Stephen Schaefer’s Hollywood & Mine
The 71st Berlinale happened this year like so many others happened – virtually. Normally, a citywide feast of cinema that attracts literally thousands of moviegoers, journalists, buyers, distributors and celebrities for 10 jampacked days, this year the reduced festival screens dozens of films in just 5 days, March 1-5. There are 15 competition films, all world premieres, although not one is from the UK, the US or Australia. The competition jury will announce its awards, including the festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear for Best Picture, Friday,.
Part of being there during the ‘normal’10-day festival is beginning each day with your hotel self-serve buffet and reading the 3 festival dailies with their schedules, reviews, red carpet photos and newsy announcements of films bought and sold. The dailies – from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Screen: International – are must reading. This year I was asked to be on Screen’s critics’ jury where 6 of us from around the world and the Screen critic offer daily ratings of the competition films. These 7 votes are averaged and published, this year online, in a grid so that festivalgoers get an instant ‘read’ of who is getting the most and least love of the competing pictures.
Needless to say as a juror I’ve never been able to do anything like this previously. I’m lucky to see a third of the competition films usually because there are press conferences, interviews and non-competing films to cover. I always wondered what it would be like to just go to a festival and see every film in the race for the Golden Bear. Now, this being my first time on a film jury, I’ll know. This year means 3 films daily. Because I’m on the East Coast with a 6-hour time difference from Berlin, my daily ratings must be filed with Screen by 11:30 AM Eastern Standard Time.
Of the 3 films for Monday, the first day, there was a delightful romantic comedy from Germany, ‘I’m Your Man’ written and directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Maria Schrader.
She offers a life-like, super smart, intelligently programmed, mightily attractive semi-human android partnered — on a 3-week test run — with a lonely museum historian who is by turns horrified at her situation being single and maybe approaching 40 and intrigued by the programming that make her new ‘fella’ possible. Dan Stevens is the android and he’s remarkable.
The Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo offers ‘Introduction’ which presents a half-dozen interwoven characters trying to figure out what life offers. Filmed, gorgeously, in vivid black and white, ‘Introduction’ offers a nonstop series of conversations that reveal the chasms between concerned parents and their nearly adult children as they break hearts and seek happiness.
From Canada and Lebanon ‘Memory Box,’ in French and Lebanese, is limited by a too familiar structure. In French-speaking Montreal a box is delivered which a mother immediately puts away. But her teenage daughter sneaks in to see what’s there – and the rest of the film ever so slowly and predictably reveals the mother’s history when she was her daughter’s age, a young girl back in Lebanon during the 1984 war. We see young love, bombings, personal loss and a farewell to a first love and the life they’d always known. Admirably acted but rarely surprising.
Tuesday’s 3 films were each in their own way, provocations. In his astonishing feature directing debut ‘Natural Light’ Denes Nagy rates as a major talent with a grimly provocative, spellbinding WWII drama. A co-production of Hungary-Latvia-France and Germany, ‘Natural Light’ delves into the muck of a Hungarian regiment forced by the Nazis to fight the Russians.
Nagy’s dark, dread-filled forest sees this squadron as primates among wild creatures, who unlike man, kill only in need. It’s a brutal picture with a haunting central figure who, as we are, is more and more horrified by what he witnesses.
Xavier Beauvois (‘Of Gods and Men’) is among France’s most distinguished and popular filmmakers – a status cemented by his appearing in the just-concluded final season of the French inside-showbiz TV series ‘Call My Agent!’ Beauvois’ ‘Albatros’ (or ‘Drift Away’) is a vividly realized portrait of Laurent (Jérémie Renier), a cop in a picturesque Normandy seaside town whose life is full and joyous with an impending marriage to his longtime partner, a lovely young daughter and a job he loves. It’s a mighty, meaningful existence – until it isn’t at all. In these years where America is convulsed with episodes of police brutality and accountability, Beauvois initially seems to be mounting a counter charge in praise of the bravery these cops face daily. But it’s more complicated than that.
The third competition entry is an in-your-face farcical, sick, disgusting, angry, polemical outrage from Romania. Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ follows the film festival tradition of forgetting about ‘high art’ and going literally hard core with a 5-minute porn video of heterosexual coupling. [This ‘tradition’ goes back to the ’70s when it was truly shocking to see real naked people and body parts.] Naked sexuality is only one of the many ‘forbidden’ subjects Jude is intent in exposing in his survey of Bucharest in all its hypocrisy, violent history, bigotry and cruelty. Divided in 3 sections we see pedestrians, principal characters and officials in pandemic face masks: This is filmed as the world we see is happening. We soon discover that opening hardcore sequence was a married couple’s private video that’s been uploaded illegally to the internet. Among its repercussions, the woman, a teacher, may lose her job. Jude’s middle section ‘Anecdotes’ is a brief history of Romanian persecution, repression and murder in the hands of its military, the Nazis and Russian Communists. It’s a raging indictment. The final section exposes the nation’s still-fervent anti-Semitism and hatred of the Roma. There’s a jaunty air to the despair, an almost comical gesture to the moralistic hypocrisy of ‘civilized’ life.
NEW DVDs:
MULTIVERSE TRAVELERS ‘Rick and Morty: The Complete Seasons 1-4’ (Blu-ray + Digital Code, 41 episodes, WB, Not Rated but Adult Swim)
Beloved, deranged, delightful – Rick Sanchez is a sociopathic scientist who enjoys using his sci-fi gadgets to go on adventures across the universe – taking his daughter Beth and her hubby Jerry’s 2 kids, Morty and Summer, with him. A situation that doesn’t endear Rick to Jerry. Bonus Features: Commentaries on every episode! Animatics for every episode!! Behind the scenes, deleted scenes. ‘Origins of Rick and Morty Part 1 & 2.’ ‘Inside the Episode’ for every Season 4 episode. ‘Samurai and Shogun,’ Prop Process and Character Creation.
DIE NAZIS DIE ‘The Last Vermeer’ (DVD, Sony, R) shines most brightly in telling its remarkable but true story, propelled by the chameleon Guy Pearce’s mesmerizing performance. As WWII ends the Nazi Occupation of the Netherlands, Han van Meegeren (Pearce), a nationally known art figure, is arrested, put on trial and if guilty to be shot as a collaborator.
He was accused of selling Dutch paintings that were national treasures to Hitler’s horrible Number 2, Hermann Göring, when he went on trial. Only public opinion rapidly reversed when it was discovered that those ‘treasures’ Göring bought were Meegeren fakes! Does this make him a hero for making fools of the Nazis? Claes Bang is the investigator charged with exposing the flamboyant art collector and Vicky Krieps (‘Phantom Thread’) his assistant.
DRINKING & TALKING ‘You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski’ (DVD, Kino Lorber, Not Rated) Charles Bukowski had a reputation as ‘the poet of the gutter’ or as Time dubbed him, ‘a laureate of American lowlife.’ 
His poetry, short stories and novels have posthumously – he died at 73 in 1994 – made Bukowski’s reputation in the US. In Germany, his birthplace, he was wildly celebrated and revered in his lifetime. ‘You Never Had It’ is a 1981 video interview of the writer and his soon to be wife Linda Lee Beighle by producer Silvia Bizio in the couple’s San Pedro home. It’s been edited with added scenes of LA and Bukowski reading his poetry. Bonus: Extended interview with Bizio.
TEENAGE PRODIGY ‘WWII: The Long Road Home’ (DVD, Brightspark, Not Rated) is inspired by director Elliott Hasler’s great grandfather Charlie Standing’s heroic efforts to traverse war-torn Europe and return home. First, this Brit must escape from a liberated Italian prisoner of war camp – and then survive the long trek to England. His detours include finding a cave sanctuary where he kills a Nazi and goes on the run again. Then there’s a wintry collapse where he’s saved by a mute Italian shepherd who hides him in a convent. What makes ‘Long Road Home’ truly stand apart is its youthful writer-director-star Hasler who was just 16 when his picture made its film festivals debut in 2017.
TRULY SUPERNATURAL Monte Macabre is a small town with real mystery. Here myths and legends of Mesoamerican folklore come to life as 2 half-brothers spend a summer there with grandma. ‘Victor and Valentino Folk Art Foes: Season 1, Vol. 1’ (DVD, 18 episodes, Cartoon Network, Not Rated) lets go with comical supernatural episodes about ‘Legend of the Hidden Skate Park,’ ‘Cuddle Monster’ and ‘The Boy Who Cried Lechuzza.’
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3uPZVCF
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