the Terminator films and The Abyss. Then went off and realized the highest-grossing film ever. Twice.

Claim to Fame: Almost single-handedly convinced the movie industry that 3D is worth pursuing.

Defining Characteristics: Epic epicness coupled with sentimentality of the highest degree.

Lined up: Two sequels to Avatar that will continue to explore the world he created.

The Verdict: Cameron is a force of nature. What his films lack in artistic merit, they make up for in sheer, inescapable, gripping bombast. There are no signs of this changing in the near future.

Rise to Power: Married effects, character drama and the manipulation of the space-time continuum in classics like the Back to the Future trilogy and Forrest Gump.

Claim to Fame: Pioneered and developed “perfomance capturing”, and with it digital 3D, in a series of films that were really not great but succesful enough to keep him going.

Defining Characteristics: Creates settings that eerily sit between animation and live action aesthetics with few cuts and sweeping camera moves to explore 3D.

Lined up: As producer, Mars needs Moms for Disney in which Seth Green plays his inner child. As director, Yellow Submarine, the remake of a film about a band whose latest achievement is making it onto iTunes.

The Verdict: Zemeckis has left his mark in the development of 3D but his style has become a bit predictable and even seems slightly old-fashioned compared to the general zeitgeist.

Rise to Power: After directing several commercials, he revived the American zombie film and brought a new quality of aestheticized violence to Hollywood cinema with 300 and Watchmen.

Claim to Fame: Directed an animated fantasy film about, of all things, owls, which looked stunning but suffered from an overcrowded story.

Defining Characteristics: Applies 3D to both space and time with his signature slow motion fight scenes. Seems to like the grandiose iconography of fascism.

Lined up: His first original screenplay, Sucker Punch, will be converted to 3D, while he tackles the next reboot of the most boring of all superheroes, Superman: Man of Steel.

The Verdict: One of the most challenging visual directors around, to whom 3D seems to come naturally. However, the quality of his films seems to be very dependent on that of the source material.

Rise to Power: Gave stop-motion animation its mainstream groove back by directing Tim Burton’s phantasmagoria The Nightmare before Christmas.

Claim to Fame: Coraline, a film that reads like the book on how 3D should work, especially in animation.

Defining Characteristics: Builds worlds that are slightly askew, both visually and storywise.

Lined up: Has returned to Disney/Pixar to work on more stop motion films.

The Verdict: Might produce the first film for Pixar that actually embraces 3D in its mise-en-scene.

Rise to Power: Made films about maniacs of all colours as part of Germany’s new wave in the 70s, then became one of the most leftfield directors around, creating motion pictures in every genre, form and country.

Claim to Fame: Got exclusive access to ancient French caves to film them in 3D in Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Defining Characteristics: Embraces everything that fascinates him and turns it into something strange … and good.

Lined up: No word yet if there’s more 3D to come.

The Verdict: Herzog, with his oddball mentality and his talent for tearing down cinematic borders, might be one of those who leads 3D from childhood to maturity.

Photos by Steve Jurvetson, David Shankbone, rwoan, Thomas Crenshaw and erinc salor, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

Tron:Legacy – My favourite Quote (so far)

I am fascinated, if not obsessed with the idea that we live in the future now. Adam Rogers’s behind-the-scenes article on Tron: Legacy for “Wired” recently demonstrated this point in a way I never really thought about. But it’s true.

All those artists at Digital Domain know they’re creating Tron’s reality by creating it in reality. “We’ve achieved what the first film predicted,” [Director Joseph] Kosinski says. Jeff Bridges had to get a full-body laser scan during preproduction, an eerie hearkening to his digitization in the first movie. When he shot his scenes as Clu, the motion-capture rig he wore to translate his facial movements to Rev 4 included a visor that looked uncannily like the helmet he wore in the original. And the prospect of an unimpeachable, photorealistic avatar for Bridges ought to make the Screen Actors Guild freak out.
(read the whole Article)

It’s really a shame that the new Tron doesn’t arrive in German theaters until the end of January. It’s a film I will hopefully be blogging a lot more about soon.

Stuff I learned this week – #48/10

Aufs Auge gedrückt – 3D überall

Kaum vorstellbar, dass die Kinoleinwand einmal der einzige Bildschirm war, mit dem wir es zu tun hatten. Heute sind wir von Bildschirmen aller Formate umzingelt: Man trägt sie uns nach wie die Werbetafeln in den Städten, und wir tragen sie mit, in Form von Handys und I-Pods. Dennoch scheint es, als wäre das Kino, jenes Urmedium des Bildes, immer noch ein tauglicher Pionier und Innovationsmotor, der Trends etabliert, dem andere Bildmedien nachfolgen können.

Weiterlesen in epd film 12/210