Longing
January 14th, 2008
You may have heard French lounge cover act Nouvelle Vague’s version of Eisbär, but nothing beats the original 1981 Grauzone version of the song, a Neue Deutsche Welle hit in 1981. At least that’s what I thought until I saw Valeska Grisebach’s Sehnsucht (Longing), in which a German small-town couple plays it on their dinky keyboard after dinner. In their incapable hands, the song’s NDW ironic reserve (this is the period that brought us Trio’s “Da Da Da“) turns into real heartache that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s mood of awkward tragedy.
Like Christian Petzold and Robert Thalheim, Valeska Grisebach gets lumped into the Neue Berliner Schule — and I guess I just did it, too. Movement or not, every film by these directors that I’ve managed to catch so far has been outstanding. Sehnsucht, the story of an ill-fated love affair between a locksmith and a waitress cast with non-professional actors and set in a tiny village, feels absolutely lifelike. The characters and the tired, cliche-ridden things they say in hopeless attempts of bridging the gaps between them are depressingly real and instantly familiar to anybody who has spent any time in small-town Germany. Bold direction and editing add an artful dimension to the sparse, elegant story. There’s a fantastic sequence involving a Robbie Williams song, and then there’s that Eisbär.
- signandsight
- Sehnsucht - Laien werden Berlinale-Stars
- “Sehnsucht”: Realismus des Wünschens
- Arne Hoehne Presse | Sehnsucht
- Sehnsucht (Schnitt Online)
Sehnsucht. Valeska Grisebach, 2006. ****
This post is dedicated to the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, who swims laps tirelessly to everybody’s endless delight. Too bad about that whole warming thing.
Hot Fuzz
March 28th, 2007
More amusing silliness from the guys who made Shaun of the Dead. After demolishing the zombie film, Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost are taking aim at the Jerry Bruckheimer action flick, and they’ve set it in the picture-postcard English countryside. Bobbies with firearms–what’s not to like?
Simon Pegg plays Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a London supercop who is sent off to the provinces because he’s making everybody else on his team look bad. In sleepy Sandford, the only available heroics consist of chasing underage kids out of the pub and catching runaway swans. Angel’s new partner PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) is an action-movie fanatic whose dearest wish is to fire a gun while jumping through the air in slow motion. But ah, evil lurks in Sandford, and Danny might get his wish after all….
It takes a while for Hot Fuzz to ramp up the action, but in the meantime, the spectacular supporting cast keeps things very entertaining: Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Bill Nighy, and a slew of other familiar faces populate the town with characters that range from oddly endearing to cheerfully creepy. My patented scientific method for objectively judging comedy reveals a favorable chuckle-to-groan ratio, one dozen solid out-and-out laughs, four roll-out-of-your-seat moments of uncontrollable hilarity, and a steady state of hearty bemusement. For a 120 minute film, that’s not bad at all. Hot Fuzz opens on April 20th.
Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, 2007. ***
