crackerjack

Well-known member
The bits in Sweden when they are becoming suspicious of each other, and especially Ulrike, I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be so paranoid and confusing or if that was the edit. Works well though.

You mean the bit in Jordan? Ulrike was dead by the time of the Swedish fiasco. Yeah, I agree - I was looking up Peter later to see where the 'mossad spy'' bit came from, but it can only have been Ensslin's paranoia (and a spot of revenge for his scrap with Baader). Poorly introduced, though - was it the natural result of a life on the run, or were they just damaged people anyway? The film didn't really speculate either way, or even acknowledge it.

The old intel dude reminded me a of one of those professors from a 70s horror film who understands more than everyone else about what's going on and expounds slowly and at length about his theories. Good period device ;)

The great Bruno Ganz, who you may recognise from clips such as

 

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
You mean the bit in Jordan? Ulrike was dead by the time of the Swedish fiasco. Yeah, I agree - I was looking up Peter later to see where the 'mossad spy'' bit came from, but it can only have been Ensslin's paranoia (and a spot of revenge for his scrap with Baader). Poorly introduced, though - was it the natural result of a life on the run, or were they just damaged people anyway? The film didn't really speculate either way, or even acknowledge it.
Well that too, but I meant the bits in jail in Sweden when they are preparing for the trial. Seems they think she's a turncoat but it's not really apparent what their differences are.

I thought the 'mossad spy' bit was just to get him out of the way. We didn't see him get out of Jordan though and it wasn't clear who subsequently picked up the children in Sicily. That definitely seemed like a case of something getting lost in the cut.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Sure, I appreciate all that, but does that make them 'notorious'? Hmm, maybe it does.

Depends on how you use 'notorious'. If it's 'blew more shit up', 'killed more people' etc, then not.

If it's some amalgam of 'pointless', 'weird', 'psychically damaged', 'those crazy kids', the RAF fit the bill.

Craner, you had a lot to day on this on another thread - is there one book on this you'd particularly recommend for a good overview? I've developed a guilty fascination and especially want to know if the babes were as hot as they are in the movie.
 

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
Shame about the soundtrack though, a missed opportunity. Should have had lots of righteous German art-rock.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
Well that too, but I meant the bits in jail in Sweden when they are preparing for the trial. Seems they think she's a turncoat but it's not really apparent what their differences are.

Ah, right. The jail was actually in Germany, though you're right, Meinhof was still alive at the time.

I thought the 'mossad spy' bit was just to get him out of the way. We didn't see him get out of Jordan though and it wasn't clear who subsequently picked up the children in Sicily. That definitely seemed like a case of something getting lost in the cut.

Agreed. It was Peter who picked up her kids, and delivered them to their father, but they just sorta threw that bit in, like they wanted to get it out of the way.

Interestingly Mahler - the speccy lawyer who went to Baader and Ensslin in Italy and who had the idea for RAF - joined a neo-Nazi group in the 90s. Just a little something i picked up in my after-movie wikiing.
 

waffle

Banned
In Germany I guess. Maybe they just straight translated the tag line?

Well, the German media did engage in a crazed moral panic in response to the RAF's violent campaign at the time (much as Italy did with the Red Brigades, France with Action Directe, the US with the Weather Underground, etc), so much so that Germany's leading 'New German Cinema' directors, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, along with its leading novelists like by Heinrich Böll, expressed their disgust through their work. Schlöndorff and von Trotta directed The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum in 1975, adapted from Böll's novel of the same name (published just after he won the Nobel Prize in 1972), while Fassbinder directed Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven in the same year, both films dealing with the fallout from the media frenzy over terrorism. On the DVD for Lost Honour, Schlöndorff and other crew members even argue for "the film's continued relevance today, drawing an analogy between the political climate of panic over terrorism in 1970s West Germany and the post-September 11, 2001 situation in the U.S."

I haven't seen Edel's film yet, though judging from reviews and his visceral Last Exit To Brooklyn, I imagine it is something of a violence-as-language gore-fest, or is it more like Frankenheimer's woeful movie about the Red Brigades? Interesting that the film's release coincides with the release from prison of the remaining members of the RAF, one of its leaders, Korg, released today. What's that about? I can only conjecture at this point.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Just watched the Hourglass Sanatorium which has just come out on dvd

In Wojciech Has' adaptation of Bruno Schulz' short stories, time plays tricks and dreams come to life as a man visits his not quite dead father in an otherworldly sanatorium
"Everything is muddled up, Father. One needs such patience to find the right meaning in this tangle."
So says Jozef (Nowicki) to his father Jakub (Kondrat) in the middle of Wojciech Has' Hourglass Sanatorium, no doubt articulating the thoughts of many a viewer by this point. For Jakub is in fact dead, but his life has been supernaturally prolonged in an isolated and dilapidated sanatorium, located alongside a cemetery (or perhaps in the subconscious). The residing doctor (Holoubek) has put the clocks back to reactivate the past in all its unfulfilled possibilities and missed opportunities.
After a long, sleepy train journey surrounded by corpse-like Hassids and naked women, Jozef has arrived at these dusty corridors in search of both his lost father and some sort of meaning for his own life, but he is soon, much like the doctor with the pretty nurse (Sokolowska), distracted from his task by considerations of a more erotic nature - and more particularly by his fanciful encounters with two women, voluptuous Adela (Kowelska) and spectral Bianka (Adamek). For in this tomb-like sanatorium where time has been reversed, memories run parallel to dreams, desires and fantasies, even if ultimately all these branch lines and sidetracks lead to the same inevitable terminus.
If Jakob comes to regard the past as the 'text' of God's will, misinterpreted or emended at the reader's peril, and if his uncanny adventures are all prompted by books that he has encountered in his youth, whether a scrapbook of catalogue advertisements, a stamp album owned by a childhood friend (Zylber), his father's collection of bird illustrations, or the Old Testament itself, all this serves in part as a reflex for the literary origins of Has's film.
The Polish director had already acquired a reputation as a skilled adaptor of 'unfilmable' books with his dizzying The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), and in Hourglass Sanatorium, he turned his attentions to several of the linked short stories collected in 'Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass', published by celebrated Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz in 1937.
I've never read the book but presumably this is not a totally faithful adaptation as there are references to the holocaust which had not happened when Schulz wrote it. Very interesting film anyway.
 

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
Interesting that the film's release coincides with the release from prison of the remaining members of the RAF, one of its leaders, Korg, released today. What's that about? I can only conjecture at this point.
Other than coincidence?

At the showing for this one of the trailers was for Steven Soderbergh's two part Che Guevara biopic. So I guess revolution is in the air. Some might say conveniently canalised into cathartic spectator entertainment.
 

slim jenkins

El Hombre Invisible
'The Conversation Piece' - Visconti - interesting, I thought...Burt Lancaster's isolated professor getting in a mess when strangers insist on renting his spare room....forcing him to confront radical politics and sexual liberation.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Michael Clayton

If you liked George Clooney in Syriana, you may also like Michael Clayton.
Different subject and focus, but some similar tone in the film.
Was surprised I liked it but , hey you never know until you watch.
 

Bettysnake

twisted pony ******
JESUS CHRIST SAVIOUR - Kinski madness

Still on a german tip I saw this on Sunday morning - by turns laugh out loud funny and incredibly moving.....
Jesus Christ Saviour

It made me think that there's definitely room in the documentary canon for a really great film about heckling...

"At the height of his career, Klaus Kinski was Germany’s favourite fiend. On November 20, 1971, the iconic actor took to the stage of Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle to perform a very personal reinterpretation of the New Testament, a theatrical monologue about ‘a man who would rather be massacred than continue to live and fester’. Only moments after Kinski entered the spotlight to begin his recitation hecklers in the sold-out auditorium started hurling insults, deliberately provoking Kinski into a rage until he stormed off. However, he returned to the stage time and again and eventually what was meant as the prelude to a planned world tour turned into spectacular tumult and chaos."
 

swears

preppy-kei
Saw The Baader Meinhof Complex the other night. Pretty good, mostly because the events recalled were so interesting in themselves. One strange thing about Baader himself (as he is portrayed in the film) is that he doesn't even talk about politics much (that's left to the more intellectual Meinhof) but seems to be going along with everything for the kicks, for the thrill of being a rebel for the sake of it. I wonder how accurate a representation this is. He even comes out with reactionary statements regarding the women members of the group: "Oh, so this is going to be a cunts revolution!" There's been talk of this film glamourising the actions of the RAF, but I didn't get impression at all. They failed to achieve any political ends, made Germany more right-wing than before, killed innocents and died as completely discredited and broken people. The main feel of it all is one of a manic but impotent desperation.

I noticed that a bearded, middle aged guy a few seats down from me was crying at various points during the film, perhaps he was a radical in his youth...
 

zhao

there are no accidents
hell boy 2 was embarrassingly horrid beyond anything i could imagine. not a single redeeming feature.

the mysterious character turned into a beer guzzling "tough guy but sensitive" dimwit like Joey from Friends. Abe the fish guy moves and speaks like C3PO, a clumsy butler with self esteem issues, while he is supposed to be an agile, shadow-like and silent rogue.

Mignola's original stories had humour, yes, but were also dark and intriguing and genuinely spooky. this movie series has become a sitcom farce.
 
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