Nasser Asphalt ZERO STARS/****
Image D+ Sound C-
starring Horst Buccholz, Martin Held, Maria
Perschv, Gert Frobe
screenplay by Will Tremper
directed by Frank Wisbar
by Walter Chaw
Unbearably padded with stock footage and stilted segues around the
alleged intrigue of newspaper ethics, Frank Wisbar's abominable Wet
Asphalt might discover contemporary relevance for the conceit
that a lie about war becomes the biggest story in the world--but
probably only if you're so blinded by rage that the picture's
shortcomings are secondary. Directed by the obscure Frank Wisbar and
starring the recalcitrant punk (Horst Buchholz) from The
Magnificent Seven and One, Two, Three,
the film follows the trials of a ghost-written young reporter who gets
his name attached to a bit of nonsense about Germans living underground
after the war. Maybe it's an offshoot of the apocryphal tales of
Japanese soldiers crawling out of the Pacific bush years after VJ-Day;
more likely, it's the product of a belief that cheapo genre horseshit
like this would earn its investment back before people got wise and
stayed away in droves. Oh, and there's also some claptrap revolving
around a perfunctory love story with wallpaper Bettina (Maria Perschy),
to say nothing of the sitting room moralizations with smarmy boss Cesar
(Martin Held).
Die Fälscher ***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, Devid Striesow, Dolores Chaplin screenplay by Stefan Ruzowitzky, based on the book by Adolf Burger directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
by Bryant Frazer This year's winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher) is defined in equal terms by what it is and what it isn't. It is a Holocaust survivor's yarn told with a certain playfulness and no lack of moral consideration, but it is not really a concentration-camp movie; mostly, it feels like a prison caper yarn that happens to take place in Sachsenhausen. The film's weight comes from the things we know about but cannot see within the frame: those haunting images of emaciated Jews, the walking-dead stares of the prisoners consigned to the gas chambers and crematoria, the tragedy of systematic genocide.
Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte ***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+ starring Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukur, Ursina Lardi written and directed by Michael Haneke
by Bryant Frazer The origins of evil--an alluring subject for writers and filmmakers, perhaps even more so than for psychologists and historians, who are limited by the facts of any given case. They become psychological archeologists, looking for the broken artifacts of a damaged mind that indicate why this person or that chose to inflict great pain and suffering by picking up a knife, a gun, or the blunt force of an entire nation's army. Artists who imagine or investigate evil deeds, on the other hand, have the refuge of the poet. They may root in the filth of amorality and sociopathy, seeking dark messages there, but what they eventually create is the product of humanism--an effort to understand and shed light on tragedies in motion, on the present-day injustices that can lead to future wickedness and despair.
Welt am Draht ****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A starring Klaus Löwitsch, Barbara Valentin, Mascha Rabben, Karl Heinz Vosgerau screenplay by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on the novel Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
by Jefferson RobbinsIf computer engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) doesn't realize he's a digital simulation, you can forgive him for not having seen The Matrix. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two-part 1973 movie for German TV, World On A Wire, populates Stiller's environment with so many characters who are obviously automata, of greater and lesser sophistication, that he really should get a clue. Most of the people he encounters are over-painted, pancaked and rouged to the point of looking like mannequins or clowns. There are the beautiful women who materialize exactly when needed and stand by for male appreciation. There's the bartender who stands waxen until, as if activated, he lunges forward to offer a cocktail. Even Stiller's own responses to stimuli seem at times posed and inauthentic. But we suspect Fassbinder's satirizing a notoriously affectless society. The distant miens of Stiller's peers and strangers could simply reflect a heart-freezing German ennui--or a universal egotism, in which we mentally reduce everyone not in our immediate circle to the status of clockwork extras.1
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