Skriptdoktoring in der Filmklasse des Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz. Die Größe des Entwurfsbereichs ist leider umgekehrt proportional zum momentanen Budget des allerdings sehr vielversprechenden Projekts… Akademion.

My flickr photostream – meine flickr-Bilder

Of course, those allegedly interested in midwifing the project, Bob and Harvey Weinstein as well as Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, aren’t just anyone. But since the only successful Hollywood remakes of a European films I can think of off the top of my head were “Nikita”, “True Lies”, and “Three men and a baby” – all of which weren’t exactly rooted in French culture, a remake of “The Life of Others”, seems like a natural candidate for a “lost in translation”-style disaster. I’m saying this inspite of my sympathy for every project exposing the danger of the eavesdropping culture that is slowly being established in the US as well as in Europe.

Maybe it was that what Steven Spielberg meant, when he, according to Donnersmarck’s own words, congratulated him after the ceremony by saying – “You’ll never get over this.”

Es tut sich was im Mainzer Kino! Drei Jahre nach der Premiere ihres erfolgreichen Kultstreifens „CARNE VALE – Fastnacht der toten Seelen“ (DVD – Kurtsfilme.de) stellen die Mainzer Filmemacher Sebastian Linke und Daniel Stümpfig ihre jüngsten Werke erneut in der Gutenbergstadt der Öffentlichkeit vor. Die Filme „PANDEMIA“ (Stümpfig) und „PILÙ oder das andereLeben“ (Linke) werden am 2. Februar 2007 um 20 Uhr in der Kultur-Kasematte in Mainz mit anschließender Premierenfeier uraufgeführt.

Zwei außergewöhnliche Kurzfilme mit einer Gesamtlänge von 50 Minuten und anschließender Premierenfeier – zu erleben am 2. Februar um 20 Uhr in der Kultur-Kasematte (Zitadellenweg 1, 55131 Mainz), der Eintritt kostet drei Euro. Die Regisseure und ihre Teams sind anwesend und freuen sich, dem Publikum und Vertretern der Presse Rede und Antwort zu stehen.

Letzteres gilt selbstverständlich auch für mich. Ein paar Worte zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Titelmusik habe ich an dieser Stelle ja bereits vor einigen Tagen geschrieben. Alles andere dann vor Ort…

“Die Grundidee ist äußerst simpel. Patienten erkennen sich und ihre persönliche Situation in bestimmten Filmszenen wieder, können danach besser ihre Gefühle beschreiben oder über ihre Probleme reden. Außerdem können ausgewählte Filme eingesetzt werden in Fällen von beispielsweise Antriebslosigkeit, zur Trauerarbeit, bei Ehekrisen, ja, fast in jeder schwierigen Lebenssituation.

Andererseits… die in dem Artikel erwähnte Webseite der amerikanischen Film-Therapeutin Birgit Wolz, Cinematherapy.com, führt im Bereich romantic love “Das Schweigen der Lämmer” auf. Zum Thema Vertrauen… naja. Aber im Bereich romantische Liebe? Psychologen haben da wohl doch ein wenig andere Vorstellungen als unsereins.

Still, on balance, I’d say the remake is better than the original, which is quite unusual. Watch it now, if you’re in Germany, understand German, and receive BR3 (31/10/05, Bayerisches Fernsehen, 23:05).

Still, this is one too see, if only to once more ponder about the fact that the better German films are recently usually set in minority or immigrant communities, cover (at least partly) minority or immigrant subjects. Clearly, that’s aided by the immigrant connection’s initial success (that’s how film subsidies work in Germany), and it indicates that “their” themes of life are also of majority interest. But it begs the question if non-minority, non-immigrant Germans have no more stories to tell that are sufficiently interesting to make it on the silver screen…

Oscar-winning German director Volker Schlöndorff discusses his latest movie “Der Neunte Tag” (The Ninth Day) at the FilMZ movie festival in Mainz.

Wolfgang Thierse, President of the German Bundestag made it clear that it will indeed be impossible to shoot some action scenes for the next Tom Cruise star vehicle, Mission Impossible 3, in the glass dome of the Bundestag. After Cruise had visited the dome in April, the studio’s location manager had asked for permission to shoot there but was turned down because of concerns regarding the “dignity” of Parliament.

Dignity? On which planet do Mr Thierse and his advisors live (although I have a hunch this was Thierse’s decision. It sounds just like him…)? Turning down such a huge PR opportunity for German Democracy with the alleged “dignity” of the Bundestag is beyond me. What’s undignified about visualing the new Reichstag, a symbol of German Democracy, to a billion people, many of whom will probably have only seen images of the building with Hitler or the Kaiser parading in front of it. What’s undignified about raising people’s interest in Berlin? What’s undignified about shooting a movie? It’s certainly inconvenient, but I am rather sure overlapping schedules were not a fundamental problem. Sure, most films set in, say, The White House, aren’t actually shot there – but does that matter for the “dignity of the institution”? Besides, what was more undignified – Denzel Washington’s “Murder at 1600″ or the questionable election procedures and results in Florida?

To be at least a little balanced here, I haven’t read the screenplay – and if I had, I would not tell you for free. So maybe it is indeed objectionable with respect to some concept of dignity. But I don’t think so. Quite honestly, I have a feeling the decision to keep Cruise out of the Bundestag is telling more about the way representative Democrcacy is understood by senior German politicians – including Wolfgang Thierse – than anything else. Must dignity always mean distance? Remember cosy Bonn? And would Thierse have declined the request to use the dome for a Yo-Yo Ma documentary? A video for Herbert Groenemeyer? I’m sure there’s a line somewhere, but does it exclude action movies?

The rejection is a little reminiscent of the extremely embarrassing debate preceding Christo and Jean Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995, which was later hailed as impressive art and an opportunity for Germans to re-embrace the Reichstag building as a cornerstone of their Democracy.

But at least some politicians seem to have learned this lesson. Walter Momper, former Mayor of Berlin, and currently President of Berlin’s state Parliament has offered his chamber as an alternative to the producers. His bid might be successful as the film will be shot in the Babelsberg studios just outside Berlin, where – suddenly – more and more “Hollywood” movies are being shot – predominantly because studios in Los Angeles are far more expensive.

Mr Momper therefore rightly grasped the opportunity to benefit from supporting this kind of “reverse outsourcing” without undignified excuses. But then, he doesn’t have a dome…

“Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told BBC News Online earlier this year that digital piracy could become “debilitating” for the industry.

‘Digital piracy has become a real menace,’ he said. Despite the availability of pirate copies, The Matrix Reloaded has made more than $363.5m at the box office worldwide so far.“

Quote 2: Brad DeLong, Speculative Microecomomics For Tomorrow’s Economy, draft, November 14, 1999 -

“The ongoing revolution in data processing and data communications technology may well be starting to undermine those basic features of property and exchange that make the invisible hand a powerful social mechanism for organizing production and distribution. The case for the market system has always rested on three implicit pillars, three features of the way that property rights and exchange worked.

Call the first feature excludability: the ability of sellers to force consumers to become buyers, and thus to pay for whatever goods and services they use.

Call the second feature rivalry: a structure of costs in which two cannot partake as cheaply as one, in which producing enough for two million people to use will cost at least twice as many of society’s resources as producing enough for one million people to use.

Call the third transparency: the ability of individuals to see clearly what they need and what is for sale, so that they truly know just what it is that they wish to buy.

All three of these pillars fit the economy of Adam Smith’s day relatively well. …

But digital data is cheap and easy to copy. … Without the relationship between producer and consumer becomes much more akin to a gift-exchange than a purchase-and-sale relationship. The appropriate paradigm then shifts in the direction of a fund-raising drive for a National Public Radio station. When commodities are not excludable then people simply help themselves. If the user feels like it he or she may make a “pledge” to support the producer. The user sends money to the producer not because it is the only way to gain the power to utilize the product, but out of gratitude and for the sake of reciprocity.

This reciprocity-driven revenue stream may well be large enough that producers cover their costs and earn a healthy profit. Reciprocity is a basic mode of human behavior. People in the large do feel a moral obligation to tip cabdrivers and waiters. People do contribute to National Public Radio. But without excludability the belief that the market economy produces the optimal quantity of any commodity is hard to justify. Other forms of provision–public support funded by taxes that are not voluntary, for example–that had fatal disadvantages vis-a-vis the competitive market when excludability reigned may well deserve reexamination. …

[But t]he market system may well prove to be tougher than its traditional defenders have thought, and to have more subtle and powerful advantages than those that defenders of the invisible hand have usually listed.

“Bowling For Columbine” isn’t a documentary. The film is essentially a sort-of fact based cinematographic, cleverly positioned, political pamphlet. It is a well done, important film – but it is hardly a documentary in the classic sense of that term. It is well worth ciriticising that Moore continually claims it is. But that’s about it.

Moore’s main points are important even if, as the Canadian newspaper Star reports among other points,

“[a]ctor Charlton Heston, the head of the National Rifle Association, did not callously go to Denver 10 days after the shootings simply to proclaim to cheering fellow NRA members that he was going to keep his gun until it is pried ‘from my cold, dead hands.’”

This simply doesn’t matter for the film’s fundamental messages.

Moore claims that there is a much higher (physical, not economic) risk aversion in the US than in Europe which is responsible for a lot of paranoid behavior. I have to say, the highly emotionalised American discourse regarding the dangers of rogue states post 9/11 probably underscores this claim – if you want to see it that way.

Moreover, Moore claims that this higher risk aversion is a consequence of what he claims is the central social cleavage in the US – an unresolved racial conflict based on ritualised and inherited slave owner vs. slave identities. A possible conclusion, which I really cannot really say a lot about. But his claim is – here in the realm of social policy – supported by important allies, as for example this paper by Alesina, Glaeser, and Sacerdote indicates. To them, racial animosity is the principal answer to the question “Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have a European Style Welfare System?”. Charlton Heston somehow made the same point in the film – and, if I remember correctly, that section was not even cut in a particularly distorting manner.

“Bowling For Columbine” is not a scientific elaboration. It is an opinionated, scary, but also entertaining film that expressed some of the fundamental anxieties a non-negligeable part of Americans seems to have with regard to the society they live in as well as an attempt to explain some of the fears the rest of the world recently developed with respect to the former land of unlimited opportunities. And – being cleverly marketed by a director who increasingly presented himself as the bearer of truth in a time when people readily swallowed everything that would “verify” their gut felt opposition to the Texan way of life – the film was turned into a huge commercial success.

Again. It is an important film. It is film whose message deserves to be taken seriously. It is a non-fiction film. But is hardly a documentary in the classic sense. Moore deserves criticism for telling the world it is, but again – that’s about it.

Why is that? Well, where the first film was able to intelligently translate the existential questions which we carry around with us – whether we are able and/or willing to actually articulate them (like these scholars do) is an entirely different issue – to the digital age and combine that with a stunning visualisation, the second part sometimes gave me the impression of having been written around the visual effects, with additional elements from a motley collection of mytholgies diluting the initial brilliance of the story – I’m probably not ruining anything for those who haven’t yet seen it with these examples – the “ghosts” and “vampires” (remnant’s from an earlier, seemingly “medieval” version of the Matrix), the reanimation scene.

Of course, in the Matrix, everything imaginable is possible. But it does come at a price: the Matrix overloads a little.

But then again, maybe my criticism is a little overloaded, too. Maybe I am a victim of overloaded expectations. Maybe some lack of clarity is intended, and indeed necessary for a second part of a trilogy. And maybe the Wachowski brothers will be able to satisfactorily dissolve the overloaded web they spun in this part in “The Matrix Revolutions.”

All I know for sure is I have to wait another six months to find out. And that is not making me happy.

But what do you reply once the person you talk to starts to explain to you that the real reason for the Nazi dictatorship was alien control? I am not entirely certain about the details of her argument due to linguistic difficulties. But the gist of it was that she had read about it in “a Japanese book“.

So what do you do? Well, I can tell you what I did: I changed the subject to something tastier and far less problematic with a slightly irritated – “anyway… so where do you get your Sushi here?”

Happy about my newly acquired knowledge about great Japanese restaurants in the area, I almost forgot about the irritating incident. But when I later checked my email, I could not resist to google for “Nazi Ufo”. The result was unbelievable. You should try that yourself.

The search yielded a countless amount of webpages determined to uncover and explain the “real” reality, as if we were all living in a “Matrix” [I am not going to discuss the ontological possibility this could actually be the case or any possible ethymological implications of such a possiblity. For our mind's sake, let's just assume it's not the case.]. I am simply stunned how so many apparently at least modestly intelligent people are eager to waste their intellectual energy on blatantly nonsensical conspiracy theories.

Now you might reply that conspiracy theories can be valuable – some sort of intellectual modelling, an intelligent fictional exercise trying to identify fundamental causes behind the events that shape the world in our framed perception – even though evidently wrong, most of the times. But the important part of the last argument is intelligent – unintelligent conspiracy theories simply are pulp fiction. Moreover, unintelligent conspiracy theories are plainly dangerous, because they appear to be no longer checks and balances to a possibly framed official version of history but ot have become a “Matrix” themselves. Just clicking on some links on the first page of google hits I found the following extraordinary example about German moon bases in 1942. In case you don’t bother to click on the link above, here is a remarkable extract from that page:

“In my extensive research of dissident American theories about the physical conditions on the Moon I have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon, and that man does not need a space suit to walk on the Moon. A pair of jeans, a pullover and sneakers are just about enough. Everything NASA has told the world about the Mood is a lie and it was done to keep the exclusivity of the club from joinings by the third world countries. All these physical conditions make it a lot more easier to build a Moon base.”

No way to argue with that, I know.

And as you remember, I did change the subject when the Japanese girl started to explain the intricacies of the Nazi-Alien connection (which seems to be at the core of an astounding amount of conspiracies on the web). But the scary thing about her was that she did not seem to be a Mulder-like UFO freak, who “wants to believe”. The scary thing was that she seemed to quote not from a mailing list or web site run by “dissident scientists” but from an apparently accepted Japanese source.

It’s a strange world out there.

The things in find most remarkable in this film? Firstly, the car chasing scene in Paris. It’s hilarious. They jump from one end of the city to the other within seconds. I guess that’s what “beaming chases” will look like in the future. Secondly, the French, especially, the French police get a decent amount of bashing for no apparent reason. Finally, the CIA, their technological abilities as well as their organisational imperfections, are portrayed in a scary way.

Summary: Two hours of decent entertainment. IMDB rating 7.5/10, my rating: 6.5/10. That, as well, is quite an achievement for an action film.

Has anyone ever heard of vampire style bad-guy aliens able to fly zillions of miles in warp-speed-vehicles with the intention to kill humanity only to give up and fly another zillion of miles back home because they could not manage to enter a room protected by wooden boards nailed to the door? Can anyone believe that mind reading aliens in possession of mind blowing technology that would, according to the film, change everything ever written in (human) science books – but who are, unfortunately, lethally allergic to water – could actually be stupid enough to go on a largescale manhunt on a planet that largely consists of water without ever thinking about how to protect themselves? I’ll stop here, gentle readers, for your and my brain’s sake.

It’s a bad, bad film. And it’s even worse because of all the religious allusions trying to tell the viewer that God has accorded humanity a special status even with respect to the rest of the universe. Everything is taken care of in a big masterplan in which we are lucky enough to be on the right side. As long as we believe.

When Mel’s wife dies in a car accident she utters strange last words. Because of her early death, Mel loses his faith, quits his position as reverend and becomes a farmer only to discover the extraterrestrial signs in his field (which, as a footnote, the aliens use as navigational devices, because their mind blowing technology is unable to provide sufficient electronic landing information). Of course, neither his wife’s death nor her last words, nor his son’s asthma, nor his daughter’s eating disorder (she puts half-full glasses of water everywhere), nor his brother’s talent to play baseball are actually random – they’re the most important pieces in the puzzle leading to the defeat of the last alien vampire, gracefully left behind by his fellow invaders to die and thus help end the film. After his dead wife’s last words prove to be the clue to killing this last stupid alien, Mel can rediscovers his faith and resume his position as a reverend.

So what is the gist of the film, for those of you who will wisely decide not to see it. The truth is I don’t know: If this was supposed to be a film about the special bond between humanity and God then the clearly stated complete predetermination of events does not make any sense. Predetermination cannot create a bond, not even dependence. It reduces agents to puppets of their principal in any context.

If this was supposed to be a film about a lonely widower fighting alien vampires to protect his family, then the religious allusions seem misguided.

And if this was supposed to be a film which wants to scare humanity with the abrogation of free will, then it is helpless. Matrix did a much better job there. It’s a stupid film which does not know what it wants. Not that this would reduce its box office potential, although, in an ideal world, it should.

But that’s just my opinion. And it’s apparently a minority report.

“One human is intelligent, but a bunch of humans are dumb hysterical dangerous animals.”

Note that I retranslated the line from the German version, so I don’t know the original words. Strangely enough, this line has not made it to the memorable ones on imdb.com.