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Europa Europa (1990)
definitely keeps your attention
Europa Europa is a filmed account of Solomon Perel's autobiographical experiences during the World War II. From Communist orphanage to Hitler youth group, Solly blends right in with each circumstance that he finds himself in. One of the questions on the sheets was something about Solly having nine lives, and it seems that he does for some part. First he's in the bathroom when his sister is killed, and if he had stood up when she called for him he could have been killed himself. Then he's saved by a Russian solider, speaks good German to the right officer, and they take him in without question. Again he's in the tub and one of the soldiers sees him, and finds out that he's a Jew. It's a powerful scene because the solider could have turned him in and had him killed. Instead the gentleman befriends Solly and treats him like a brother. He manages to hold his head together long enough to keep himself alive until the war ends, or his freedom, if he can find a way. Solomon Perel was luckier than most, he escaped to Palestine, and now lives in Israel.
The film moves along very well, and is not predictable at all, which is very similar; I'm sure to what the young Solomon had to go through. It doesn't have boring moments, and even includes some flights of fancy by the young man, who has a bit if a sense of humor, even if subtle.
"Europa Europa" is a somewhat long movie, but never loses its impact. It is quite intriguing how Solomon continuously masquerades as different types of people. There are several sequences where Solomon imagines various images, such as Hitler dancing with Stalin among others. "Europa Europa" is a wonderful movie, but not for everyone. The subtitles are sometimes hard to follow; so most viewers won't be likely to follow the film easily. However, anyone who enjoys foreign films or doesn't mind the subtitles, length or depth of subject will likely enjoy this film.
Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979)
not really my kind of movie, but i did enjoy it.
SPOILER The Marriage of Maria Braun-Fassbinder
They weren't kidding when they said the movie would be rated R by American standards. The movie definitely had some twists to it also. In the beginning, Maria was happy. Her and her husband had just gotten married right before he was sent away. She spent everyday looking for him to get off the train. When Betti's husband told her that Hermann was dead, it didn't take her long to find someone new but she never forgot him in her mind. The day he comes home and finds her about to sleep with another black man, she chooses to show her devotion to Herman by hitting Bill over the head with a bottle until he falls on the bed.
She clearly takes after her mother when it comes to men. She goes home for her mom's birthday, and Maria meets her mom's new `good acquaintance' while she's there. Maria definitely goes from one man to the other with ease. She has no problem talking to Hermann in prison and then going to Mr. Oswald's arms right after. Maria has very extreme emotions. She goes from being calm and mysterious at work to loud and advasive when Oswald calls. She is very outgoing in my opinion. She goes in for a job interview and tells the man that he won't need anyone else after he hires her; she tells Oswald she'll never marry him but she'll be his mistress for the time being. Maria yells at her mother when her mom tries to give her advice, and there are many other situations where I wasn't expecting a reaction like the way she did.
The ending was also interesting. She lights her first cigarette on the stove and turns the stove off. Then she and Hermann both undress, until the door bell rings. She excuses herself to go and get dressed, they show her running water across her arm, she then lights another cigarette and purposefully leaves the stove on. Atleast, I think she left the stove on purposefully this time. She clearly knew to turn off the stove, especially after she did it right the first time. I didn't understand why she ran water over her arm though. Obviously Fassbinder wanted to foreshadow that she was going to try and kill herself, but she seemed very happy at the time. She and Hermann were together again, Oswald was gone and she had his money. I wasn't expecting the ending to be so sudden or so dramatic. The interesting thing about the ending was that first they showed her running the water on her arm hinting that she wanted to kill herself. At the end, she killed herself and Hermann also. I wonder if she was planning on doing that the whole time. Clearly no one knew about her plans to kill herself, and it had never crossed my mind that the movie would end that way before the ending scene. Although after doing my research on Fassbinder, I should have expected something like that to happen at the end. I did like the movie because it was interesting to me. I enjoy shock value in movies also because the can keep your attention. I was also happy that I got to see one of Fassbinder's movies because I think it could help me understand the information I have been reading on him.
Jakob der Lügner (1974)
My feelings on this award winning movie.
Jacob the Liar
I liked this movie, and I think it had good lessons to learn from. I liked Lena's character. She was completely innocent throughout the entire movie, and I felt that she showed not everyone had lost hope during the time. Even at the end, she was excited that they were going away, and she had no clue where. She was just being a kid, and going anywhere is exciting when you are young. Jacob starting telling stories about the Russians and other things he knew about the war. The reality was that he knew nothing more than anyone else. In a way, it did help the people's spirits though. But in the end, everyone was unhappy because their optimism was crushed with the sign that said everyone was to gather together with less than 5 kilos in luggage so they could `go away'.
I think my favorite scene was when the old man thought he heard voices in the freight car. While I was watching the movie, I thought he was crazy and apparently so did everyone else. They all thought he was just hearing things that weren't there. The reality was that there was someone in the car, but they never showed who and a guard shot the old man before he could tell anyone. The scene sparked my curiosity on who it was exactly in the car and why that person was being held in there, or if they were being held in the at all.
The whole radio lie caused a lot of problems in the movie, and that's why I said above that there were some good lessons to be learned in the movie. One lie sparked another for him, and that got him in deeper into his stories until so many people were asking about the radio that he just couldn't make anything else up and he finally told his friend. Surprisingly enough, the friend took the news very well. In a way, it almost seemed like he was expecting it all along. The movie shows that lying for whatever cause is never a good cause no matter how much you think it may help the situation. The lies turned everyone against him in the end, and they all ended up the same way anyhow unfortunately. Although this wasn't my favorite movie in class so far, I did enjoy watching it, and it kept my attention throughout the story.
Le procès (1962)
Interesting to try and follow, especially the first time.
Contains Spoiler The film starts with Wells telling a story with animation. The story is a fable about a man waiting at the door to the `law', which could be a symbol of the door to judgment or even heaven and God. "The law should be accessible to every man," the man says. But, accessibility is not a simple matter in this movie at any point in time.
`The Trial' is about a man who one day is awoken and told that he has been found guilty of a crime and will eventually go to trial. He is permitted to carry on with his normal functions, but absolutely nothing is revealed to him about the nature of his crimes and why he is being charged. His character, K, does his best to investigate into why he is being charged and he seeks the counsel of Advocate Albert Hassler, who is played by Orson Wells himself in the movie. He battles the system, but no matter what he does, K is unable to find out anything concerning his crime and more and more, his situation becomes hopeless.
K's crimes are never revealed, and neither is the motivation of why he is being pursued or the knowledge of what will happen to him. This makes the film very difficult to understand on a first viewing. There is a series of encounters and scenes that never make his situation any clearer to him.
Wells is definitely creative. He took a piece of German literature, by Kafka, and made it into an American cinema. The entire movie is very surrealistic in a way. K.'s character seems flat because he does not change much over his series of distressing encounters. There is occasional anger and mistrust of the world, but more real responses to his awful and accumulating experiences aren't there. In the end, it was out of curiosity rather than sympathy that I cared at all what happens to his character. Its two hour length seemed longer because it is chopped up into multiple episodes which often seem to be there to illustrate yet another point, without really moving the story ahead. Another thing is that you can never really tell how time works in the movie. After what seems like days in the movie, a woman named Hilda who worked for the lawyer talks about the speech he made last night after he got arrested yesterday. So, that causes the audience to realize that everything has happened in one day so far when it actually seemed much longer.
The film's greatest achievement overall is that it pulls us into a story that is just like a nightmare, and this is the best film of its kind that I have ever seen. There is a nightmarish sense of frustration throughout the movie. Although Joseph K. seems to get close at times, he's never able to get any answers that make sense. He's never able to face his accusers or even find out what crime he is charged with. Basically, K gets two choices. He can buy into the game and accept blame, or he can refuse to go along with the game and defy the system. Regardless of his choice, he can't win. That is another reason the whole movie is like a nightmare because K can never get out. K is always shown as very insignificant throughout the movie. For example, the mountain of typewriters at the office and the huge doors of the courts show his size doesn't matter.
Perkins did give a good performance in the film in my opinion. He is the glue of every scene and you wait to see his reaction to all the torment he goes through now that he is one of the accused. He seems to always have this nervous guilt, as though he knows somewhere in the depths of his soul that he is guilty of something, but the actual crime makes no difference, the important thing is always his guilt. Something I found interesting in the movie is that all the women of the movie are sex objects. Wells implies that whatever it is that K is guilty of has to do at least part with sex, especially because every scene with a woman turns sexual at some point. It's almost as if the women are a part of his trial, since all of them literally throw themselves at him at one point or another.
Anyways, I thought this was a good film, even though the end is very strange to me, with him wandering in and out of buildings when those buildings were never connected in the movie before. At the very end, K lets two men carry him away and it's almost as if he's given up and is just ready to accept whatever fate is coming to him. He definitely doesn't leave undefeated.