Delicatessen

A French indie from 1991 I remember having seen almost ten years ago. I watched it together with Esther and Martina from my class in the cute little Lichtblick Kino in Prenzlauer Berg after an extended chat and update on everything in the Café St. Oberholz.

The theater is so small and lovely that I feel like describing it a little. The first thing you notice after entering the “Foyer” is its smallness. There’s a counter on the left, a table on the right and a bank covered with a blanked in front of you — who knows what’s underneath the blanket. Left of that is also a little door to the narrow screening room and an even narrower stairwell to the cellar, guarded by a street sign saying “Ende”.

Once we had persuaded the man behind the counter that all of us indeed were students (despite our expired student IDs) we got our tickets and I felt like buying a pack of TUC crackers for as little as 1 €. Then we went in.

After the blue door you walk past the den with the projector, past a black curtain on strings and descend into the theater, a lengthy room with about ten rows with four seats each. I found out that the second row from the front is the best, in the last row you should watch the movie on your cell phone because of its comparatively big screen. The walls are in a light blue with square-shaped lights in different colors scattered randomly along them. Right before the screen waits an old dusty upright piano to be played on along to a silent movie. Further, as Esther told us, you can hear the phone ringing in the apartment above the theater, or if somebody goes into the kitchen for a snack; still I didn’t experience any such nuisances when I was there. So all in all it is a charming little cinema with a lot of character and patina.

Then the movie starts. No commercials, no trailers, no nothing — just the film. That’s how it should be!

Rant

Delicatessen is a great piece of very entertaining art until the third act. The setting is placed well and all the characters are set up with so much love and detail, have their motivations and are entwined masterfully until the third act. Then, little by little everything loses substance and motivation and everything falls apart. You can’t tell who’s on whose side and the end is as random as the authors may have felt. My guess is that the three (!) of them (two of them directed the film as well) made a bet who would be the first one to finish the script within one night. I bet that any of you who only watches the first two thirds of the movie will produce a better ending than the filmmakers.

WALL·E

I went to see the film on Tuesday afternoon at 2:40pm so I didn’t expect many people and in total we were five in a big theater, the three children with their dad sitting right behind me, as usual — *sigh*. In fact in any show of the small indie Lichtblick Kino there were more people in the audience…

The first ad was for a xbox 360, the children cheering in my back. That was when I realized that it was going to be a tough time sitting through the children’s ad-reel but it wasn’t as bad as anticipated ¹. It is shocking how receptive the little buggers are to commercials! There was a Ben & Jerry’s 60 second ad for cookie dough and the three children aged about 6 to 12 instantly asked their sorry dad if they could have ice cream after the show. He mumbled something about “it’s not the weather for ice cream today”, hoping the kids would forget about it in 90 minutes.

Another odd thing was the children’s proficiency with upcoming movies. After about three seconds of a new trailer they shouted in unison “Madagascar 2!“, “Ice Age 3!” or “Inkheart!” and were always right. They giggled along at the intended moments of blunt and uninspired slapstick and non-funny jokes. Hmm. It looks like I am getting too old for this. Or I am just a connoisseur when it comes to quality. And boy, alone from watching the trailer I can tell that I hate Madagascar 2 already for its lack of quality and intelligence. But I was waiting in the dark for a Pixar film to start after all and I wouldn’t be disappointed. Still, there are some very questionable movies coming up.

The tradition of the funny Pixar shorts lives on with Presto, that transported the atmosphere of 40′s and 50′s Warner Bros cartoons very well in the digital medium. I already felt my money well spent after this one.

If you want to know some background behind WALL·E, see my report from the fmx/08 where I talked to some folks from Pixar.

There were great little in-joke moments in WALL·E where only I laughed — I wish I had brought somebody along for sharing laughs about the sound WALL·E makes when being fully charged on solar power (listen below), when he reaches 2000 points at Pong! and at some point later in the movie you see a new-generation version of the same game for a second. And listen to the sound of the little cleaning robot: It’s an electric shaver. Or compare the stage where the BnL-CEO talks in the video message with this one. Creepy. And I bet there is way more to discover — can’t wait for the Blu-Ray!

WALL·E fully charged.
Download audio file (mac-startup.mp3)

Rant

The movie was quite good but as somebody with close ties to film-making I have some points to resolve: When you are in the audience then turn your fucking cellphone off for Christ’s sake, even when you’re nearly alone. Because “nearly” does not mean “completely”. The dad behind me received three calls during the film and when he was having the third I advised him to turn off the phone or I would do it. That helped.

Further you should stay during the credits because there usually are a lot of people involved in making a movie and walking out on them is as rude as it is ignorant. Plus you miss some very good illustrative animation at the end of Pixar films. And with WALL·E also some funny pixel animations. So stay until the end. On the other hand it’s your money you throw out of the window…

Burn After Reading

My second film on that Tuesday, again for moderate 4.50 € so I threw in some more cash for some nachos with salsa. One word of advice: If anybody asks you about an extra helping of peperoni just say no otherwise your stomach is screaming “No! Nooo!” all the time.

I was prepared for another shitload of commercials and trailers, but I was not prepared to sitting next to two chatterboxes of middle-aged ladies who were gossiping like crazy during the commercials. Fortunately they turned their voices to a whisper when the movie started.

Funny: Again the ad-reel started of with the xbox 360 commercial and one of the ladies asked the other “So — what is it good for?”, the other replied “It’s for downloading movies”. I lol’d hard on the inside when I heard it and I wonder how the guys and gals who plotted the marketing campaign would react to that.

Another couple of trailers rolled along featuring Till Schweiger’s medieval satire twice, probably in the hope of stirring public interest for a mediocre movie by a not-so-good-actor/director.

Then, finally after 25 minutes of trailers, commercials and chinking bottles in the audience the movie started. And it was a good movie and in English it would’ve been even better. The opening scene is a home run for John Malkovich; Francis McDormand as Linda Litzke has the naïve charm of Marge Gunderson, her role in Fargo, Brad Pitt as dumb fitness trainer is as hilarious as George Clooney’s slightly paranoid role. All in all it is a very Coen movie with protagonists you pity for their lack of luck, a twisted story that doesn’t unravel completely (still satisfactory enough) with probably one of the funniest closing dialogues and a catchy tune for the credits. Stay seated. And if you like movies with people in cars stalking after other people in cars then this is your movie!

Rant

Nothing much to rant about this movie. But I just came home from it. Maybe I’ll develop some deep rooted hatred in the next couple of days, who knows?

Taxi Driver

It was Monday and it was close to 10pm as I realized that I own the DVD for a couple of years but have never seen this famous Scorsese movie. And when I have the chance to watch it on a big screen ² I wouldn’t miss it for the world. So I abandoned my evening in the Café St. Oberholz and took the M1 to the theater. I bought another pack of TUC crackers and seated myself in the second row, right behind a pierced and very indie girl that sat right in front of me and coughed a little throughout the movie. But it was bearable.
During the movie I always caught myself in trying to analyze it like “This was the exposition, cleverly done!” or “So the water stands for Travis’ intentions to ‘wash away the grime’?”. It’s a good movie and it’s a very atmospheric movie. The New York of the 1970′s remembered me a little of today’s Berlin with its charming dirt and worn down sidewalks. But, I have to admit, I didn’t quite understand the movie and I don’t think watching it over and over again will be of any help. Maybe some of you can explain it to me very slow in very easy terms.

Rant

Like Delicatessen it was a subtitled movie which is always better than a dubbed version, still it becomes a little annoying when there are errors in the translation. For example they translated “Libra” as “Leo” which is not a typo but totally wrong.

Are you talking to me?

My conclusion is that one like me should avoid multiplex theaters because it only gives me stuff to rant about, they sell their snacks for prices that couldn’t be higher after a nuclear war and the massive amount of commercials they try to stuff into your head. On the plus side you can order the tickets online and choose your seat in advance (apart from any seat that’s exactly in the middle. They just won’t allow it. Bastards!) and have a very big screen with very good sound.

The small theater has a big bonus in flair and prices. They usually show only subtitled movies so you can listen to the live recordings which I always prefer to dubbed versions. That was also the reason why I welcomed the DVD so much back in the good old 1990′s. The audience is usually just as drunk as in the big theater but remains silent throughout the movie and most of them stay also for the credits. On the downside… well, it’s small and the sound is good but also a little low in volume. And if you miss a film once, you miss it for good.

A downside on both movie theaters is the low temperature that creeps up your trouser legs and into your sweater after half an hour. But in Berlin you have it like this any place you go — for me that’s terrible! The only place warm enough is the bathtub or inside the furnace. When I am back in Austria in two weeks I’ll heat up my apartment until it feels like Honolulu — muhahah!

Finally I had some time this weekend playing the new Alone in the Dark, with the same name as the original from 1992, which was done by Infogrames (now Atari) and taught me how three polygons scare the bejesus out of a nine-year old. Good times… But this new game left me with mixed feelings and an uncomfortable nausea.

one shouldn’t write a review of a game when he hasn’t even finished with the first chapter of a total of eight, but what the hell.

Installing game that’s just shy of occupying 8 gigs on your hard disk took so long that I had enough time to write my one page of this week’s report for the university. When I finally started it, everything looked very promising and the look was great, the atmosphere dense and the voice acting quite good.

The first odd thing was having a key to blink your digital eyes which was necessary because your view kept blurring. And it happened, just as in real life, that when something interesting was about to happen you were busy blinking your eyes, including half a second of refocusing again. Tedious!

The Product Features on Alone in the Dark at Amazon.com read: In-Game movement has been designed to allow players to do almost anything that is physically possible in the real world. A big *LOL* here because in the real world I don’t have any troubles going through a door, facing into the right direction. Don’t get fooled by this buzzline, I wish it was more like Half-Life² mated with F.E.A.R. and spawned this game with a spring-solver for ropes and cloth.

On the plus side the game tries to teach you its interface while you play it, which I always like better than a never ending table with keyboard commands or a useless tutorial-mission. On the down side the game doesn’t discern between first person and third person view when prompting messages like “to spray [Button 0]“. I was using “Button 0″, which turned out to be the left mouse button, over and over again but Edward, the avatar, only kept attacking an invisible enemy with the fire extinguisher before stepping into the fire. Yes, Ed advances a step when he’s swinging furniture. it wasn’t the first time that I fell off a ledge. So to extinguish a fire in Alone in the Dark with “Button 0″ means switching to first person mode and pressing the left mouse button.

That switch between first person and third person is an interesting idea but it acts more as a tool for showing you stuff to interact with by a third person camera on Edward and his surroundings. The camera and the controls react oddly in third person but it is nearly impossible to play only in first person, because the game switches back and forth, swivels the camera around until I feel really nauseous in front of my 24″ HD-screen. Anytime you want to know what you are doing, you switch to 1st person, only to get switched back to very cinematic and very uncontrollable 3rd person.

In once instance you have to fight your first “real” zombie which was so terrible that I quit the game angrily at that point at first: She attacks you while you walk around as if going for a walk, looking for something, anything, to whack her. Until you finally pick up a chair and start to strike back, your almost dead. But if you really succeed at punching the zombie to the ground she’ll get up again after a while! Like fuckin’ Silent Hill 4 ¹! I hate that! The only way to kill her for good, the game tells you, is to drag her numb corpse into some fire. But when you haven’t played that scene over and over again, you don’t know where there’s fire. She comes at you again and so on and so on.

As one reviewer on Amazon.com pointed out: This isn’t a run-and-gun-game, it’s more like a walk-walk-walk-and-then-search-in-a-panic-through-your-inventory-while-fire-is-all-around-you-and-monsters-are-coming-game.

Oh, and the inventory or the way to treat wounds: Atari says its an innovative new system, in practice it’s a bitch in the middle of a fight: Hitting I, selecting your weapon via mouse and then closing the inventory by hitting, get a grip, Î ², that’s an I with a brow (haha!). The only way of producing an Î is by hitting the circumflex ^ first and then the letter I — in the middle of a fight! Gah! Just as bad as letting go of a rope, hitting Alt Gr, the German right Alt key. And if you are wondering: Yes, it means letting go of the mouse for a second — that’s a sin in most modern games (no, text adventures aren’t modern games)!

The graphic is up to today’s standards, sometimes it looks really good, sometimes there’s just a little too much bump-mapping, but I can understand the artists: Once it finally works you want everybody to show how well it does. And occasionally there’s heavy clipping, collision misdetection or some other atmosphere killers.
The in-game cinematics are executed quite well, defocusing, different angles, nice cinematography, but the characters seem so unnatural despite all the efforts taken by the designers with bump-mapping and blend-shaping. They could at least have made their mouth-cavities darker! And don’t get me started on buggy cloth-solvers that kill the atmosphere at an instant.

I haven’t played far yet to tell enough about the story but I don’t like it, when all the time people you just met keep dying in various ways. So far in the story only one or two survived. Out of seven characters!

I would really love to love this game, but after all Half-Life² still is god to me and I haven’t played a game with such a good balance of an interesting story, fun gameplay, intuitive controls and pacing since four years. Maybe a patch will save it all. Or maybe I’ll become so brainwashed while trying to beat that sucker that I really enjoy it. That reminds me: I have to finish F.E.A.R. Fahrenheit and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too…

The Simpsons movie is targeted at a broad audience, from children to blockbuster-buffs to members of the mainstream who consider themselves alternative and “politically concerned” and who probably are vegans too… The movie is totally about US-politics and “the environment”, a cheap attempt at slipping through the door Al Gore had opened during the academy awards.

The Simpsons-movie is more sassy than the usual episode. For example: Ned Flanders would’ve never used the word “penis”, or neither you would have seen one.

In my opinion there were way too many screenwriters, a team of two would’ve been enough. The story feels too polished without any striking features that you either love or hate. It’s so-so.

“You can’t stretch the structure of an episode 22 minutes long to 90 minutes!” Lisa says. She’s right. But still I would’ve liked something in the style of “22 short stories about Springfield”. Some characters are just thrown in only for the reason of being in the movie. Hans Moleman has his second, as do Dr. Nick or Otto; Ms. Krabappel and Skinner are just faces in the crowd. Even my favorite character, Mr. Burns, has only a few and not really funny minutes on the screen. Boooring!

The Simpsons Movie. In two-point-five-dee

In the Teaser #2 Moe claims that the movie was totally 2D but even the fucking first shot consists of fucking toon-shaded CGI. What is this? I’d rather settle for some not so realistic 2D than for hyper-realistic CGI where it’s not appropriate! Alright, some shots had to be 2.5-D such as the dolly through the angry mob but that’s it. Just look at Lion King, Disney’s best modern animation movie! Usage of 3D was subtle, barely to make out. That’s the way I know The Simpsons from television and that’s the way I want to see it in the theater! Jeez…

Hans Moleman Zimmer

The mawkish soundtrack by the German count of epic movie scores himself, Hans Zimmer, sounds exactly as suspected: Like molten butter with sugar and cream and even more butter: Sweet, yes, but it makes you sick after a few sips. The producers probably were afraid of putting Alf Clausen in charge, or even Danny Elfman. Each of them would’ve given the movie a more ironic twist instead of emphasizing the mood already given by the happenings on screen.

Suggestion for improvement: The story would’ve been better when centered in Springfield rather than jumping back and forth between locations, perhaps with Mr. Burns as arch villain, or any secret identity of the comic book guy.

Where’s Rainier?

Rainier Wolfcastle is no more. The screenwriters (about a dozen !!exclamation marks from hell!!) changed his hair to brown and his name to the even more awkwardly sounding “Arnold Schwarzenegger”, however this is pronounced or whatever this should mean…

The paragraphs above probably came out wrong. It’s not a bad movie. It’s not the best one out there too. If you like the taste of popcorn, a carefree evening without thinking much about the movie you’re watching then it’s the movie for you.

And when you sit through the complete credits sequence then the squeaky-voiced-teen appears and says some very true lines that gave us the best laugh in the whole movie. Let’s just hope that Maggie is not right with her first word.

Congratulations, Mr Groening. You sold out the Simpsons. May you enjoy the money from now till evermore.

Don’t worry! No spoilers ahead!

This film is the most Lynch-esque movie out there, it’s like a combination of Mulholland Drive mixed with Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, as pure Lynch as possible so to speak. And it starts off surreal — just as anticipated: The weird prologue consists of a Polish hooker (there are lots of them later on!), scraps of conversation reveal one of Lynch’s most dearest symbols in his movies: Doors, passages and gates, that lead you through time, space and even into different personalities. Other typical themes observed in this film are

• The voyeur.
• Close-ups of silently crying women.
• The gun.
• A rather brutal paternal character.
• Telephones and phone calls.
• Flats in the style of Lost Highway.
• The lesbian kiss.
• The point where you are certain that “this time I almost know what this movie is about!”…
• …closely followed by the point where everything stops making sense.

Then follows a sitcom-situation starring three rabbits with random laughs from the audience and one hare-character in an noble environment, a short dialog in Polish about a certain “entrance” one is looking for. Fade out.

Axx°Nn

After this disturbing prologue the Hollywood-Lynch directs: Time and people behave (rather) logical and there are only a few jumps in time. Most enthralling are the dialogs in the first part of the movie, strange, yes, but terrific and exciting. Listen closely and pay attention because it will help you deciphering (a bit) of the movie later on. Jeremy Irons as the director is doing a great job, actually that’s the kinda guy you like having on a set, very dear and very authentic.

David ♥ Dogma

David Lynch is like Picasso: After mastering the realistic and “beautiful” he turns more and more to the abstract and ugly, MiniDV in the case of INLAND EMPIRE. Learning about that after a few minutes made our decision to sit in the second row rather painful: Blurry and grainy, shaky and low-res. Mixed media (DV and film) would’ve fit better I think. Now it is just painful observing 35mm Panavision cameras in the film that are filmed with a low res DV cam.

Dogma is the way: Sometimes the camera-lens nearly touches the sweating, dirty, wrinkly, imperfect faces of the actors, so close that it’s not even possible to focus on them. Terrible light situations, especially in Poland or on the Hollywood Bld/Vine Str. intersection. But why not? It’s not the reality, it’s a movie.

On one hand it looks more realistic hence to the media, on the other hand less realistic because the DV footage screams “I am a video, not any reality!”; just the way Chris Marker experimented with analogue image samplers in Sans Soleil in 1981.

The film INLAND EMPIRE and the film that the characters are shooting become closer and closer until you can’t tell what is what. A little hint to keep them apart: Pay attention to the camera: If its focus is not where it usually should be thanks to technical limitations then the scene is probably no part of the film within the film. But if the scene looks just like you’re used to, and the music is as kitschy as it gets, then you’re most likely observing a scene from the film in the film.

To sum it up:

Great movie, especially for Lynch aficionados, but after the break to the completely surreal and twisted world that exists in David Lynch’s head (after about half the film) it sometimes gets a little hard, especially when the actors and actresses take their time discovering things that you didn’t dare to think of. The total running time of 180 minutes is a little hard to sit through.

Oh, one last reason to watch the movie if you can’t make up your mind: Did I mention the tits?

Look and Feel

Definitely Nintendo-inspired. The cards are popping up, shuffling and turning in a very playful manner, neat hints help you with your first patiences. If you don’t like the cute and round look you can change the decks with a single hit on F7. There you can select between various kinds and decks, from colorful Web-2.0-y to a serious classy look. Only the background is a little to grassy green for me, I prefer the old EGA dark green color-fill (#00AA00).
Did I mention that you can finally play in fullscreen mode on your 1920*1080-screen and still find the cards? Thanks to the vector-shapes they always have the same proportions.

Gameplay

One and most important new feature: When moving the visible cards from a hidden deck the first card turns around automatically: No more clicking is required but done automatically. This will definitely ease some of the game’s enjoyment.
Long employed office workers, students and bored housewives, Solitaire veterans with one word know: You don’t have to drag every card yourself to the upper stacks (once they’re there), you can use a double click. And here’s another subtle optimization to the original: You may now use a right click too. This will save you half of the mouse clicks better spent in FPS
When you try an illegal move a little pop-up on the lower left will inform you what can be done and what can’t. Further there is a hunk of sound effects, so you might want to turn up your volume or tun it off completely.

After the game

Now here’s the catch: Windows Vista presents you your statistics after each game: How long it took you, how many game’s you’ve won so far and what your lose/win-ratio is. Mine is terrible, because I spent more than 900 seconds of the game writing this review.

I ordered a jasmin tea (2.10 €) and a large sushi set (~ 18.50 €) – I was hungry. Lisa also settled for a jasmin tea, a miso soup (2.80 €) and a small sushi set ( 8.70 €) which included three maki (cucumber, salmon and carrot) and four sushi ( 2 salmon, 1 tuna and 1 tamago).

When the food arrived I realized that my order of a large sushi set had been forgotten – probably because we were the only guests after a while. So I also received a small sushi set which was eaten all too fast. It tasted nice though. Better than Vienna’s Akakikos and Graz’s Osakabut the price was steep for what you got: More than 10 € just for a snack is just too much for me.

We tipped a little and left. The service was pretty good, although the Japanese flair was missing, probably because the waiters talked Chinese and the muzak was just random Chinese restaurant music.

Japanese Restaurant
KUSHI HACHI
Innsbrucker Bundesstraße 45
A – 5020 Salzbrug
(Map)

Parking Situation:   8/10
Atmosphere:          6/10
Service:             7/10
Food:                8/10
Cost/Performance:    3/10

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 Overall Score:     32/50



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