The Velvet Café

I’ve promised myself to stop talking so much about Mark Kermode.

I’ve told you before that this British film critic is a favourite of mine – passionate, articulated, knowledgeable, funny and a little bit provocative to make sure I’ll stay alert. But if I keep referring to his views all the time it will make me appear as if I’m just a silly fan girl, completely void confidence and ideas of my own.

However I couldn’t possibly write about The Exorcist without mentioning his name, so you have to excuse me for dragging him into my blog once again. Mark Kermode basically is “Mr Exorcist” after writing an entire book and numerous articles on the topic, time after time appointing it to the best film ever made.

Last time I heard him talking about it, he said he’d watched it 200 times, and by now I’m sure it’s even more. And he claims that every time he watches it, he discovers something new.

It’s the same sort of obsession as a friend of mine has with The Third Man and I’m a bit on the fence on how to react it. Should you pity those nutty people who spend so much time re-watching something they should know by heart by now when they could watch something new instead? (There has been a standing joke for months on the podcast where Kermode dwells about how he’s been unable to find a time slot to watch The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which he claims that he really would love to see but for some reason never get around to.)

Or should we envy them, for having a somewhat quirky feature in their personality that makes them appear more interesting than the rest of us? They know something that we don’t and if we just were smart enough we too would see why The Exorcist is worth 200 viewings.

Revisit after 20 years
Given that I often, although not always, agree with Kermode’s takes on films, I had fairly high expectations when I watched it recently in a theatre as it appeared in the programme of my local film club.

The first time I watched it was over 20 years ago, and all I could remember was that there was a possessed girl lying in a bed and that she could spin her head, which looked scary, and then there was a bad-ass priest, Max von Sydow who tried to cure her by the means of exorcism.

The question was: would a revisit make me notice something more? And how well would it hold up after all those years considering the development in the special effects department and the increasing amount of gore we’ve been exposed to and learned to expect from horror movies? Would it be that scary masterpiece I imagined or could it be that people hold it so high out of pure nostalgia for their first truly upsetting experiences of movie watching in their lost youth?

As far as the plot goes I’d say that my recollection was pretty accurate; it’s a simple and straightforward story.  If you need a refresher, the 30 second bunny version wraps it up perfectly. 

I haven’t read Kermodes book but I’m a little bit puzzled at the idea of writing an entire book about it. How could you possibly have that much to say? There must have been a lot of hidden layers that I didn’t spot.

Giggling at The Devil
This said: I was positively surprised at how modern it felt. There was no CGI, no motion caption technique, no 3d, and yet the special effects left nothing to complain about.

I particularly liked how they didn’t overuse cheap silly scare effects, you know when they fire off a sudden sound or light effect and you get an automatic jump reaction in your chair and then you see that you’ve been tricked because it wasn’t a “real” horror this time, only a cat or some other natural explanation. I only noticed one use in the entire movie, and that’s a level I can live with. Too much of it and I feel transported to an amusement park, rather than engaging myself in a story.

Most of the time I felt pretty much involved in the events o the screen and if not frightened, at least sufficiently uncomfortable, which is what I expect from a horror movie.

Oddly enough I had a far worse time watching her going through medical examinations of her brain at a hospital than watching her hovering in the air, shouting with a man’s voice that she was the devil. Even if they were technically well made, there was something about the possessed-girl-in-a-bed scenes that occasionally made me giggle rather than shiver.

I guess The Devil is a little bit hard to take seriously when you’re a firm believer in his non-existence. (The final scene in Rosemary’s Baby had a similar effect on me for the same reason.) I also think it didn’t help that I went to see it on my own. Horror movies are pretty much like rollercoaster rides: you’re more likely to scream if you’re in company with someone who is freaked out. The fear is contagious.

Rosemary’s Baby vs The Exorcist
Finally I owe you a verdict. As I watched Rosemary’s Baby earlier this autumn I promised to match it against The Exorcist. Which one did I like best?

I struggled to make up my mind since they’re so different to each other and therefore hard to compare.

Where Rosemary’s Baby is about a creepy, increasing suspension, The Exorcist is about shock and terror. Both managed to scare me, but also gave me a few involuntary laughs. Both look great, both are well crafted, both have good actors.

Usually I prefer psychology to gore in horror movies, which should give Rosemary’s baby an advantage. However, while it’s a close call I’ll go for The Exorcist.

The tipping point? Max von Sydow, who not only is a fellow Swede, but also one of my favourite actors.

I asked myself which of the two movies I’d rather watch again and came to the conclusion that it would be The Exorcist, since it would give me the chance to see von Sydow again.

However I’d firmly say no thank you to watching it 200 times. Mark Kermode may be a good film critic, but he clearly IS a bit nutty.

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, US, 1973) My rating: 4/5

At last I got a proper view of the legendary actress and not just a glimpse from a news magazine.  Elisabeth Taylor. I can’t believe it took me so many years to see one of her movies and realize that she wasn’t just gossip fodder. She was also quite a fantastic actor.

Until last week I had a somewhat twisted impression of her. Basically all I knew was what I had learned through a bunch of women’s magazines from the 60s. In the absence of TV, computers and mobiles, they were the only entertainment provided in the cottage in the mountains where I spent many summers as a child.

We had three activities to alter in front of the fireplace: playing cards, reading novels (restarting the Foundation trilogy again as soon as I had finished it) and looking in those old papers, a leftover from a previous owner of the cottage who was a dentist and had brought them from his waiting room as soon as the ladies where done with them.

As far as I can recall, apart from gossip about the royal families of Europe, most of the articles were about either Elisabeth Taylor or about the Kennedy family. I suppose they were royalties too, of the US sort.

What I knew
If you had asked me about what I thought of Elisabeth Taylor as an actress, I would have shrugged, putting up a face of embarrassment.

“Well, you know… She did all those BIG movies you know, from the time when everything was supposed to be huge and taking place in history. Cleopatra, that was she, wasn’t it? Not quite the kind of movies I watch you know….  She seemed to be unhappy and married and divorced and married again, sometimes with the same guy. They had an on-off-relationship didn’t they? And was there some alcohol problem as well? But the quality of her acting? To be completely honest: I have no idea. I can’t remember seeing her in a single movie. I might have unknowingly, but I can’t remember where or what I thought of it.”

And I would have felt like a horrible, horrible film buff.

But now we’ve finally met, and what a meeting it was! She swore at me, she spitted out the most devilish lines, she made faces and raged and behaved in the way you do when you’re drunk as a skunk and genuinely unhappy with yourself, your marriage and life overall. And she was fantastic, about as far as you could come from the soulless but beautiful generic film star I had imagined her to be.

Debut film
The movie that introduced us to each other was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  I hadn’t heard of it until recently, when my mother sent a copy to me, insisting on me to watch it. I met you know about it already; after all it was nominated for no less than 13 Academy awards and it won five big ones. That’s quite something considering it was the debut film of the director Mike Nichols.

It’s based on a play by Edward Albee and you can certainly spot its origins. The theatre vibe is strong,  despite the efforts of the cinematographer to be innovative, bringing a movie feel into it.

The story is about two couples, both with the husband working in the university world. The older couple, played by Elisabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (who also had a real life relationship to Elisabeth, how tickling mustn’t that have been as the movie came out?), invites the younger to their home a late night. Discussions and incidents will follow.

At the start Taylor’s and Burton’s characters are already pretty drunk and as the night progresses, they get increasingly poisoned, not only by alcohol, but also by the harsh words they say to each other.

Non-stop fighting
The movie runs for a little more than two hours, and most of it consists of non-stop fighting, mostly with words.

Like this:

“George: You can sit around with the gin running out of your mouth; you can humiliate me; you can tear me to pieces all night, that’s perfectly okay, that’s all right.

Martha: You can stand it!

George: I cannot stand it!

Martha: You can stand it, you married me for it!”

Or this:

“George: You’re a monster – You are.

Martha: I’m loud and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody’s got to, but I am not a monster. I’m not.

George: You’re a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden…

Martha: SNAP! It went SNAP! I’m not gonna try to get through to you any more. There was a second back there, yeah, there was a second, just a second when I could have gotten through to you, when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it’s past, and I’m not gonna try.”

Or this:

“Martha: I looked at you tonight and you weren’t there… And I’m gonna howl it out, and I’m not gonna give a damn what I do and I’m gonna make the biggest god-damn explosion you’ve ever heard.

George: Try and I’ll beat you at your own game.

Martha: Is that a threat George, huh?

George: It’s a threat, Martha.

Martha: You’re gonna get it, baby.

George: Be careful Martha. I’ll rip you to pieces.

Martha: You’re not man enough. You haven’t the guts.

George: Total war.

Martha: Total.”

It’s just a few samples, but I think you get it.

Shocking in the 60s
So what did I make of this movie? Well, it’s definitely not as shocking as it was once upon a time. Back in the days, the rough language and the explicit sexual references created a lot of debate. The production company advised anyone under 18 not to watch it unless accompanied by a parent. This movie also became igniting spark which led to the development of the current rating system in US.

45 years later the content isn’t something you’d consider protecting younger theatre visitors from watching because it could be harmful to them.

But on the other hand I don’t think a young audience would like it particularly much. The movie is about experiences, thoughts, emotions and layers within a 20 year old marriage, things that I imagine are hard to relate to for a teenager.

George’s and Martha’s power games feel quite modern. They could easily take place in more recent movie.

One parallel that I got to think of was Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy from this year. Both movies show a couple engaged in a conversation. And in both movies you realize after a while that things might not be the way they appear to be. It’s a case of tromp d’oeil.

However the take is very different. Where Certified Copy is distanced, cool and intellectual, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf goes under the skin with its dirt, heart blood and raw emotions. If I made a top list of films that mostly consists of a couple arguing with each other, portraying a dysfunctional marriage, this one would certainly take a spot on it.

And I’m glad that I finally met Elisabeth Taylor. She deserves to be famous for more than just her love affairs.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, US, 1966)  My rating: 4/5

Today I’m going to talk about movie endings I love. Most of them are happy, a few are miserable, others ambiguous, but all of them felt just “right”. They brought the movie at halt exactly where it should, like a figure skater landing a perfect final quadruple jump and then halts, ready to receive the love of the audience.

I will make an effort not to go into too many details, but if you’re very spoiler sensitive and want to know as little as possible of all movies you see, consider yourself warned. If you go on, tread carefully and don’t read about the movies you haven’t watched yet.

Lord of the Rings
I came to think of movie endings as I wrote about The Ides of March the other day. I liked the final scene so much that it bumped up my rating of the entire movie and this made me realize how important it is that a movie end on a high note. My memory is only that good, so the last impression is often what will linger in my mind as I walk home from the theatre it’s also what I’ll take with me from the film in the long run.

My preferred movie ending is bittersweet. I’m a sucker for that perfect blend of sadness and joy, loss and gain, grief and hope. The twilight zone.

A good example of this is my favourite scene of the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the heartbreaking farewell in the gray heavens. When I read it I know that the book is about to end and I don’t want it to end but it has to and I don’t want them to go but they must and why does the world need to change and Sam, Sam, you have to go home, and look, there’s your wife and kids and the world we live in isn’t such a bad place after all…

It never fails me. It always makes me cry. Even as much as thinking about it as I’m writing this post brings tears into my eyes.

Endings of 2011
But let’s leave the literature and move along to the world of films.

I’ve seen several movies this year with memorable endings. My number one by far is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. The final image, wasn’t unexpected, but yet somehow shockingly beautiful and painful at the same time. It will go right into my list of best movie endings ever.

Another favourite was the final image from Of Gods and Men.  The movie is based on true events, about a group of French monks who died in Algeria in 1996 when they refused to evacuate their monastery when their life was put at danger. Their destiny is known from the beginning, but the movie doesn’t end with an execution as you could expect, but in a more subtle way as we see them disappearing in a snowy landscape.

15 great final scenes
And now it’s time to go further back into film history. I’m going to share 15 final scenes I truly love with you. It’s not aimed to be a ranking list over the best endings ever made. It’s just some movie endings I love. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe not. We’ll soon find out!

The Big Blue
Here is something as weird as a movie with two endings, aiming for different audiences. Both show a man who is swimming after a dolphin. But in one case he’s swimming on the surface and in the other deep down in the sea, which makes quite a bit of a difference for the interpretation. One was for Europe, the other one for US. I am a European, that’s for sure.

Billy Elliot
It can easily feel a bit too cheap and cheesy when a movie ends with a sudden jump into the future to see “what happened afterwards” . While I loved Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2, the final scene was a bit underwhelming. The aging of the young actors was so unconvincing that the audience burst into laughter. (The same ending in book form actually didn’t bug me at all.)

Billy Elliot has a similar jump into the future where we get see how all turned out in the end for the protagonist. But as opposed to with HP they’ve used a different actor and it works better. Whenever I hear the lead motive of Swan Lake, it’s not Natalie Portman that comes into my mind. It’s Billy.

E.T.
Some people don’t like sentimentality on the movie screen. I bet they’re the same ones who claim they don’t like candy. I’m not ashamed to say that I love both. This is the sweetest end I know of. I just need to make sure to have a paper towel at hands, to wipe of the sugar and the tears in equal amounts.

Groundhog Day
Could you ever believe that seeing an alarm clock to off in the morning could be that exciting and exhilarating?

Inception
Will it fall? Or won’t it? Didn’t I see it stagger a little? Was it a dream? Or wasn’t it? If there ever was an ambiguous end, open for interpretations it was this one. I know there were answers given in interviews afterwards. But I still love the image of the spinning toy. It certainly gave some food for thought and discussion on our way home from the theatre.

It’s a Wonderful Life
There’s a sugar warning for this one on par with E.T. But who cares? If I ever start to doubt my reason for existence, this is where to go to get medication.

Life of Brian
I wanted to include a movie that ends with a musical number on my list and this is probably my favourite. It’s catchy and it never fails to cheer me up.

Life’s a piece of shit
When you look at it
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show
Keep ‘em laughing as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.
Always look on the bright side of life

Yep.

Lost in Translation
What does Bill Murray whisper in the ear of Scarlett Johansen? I don’t want need to know. The melancholy and unanswered questions hit the right spot for me.

Love Actually
Of course it needed to end on the airport. A romantic comedy requires an airport scene and what better place could you choose to knit together all the storylines? What I love most about this scene is how it pans out to embrace not only the characters we’ve been following, but all the people at the airport and eventually mankind. Whenever I’m at an airport I think of Love Actually. Of meetings and separation, of love that is or could have been. It makes me equally happy and unhappy.

Match Point
Match Point ends pretty much like Inception. You stare at an item wondering not if it will fall, but where, but this time we get an answer. I love how it. It ties the entire movie into one elegant package, beautifully connecting with the beginning. Allen knows how not to drop the ball.

Never Let Me Go
An empty field, a piece of plastic or paper stuck at a barbed wire blowing in the wind. Never did I see a more gripping image of how fragile and volatile a life is in the end. It’s the perfect ending of a thoroughly saddening movie.

The Truman show
A man walks through a door. And it makes the world. Sometimes the simplest is the best.

Together
The combination of football, snow and Abba is so irresistible that even I want to throw my grownup dignity and join the party.

12 Monkeys
And so it begins. Or ends.  It depends on how you see it and it’s as beautiful as it’s sad.

2001 – A Space Odyssey
I’m not sure I fully understand everything about what was going on with at the alien place and where the space baby comes from. But I understand the language of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Bom bom bom bom bom bom. It’s space worthy.

The End
And speaking of ends, that’s where we have arrived in this post. I’m afraid I have no beautiful quadruple jump  to treat you with, so I’ll leave you with a whimper rather than with a bang. But if you agree or disagree about my choices or if you have some favorite endings you’d like to share, we can always talk about it over a drink in the comment section.

Cheers!

Whatever I know about American politics, I’ve learned from The West Wing.

I was a dedicated follower for years. I cherished every witty exchange in the corridors, I secretly imagined myself in the place of C.J. I got goose bumps and my eyes flooded with national pride whenever President Bartlet decided to made one his Big Speeches, and for a moment I forgot completely that I’m not an American Citizen. If someone had asked me to sign up as a campaign volunteer, I would have agreed in an eye blink.

Admittedly the US election system is still a bit of a mystery to me, with its intricate labyrinth of nominations and voting in several steps. But this doesn’t prevent me from feeling oddly at home in movies that take place in that political environment. After all the time I’ve spent stalking the imagined administration in the White House, I’m as good as a staff member myself.

For good and for bad The West Wing has left an imprint on me that I can’t completely disregard of, even if I should in the name of fairness. Any other effort to depicture political campaign making from a behind-the-curtains point of view will inevitably be compared to it. Is the dialogue as entertaining, are the strategy makers as cunning, are the ethical dilemmas as engaging, do I care enough to want to be a part of that world? Can they convey the struggle to balance ideals with the harsh reality in an interesting way?

The most recent candidate to be matched against The West Wing was George Clooney’s political thriller The Ides of March. This is a coming-of-age story about the assisting manager in the campaign for a Democratic candidate in the primary election inOhio. As the game between the opposing camps gets dirtier and his position is put at stake, we see him transform from a fairly idealistic (although not flawless) good guy into a shark.

So how well does it make in a comparison?

Well, as of actors I have very little to complain about. The line-up is great. George Clooney is no Bartlet, but he does have an aura that fits well for a coming president. Paul Giamotti and Philip Seymour Hoffman are fine in their roles as sharp fanged veteran campaign leaders.

The leading character is played by Ryan Gosling. Yes, that guy – again. The thing with him is that he’s at his best when he’s given the opportunity to remain silent, talking with his eyes rather than delivering regular lines. He was perfect for Drive. This role doesn’t suit him quite as well, but he’s doing fine. However I can’t help fearing that we’ll see a backlash eventually if he keeps appearing in movies at this rate. As much as I’m a Gosling fan, variation is nice.

But good actors isn’t enough to make it one of my favourite movies for this year. While it’s pretty polished and elegant on the whole, there’s something in the plot that doesn’t convince me.

I can’t talk about it in detail without giving away spoilers, but for instance I was a bit wondering at the event that initiates the whole story: Gosling meeting up with a campaign worker from the opposite team. Would that really be such a big deal?

I also had some issues with the pacing. I’m probably too influenced by the West Wing pace, but it felt really slow to begin with. And then when the action finally starts for real, with its twist and turns, it’s a firework that misfires and everything takes off at the same time. There’s very little room to fully understand what happened or to dwell on what it meant to Gosling’s character – what motivated him to act the way he did and what he thought and felt about the whole thing.

I loved the ending: open for interpretation, the camera resting on Gosling’s face as he’s walking through shadow and light. That shot is also what I’ll bring with me from this movie and which eventually bumped it up from a 3 to a 4 in my rating.

As for the initial question: yes, even the conversation is far from as entertaining, it’s probably on par with one of the best double episodes of The West Wing. But it sure doesn’t beat it.

The Ides of March (George Clooney, US, 2011) My rating: 4/5

So here’s a question: How much can the performance of one single actor affect how you feel about a movie? Can one bad apple drag down an entire film?

After watching A Dangerous Method by David Cronenberg, I’m leaning towards: “yes, it can”.

The film is based on a true story and tells about the first stumbling steps of psychoanalysis as a method to deal with mental illness and about the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, which grew increasingly worse over the years. The third main character is Sabina Spielrein, who comes to Jung as a patient, gets better by treatment, studies to become a psychiatrist herself, and for a while becomes a mistress of Jung.

Ridiculously overplayed
This would have been a pretty average, thoroughly made costume drama – surely historically correct, but maybe a tad boring and superficial – if it wasn’t for Keira Knightley in the role Ms Spielrein.

Her interpretation of what a mental patient looks like is so ridiculously overplayed that it gets an air of comedy.

You’re not supposed to giggle at serious matters like this, breaking the immersion for everyone else in the salon, and I didn’t. I swear, I did not (as little as I text messaged or munched on crunchy popcorn.)

But I really had to make an effort to keep the laughter inside me as I watched her push out her lower jaw yet another few inches. It looked so completely hilarious and a question came up in my head: I wonder if there had been some sort of CGI or other manipulation done to give her that weird, drawn out appearance?

I have to admit that I don’t know what a lunatic, psychotic person looks like in reality. I’ve never seen someone in that state of mind. But I honestly doubt that Keira Knightley has either. Rather than being pulled into the movie, believing that the woman I saw in front of me was Sabina Spielrein, I thought to myself: “So this is how Keira thinks that a crazy person looks like”.

The worst “raging like a crazy woman” scenes take place in the beginning. As it develops, Sabina gets a bit better. But instead of the craziness we get kinky sex, which also left me a bit baffled. I suppose some people will get a kick out of seeing Michael Fassbender spanking Keira Knightley dressed up in a corset, but frankly it neither looks hot, nor convincing. There’s no build-up, there’s no depth to the characters, nothing that explains to me why they end up in this situation or what’s going on in their minds. It’s almost as if those scenes were put into the movie as a tickling piece of decoration.

The positives
So isn’t there anything good to say about this film? We’re talking about Cronenberg here, a respected director as far as I know of.

Well, as I said, the costumes and settings are fine. And I generally like the concept, the idea to make a movie about the lives of Freud and Jung. It feels fairly fresh and interesting, worth some further exploration. Especially Freud is the one I’d like to learn more about. We get hints about the difficulties he faced as he introduced the psychoanalysis, one of them the fact that he was a Jew in a time when hostility against Jews was growing.

More time for Freud would also have given Viggo Mortensen more time on screen, which would be a good thing. He’s as wonderful as Knightley is awful. But unfortunately that isn’t enough to save A Dangerous Method from my sincere ridicule.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011) My rating: 2,5/5

About 30 minutes into Drive I knew I had made a mistake.

What had I been thinking, bringing a corridor neighbor from my work, the middle-aged secretary of the board, who hadn’t been to a theatres for years?

I saw her curled up in a fetal position, hands firmly covering her face. When the movie was over she turned to me and giggled in what obvious was a shock reaction.

“Well now you could perhaps tell me what happened?”

Searching for a companion
It was greed that had led us there. I don’t do downloads, which makes me a frequent cinema visitor. Unlike the main character in Up in the Air I don’t have a full deck of top level bonus cards for loyal customers. But I have one gold level card, and that is for movies. Because of this I sometimes get hold of free prescreening tickets, and this was one of those occasions. I had fetched two like I always do, assuming that I’d find someone among family and friends who would like to come with me. This turned out to not be so easy though, people being busy this night or just not having an interest for Drive.

As I got closer and closer to the showing my desperation increased. The idea of not using this ticket for anything but as a place to put my jacket felt like a waste. If you have a ticket for what you think is a good movie – even one that you haven’t paid for it – it’s your duty to make use of it.

I had almost given up when I noticed that the board secretary was working late. Perhaps she could be a candidate? After all we used to talk about things such as opera, art exhibitions and ballet. At least she had showed a general interest for culture and arts. That should be enough, surely?

I introduced the movie to her, stressing how much claim it had gotten by the critics and that the director had won a prize at Cannes. This certainly wasn’t a dozen-movie. And the leading actor was supposed to be so handsome! I also mentioned that it was known to be violent though, as a disclaimer, just to make sure.

She didn’t seem to object too badly. “As long as it’s exciting”. Thrillers should be that. Action and stuff”.

I assured her that she’d get “action and stuff” and so we went and found ourselves being the only middle-aged women in a salon packed with 15-20 year old boys.

Tipping over
It began smoothly, with a superbly staged cat-and-rat-style car chase. I’m usually not a fan of car chases; most of the time they mostly serve as fillers and I can’t wait for them to end. But this one was something completely different. Elegant, neat and tense at the same time. I had the feeling I was going to like this.

The movie went on for a while, where got to know a little bit more about how Ryan Gosling’s tooth picker munching stuntman and car mechanic lead his life and we could even enjoy a little bit of budding romance between him and his neighbor. It wasn’t particularly disturbing or violent, but I held my breath because I suspected that those warnings about a violent content had been warranted.

And I was right. More or less from one moment to the other, the movie tipped over and suddenly there was brain substance all over the screen and we got to know exactly how it sounds when someone is jumping on a human head until it collapses.

The secretary gasped and hid in her chair. And I felt how the responsibility started to weigh on my shoulders.

Usually I’d label myself as “squishy”, feeling uneasy if someone as much as slaps another person in the face. But this time I needed to keep my fingers away from my eyes as much as possible. After all someone needed to see what happened so that she could tell the other one about it afterwards and there was no doubt about that this person needed to me.

So I told myself that my sensitivity was just something I imagined. I was already doing the ride and I could as well try to enjoy it.

Did this act of self suggestion work? Well, fairly well. I managed to keep my hands under control and watch most of it, and I could share details with the secretary afterwards such as “I and then he took a hammer and a nail and threatened to hammer it into the other guys head” (even if I’m unsure of if that was any helpful to be honest.)

My rating
So I got through it, but what did I make of it? Well, there are two things that keep it from getting a 5/5 rating from me. One is – surprise, surprise – the excessive violence. While I understand why it’s there, I wonder if it still wouldn’t have been possible to tune it down a little. Just a tiny little bit. I don’t think it would have lost anything. You don’t need to show everything straight on in the picture to make us “get” what is happening. We see a brilliant example of this: a fight scene that is only displayed through the shadows on the ground. It’s a beautiful, elegant and efficient solution. A little bit more of that creative thinking maybe could have saved us a little bit of brain substance.

My second minor quibble is about one of the supportive actors, Ron Perlman, whose gangster felt a little bit over the top to me. But it’s really just a minor thing and I bet there are many who would disagree with me.

Drive is one of the best films I’ve seen in a theatre this year. Violent or not, it’s so incredibly well crafted. The story isn’t original, but the execution is, and that was what I told the theatre staff who was standing outside the cinema, asking us about what we thought of it.

The next morning I met my colleague at the coffee machine and I looked anxiously at her face for a sign. Had she dreamed nightmares all the night? Had I caused her such a trauma that she’d never go to the movies again? Was she angry with me? But I needn’t have feared.

Her eyes were excited as she smiled to me.

“Wow, that movie we watched last night… it was really… quite something! So different! I’ve never seen anything like it before!”

“Me neither”, I answered, truthfully.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, US, 2011) My rating: 4,5/5

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”

Run Lola Run begins with a quote by TS Eliot. It’s a quote that I’ve seen around quite a bit, but so what? It fits. And what follows after it is certainly not like anything else I’ve ever seen on a screen.

This is a film in the genre “Life is full of choices and crossroads. Depending on decisions you make and pure luck (or lack of thereof) your life can take a lot of different courses. And here we explore them and show them to you.” It’s a genre I like quite a bit, as evident by my previous praise for Mr Nobody.

The story is simple and takes place in a 20 minute frame. Lola get’s a telephone call from her boyfriend Manni He’s calling her from a telephone booth and he’s in an emergency. He needs to get hold of 100 000 mark in a hurry to be delivered to his criminal boss. If not something “terrible” is going to happen. Lola tells him to wait where he is and starts running while trying to find up a way to get the money for him. The story is repeated three times, with slightly changed circumstances by chance and by choices with different outcomes as a result.

But it’s not the story that makes this movie truly original. It’s the style, which is a bit of crossover between a music video and a computer game, which turns out to be a lot better and more enjoyable than it sounds.

It might be the pumping, hypnotizing techno music in the background that causes it, but whatever the reason was: this movie left me so happy, so ecstatic, so energized and giggly that I don’t know what I possibly could write to convey the feeling.

I’ve never used any stronger drug than alcohol and coffee, but I figure that my experience resemble to what it’s like to be on a high of something very illegal.

I think I’ve fallen in love. How else could I explain that I couldn’t resist the urge to watch it a second time only a few days after my first viewing? Normally the idea to do so wouldn’t even cross my mind! As a matter of fact I rarely watch movies a second time, even not after several years, since my list of movies-I-want-to-see is so long anyway. I’ll never get through it before I die and considering how limited my time is, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of it on repetition.

I didn’t only fall in love with Run Lola Run; I think I also am developing a crush on its creator, the German director Tom Tykwer. Earlier this year I watched his latest movie, 3, which is a somewhat unconventional love story about a ménage à trois – a middle aged couple who unknowing of each other have a love affair with someone outside of their marriage. What they don’t know is that they’re seeing the same man.

3 isn’t as energetic as Run Lola Run, but it’s stylish and beautifully made and with a little bit more fleshed out characters, which to be honest is something that Run Lola Run lacks. Not that it matters since it’s not that kind of movie.

It’s a lucky pill, but without the negative side effects.

Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt, Tom Tykwer, GE, 1998) My rating: 4,5/5