Fitzcarraldo

Growing older has its pleasures. I was bit nervous about renting Fitzcarraldo (1982) with Klaus Kinski in the lead role. I remember seeing Kinski as a teenager in a film depicting a strange riverboat trip.  At the time I thought the film was boring and Kinski crazy. In my memory the action took place on image [Read More]

King Kong

Good writing goes a long way. I have seen the famous picture of King Kong on the Empire State Building in New York many times. “Isn’t that silly. Such an ape would never climb on top of the New York skyline,” was my reaction every single time. I was never much interested in seeing image [Read More]

Go for Zucker

Go for Zucker is a delightful German comedy written and directed by Dani Levy. With a Midas touch, he navigates around highly sensitive topics for the German national psyche and creates the first post World War II German comedy about a Jewish family. Jacky Zucker (nee Jakob Zuckermann) was born to a Jewish mother in image [Read More]

Capote

As a biography of a major writer of the 20th century America Capote is an artistic failure. The film covers only a short period in Capote’s life when he researched and wrote In Cold Blood. The script utterly lacked a central requirement of a good biography: make us understand the person better. All we learn image [Read More]

Walk the Line

If I had grown up in Nashville listening to country music, it would have been easier to appreciate Walk the Line, a chronicle of the first 30 something years of Johnny Cash’s career. Raised on Rock, Pop and Soul and Classical Music, I could not connect very well with Cash’s music, except for the occasional image [Read More]

In her Shoes

Two sisters, Maggie (Cameron Diaz) and Rose (Toni Collette), could not be more different. Maggie gets any man she wants but is not able to hold a steady job and support herself financially. Rose has no success with men and is climbing up the corporate ladder in a high prestige law firm. When Rose finally image [Read More]

Syriana

It is customary at many opera productions to hand out notes to the audience about what is happening in the different acts of the musical work, often because the opera is sung in a foreign language. Most critics and moviegoers have remarked the plot of Syriana is jumping to so many places and to so image [Read More]

Match Point

I buried Woody Allen tonight. The first 90 minutes of Match Point were entirely repetitive of his previous films,  with the exception the location:  the film takes place in London and not Manhattan. I wished I had stayed home and not wasted time on such a trivial movie. Allen’s final mission in life seems to image [Read More]

Brokeback Mountain

Just as in The Sound of Music the most impressive character in the Ang Lee’s cowboy movie are beautiful mountains. Whenever the camera shows pictures of the arresting Wyoming landscape, one’s soul takes in a deep breath. As a piece of drama the film falls flat: forty years ago a story of two cowboys in image [Read More]