Citizen's Arrest: Catch The Robber 10/27 @ the Walker

A bank, a mask, and a bag - your typical afternoon jog? 

How many great Austrian crime thrillers about brooding bank robbers who find solace in the forest and romance busty brunettes can there be? Apparently more than one. Götz Spielmann's Revanche received an Oscar nomination two years ago and Benjamin Heisenberg's Der Räuber (The Robber) is nearly as good, losing a little novelty because it's such a similar story (both films also star Andreas Lust as main characters who jog on woodsy trails). But while the films may be similar on screen, only one of them is based on a true story: the one about the competitive marathon runner who makes a living as a notorious bank robber.

Ihr Macht Mich Verrückt

(l to r) Brühl, Bleibtreu, Fürmann...I think.

I revisited Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior last week and, in addition to remembering how terrific the soundtrack was, I was again confounded by the identity of German actor Benno Fürmann. Who I often confuse with the German actor Daniel Brühl. Who I often confuse with the German actor Moritz Bleibtreu. Who I often confuse with Benno Fürmann and Daniel Brühl. To make matters more confusing, all three have starred alongside the German actress Franka Potente.

It's a madly frustrating cycle, and since these three actors continue to drive me crazy (macht mich verrückt) with each movie in which they appear, I'm laying this post out primarily as a point of personal reference. Maybe it will help me finally sort out what they've each starred in. It probably won't work, but it might.

"When the Walls Came Tumbling Down"...at the Oak St.

Minnesota Film Arts is presenting a timely and curiously curated film series this weekend at the never-say-die Oak St. Cinema. You can find my capsule previews of the films in tomorrow's Star Tribune here. The full title of the series, "When the Walls Came Tumbling Down - Berlin and Prague, 1989 Remembered", isn't quite as comphrensive or inclusive as you might be led to think, but at least two of the films, Goodbye, Lenin and Citizen Havel, are definite should-sees during this rare opportunity.

Besides, the Oak doesn't have anything else on the calendar after this, so if it's the end of the theater's run (highly unlikely based on recent history, though the ironic title of this series is worrisome), or if it's just the end of the fall season (I expect MFA will be busy planning MSPIFF by January), you should get in while you still can.

Revanche, Jerichow, and the State of the American Suspense Thriller

In discussing the Underrated MOTM for May, Breakdown, I lamented that American suspense thrillers are about as prevalent and dependable as American cars these days:

"...shouldn't we appreciate it and movies like it more during this absolute drought of American thrillers? Over the last two years, for example, every first-tier No Country for Old Men or Zodiac, or second-tier Transsiberian or Gone Baby Gone, is outnumbered by an Eagle Eye, Vantage Point, 88 Minutes, Righteous Kill, or Untraceable, to name just a few. That I've seen none of those last five is, well, the point. American directors and studios are in far too deep with remakes, sequels, and "reboots" to think of anything new, while across the pond there's a seemingly constant stream of quality suspense. But this is really another rant for another time."

Like now. If anyone has any evidence to the contrary I'm all ears, but you'll be hard-pressed to convince me that big-budget projects like State of Play, Valkyrie, Traitor, or Body of Lies can sit on the same shelf as imports like last year's Three Monkeys, Let the Right One In, Boy A, Tell No One, and Roman de Gare, or this year's Revanche and Jerichow.

What's the problem? Well for one, Hollywood is in the midst of a decade-long remake/reboot/sequel bonanza that defies all logic, reason, and, in my young memory, precedent. I may not be happy with it, but I think I get it: moody suspense thrillers ain't exactly the easiest films for studios to market, and if you're developing a film that doesn't have a major star and can't dominate a box-office weekend, you might as well forget about it. Which leaves us, for the most part, with mediocre "suspense blockbusters" and very good foreign films with extremely limited releases. (Although in addition to the recent second-tier American thrillers I already mentioned, I would even add a third-tier of halfway decent, if not at least admirably original thrillers like Lakeview Terrace, Reservation Road, and We Own the Night.)

Secondly, I'm increasingly convinced that the majority of American directors just aren't using the right formula to create true suspense. Admittedly there are a handful who have done some solid work in recent years, including the Coen Brothers, David Fincher (Zodiac), Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects - and also Valkyrie), Christopher Nolan (Memento), Sam Raimi (A Simple Plan), and Scott Frank (The Lookout). But on balance, the American market is flooded with films that are "suspenseful" because of their action sequences (e.g., the Bourne series) or suspenseful because you're on the edge of your seat wondering if you're the only one who has absolutely no clue what's going on (e.g., Syriana).

What's frustrating is that American directors used to be masters of suspense (but not, of course, The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, who is above and beyond this discussion); consider Orson Welles, Jules Dassin, Sydney Lumet , Alan Pakula, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, William Friedkin, Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, Jonathan Demme, David Lynch, and even Steven Spielberg. Many of these directors have unfortunately passed on, but those who are still with us (Spielberg) seem to have lost their creative touch, and their successors have done little of significance in recent years.

Meanwhile, in Europe (and particular Germany), a group of young filmmakers is churning out original thrillers of extremely high quality. In addition to the directors of the foreign films I mentioned earlier, as well as Germans Tom Tykwer (The Princess and the Warrior) and Fatih Akin (The Edge of Heaven), we have two very promising writer-directors with new films out this summer: German Christian Petzold and Austrian Götz Spielmann.

See these movies if possible, and then ask yourself why, on this side of the Atlantic, we haven't figured out that simple story + well-developed characters we can relate to + a bad decision or two - manipulative musical cues - obligatory sex and action = real suspense. It's a pretty elementary formula, but then I suppose we've always been behind the rest of the world when it comes to math, right?

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(Revanche opens today at the Landmark Lagoon Cinema)

As the global economy continues to go through, oh, a rough patch, conventional wisdom would say that a rise in crime and illicit activity would follow along. People might start getting desperate and robbing banks, for example, and as most of us are not professional criminals, things are bound to go awry. Such is the case in Revanche when Alex (Johannes Krisch, a striking Colin Farrell lookalike) and his Ukrainian girlfriend attempt to hit a small bank on the outskirts of Vienna.

What goes wrong is for you to find out, but I'm giving little away to disclose that Alex is soon hiding, or rather living, at his grandfather's pastoral country cottage. He spends his days moping and cutting wood, and his nights moping and having an affair with one of his grandfather's neighbors (Ursula Strauss). In his mind he is always plotting his revenge (revanche), but the further he gets from the bank incident, the less sure he is that revenge is really the answer.

The tagline for the film is "Whose fault is it if life doesn't go your way?", which is somewhat misleading in that it suggests an answer would be sufficient. More appropriate would something like "What do you do when life doesn't go your way?", because while much of Revanche is about assigning blame to the right person when an accident happens (hint: you can't), on a deeper level it's more about what happens when you think you've figured who that is.

We don't really know how long it takes Alex to fully understand this, because writer-director Götz Spielmann has given us a tense, moody character who, like Benjamin Button, primarily communicates with his eyes. The difference is that Johannes Krisch completely owns this performance, no make-up or CGI required. What is he thinking? What is he planning? We can only guess, and in the meantime we're wracked with gripping anxiety about how and when he might snap.

One of the interesting things about Revanche (as well as Jerichow) is that unlike in Breakdown, the typical Hitchcock set-up of "innocent character trying to escape situation and/or clear their name" is thrown out the window. Alex is not innocent, yet you almost have to convince yourself of that fact as you begin empathizing with him throughout the film. This is a pretty amazing achievement by Spielmann, and despite a legendary year for foreign film in 2008, it would be hard to argue with the Academy Award nomination he received for Revanche.

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(Jerichow opens July 10, 2009 at the Landmark Edina Cinema)

Despite all of my whining and complaining about remakes, I find I forgive such movies if they're able to play by their own rules and establish their own identities, maybe thus disqualifying them as actual remakes. A popular term recently is "retread", and so maybe as Breakdown was a retread of The Vanishing, Christian Petzold's noirish Jerichow is a retread of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

It doesn't get much simpler than this: Thomas (Benno Fürmann, who also starred in The Princess and The Warrior) is a strapping army veteran who's recently completed a tour in Afghanistan and moved into his late mother's house in the formerly East German town of Jerichow. Unemployed and with little direction in his life, he fatefully meets Ali, a Turkish businessman, and Laura, Ali's beautiful blonde wife. Despite (or perhaps because of) his jealous tendencies, Ali asks Thomas to work for him as a delivery truck driver. Thomas and Laura predictably fall for each other and bad decisions are soon made by everybody.

Judging by the trailer you might think Jerichow plays like a soap opera, but as in real life, the dilemmas faced by Thomas, Laura, and Ali are believable, and the consequences of their actions are grave. Moreover, Petzold keeps the intrigue high by gradually allowing these complex characters and their backstories to fully bloom over the course of 93 riveting minutes. You don't get to know somebody after a five minute discussion in real life, so why shouldn't it be the same in movies? Because of Petzold's patience (and because there are only three characters), by the climactic ending our loyalties are torn among the three.

Immediately after seeing Jerichow at MSPIFF in April I regretted missing Petzold's Yella at last year's festival. As in Revanche, greed, lust, guilt, and distrust are simmering under the surface, discussed but never spoken. Jerichow, however, also has urgent real-world issues on its mind, including the fact that German-Turkish cultural tensions (a must in any contemporary German film) are no longer relegated to the big cities.

I should mention that Jerichow's finale, while not necessarily contrived, wasn't what I had hoped for. In other words, you can sense what's coming but you hold out hope that it won't happen in predictable fashion. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant surprise at MSPIFF and frustratingly better than its recent American counterparts. By that, I mean there are none.

REVIEW: The Edge of Heaven (B+)

Background: Unless you're paying attention, you may not know very much about the ongoing tension between Germany and its immigrant population, predominantly comprised of Turks. Appropriately, writer/director Fatih Akin (a German of Turkish origin) has been exploring these issues in his highly acclaimed films for the last decade or so. The only other one I've seen, Im Juli (In July), has stayed with me for years and will probably be profiled as an Underrated MOTM on Getafilm at some point. Akin's latest film, Auf der Andere Seite (The Edge of Heaven), was Germany's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film in 2008, and also won the award for Best Screenplay at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

Synopsis : The story is separated into three acts, but the characters weave in and out of each act, and time is fluid. In Bremen, Germany, we meet widower Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz) when he visits Yeter (NurselKöse), a Turkish prostitute who is estranged from her 27 year-old daughter. Ali is also Turkish and he has a son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who is a German professor in Hamburg, and who is reluctantly accepting when Ali moves Yeter in as his live-in girlfriend. Things turn sour when Ali suffers a heart attack and returns from the hospital an angry and violent man, and an incident occurs that leads Nejat to Istanbul in search of Yeter's daughter. Unfortunately they miss each other as her daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), is an outspoken activist in Turkey who has fled to Germany to find safety and a new life with Yeter, with whom she has had little contact for many years. As Nejat combs through Istanbul, he finds more than what he is looking for: not Ayten, but his roots. He buys a German bookstore and settles there permanently. Meanwhile in Hamburg, Ayten has found a new friend, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who takes her in (much to her mother's disapproval) and helps her in the search for Yeter. Another incident occurs that sends both young women to Istanbul - Ayten as a prisoner and Lotte as her legal advocate. Not all of this is happening in sequence, either, and by the third act, both Lotte's mother and Nejat's father, Ali, are back in Turkey as well (hint, hint - not the first time they've been they're together), and Nejat is left trying to piece everything together.

I Loved:
+ Nurgül Yesilçay, a striking presence whose character, Atyen, was felt even when she wasn't on screen.
+ The sense that we were traveling as much as the characters, back and forth between Hamburg and Istanbul, and then to the Turkish coastal town of Trabzon.

I Liked:
+ When Akin infused coincidence and fate into the story with a wink and a feather's touch.
+ The supporting cast, all of whom added to the rich drama of the story in their own way. Lotte's mother, played by Hanna Schygulla, was an especially important character.

I Disliked:
- When Akin infused coincidence and fate into the story with a shout and a sledgehammer.

I Hated:
- That the titles of the three acts of the film so blatantly give away the story. Maybe I don't fully understand this occasionally used method, but telling me someone is going to die kind of takes away from the dramatic shock that we're supposed to feel when it actually happens (or so one would think - idiots throughout the theater still deafeningly gasped, "Augh! They killed her!").

Grade:
Writing - 9
Acting - 10
Production - 8
Emotional Impact - 8
Music - 4
Significance - 5

Total: 44/50= 88% = B+

Last Word: Back in mid-March I picked out a New York Times piece about immigration in contemporary films, and The Edge of Heaven was one of the examples cited by A.O. Scott, who observed that the issue is now beginning to attract attention from filmmakers on a global level. It was a terrific perspective, and he did well in mentioning The Edge of Heaven, which achieves the rare goal of actually being the movie it tries to be. Fatih Akin certainly has the filmmaking talent to tackle the subject, but more importantly, he has the authoritative perspective and pride of someone who lives in that world every day. I don't know what his reputation (or that of the film) is in Germany, but it's encouraging to me that the country chose this as their Oscar submission. It tells an extremely important story in a very real way. Some of the coincidences existed as a bit of stretch to me, but if Akin's underlying thesis is that we're all related in some way and fate brings us together, I can live with that. There are some outstanding acting performances on display, surely a combination of the cast's talent and Akin's direction. For me, his method of giving the plot away to build tension backfired, but others may see it differently. At the end of the day I think I would rather go back and rewatch Im Juli or see his acclaimed Head-On for the first time, but The Edge of Heaven is nevertheless a solid addition to this young writer/director's list of credits. Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior) may get the most exposure of the current generation of German directors, but it should be a surprise to no one if Akin is soon regarded as the one making the most important films.

Underrated MOTM: The Princess and the Warrior (2001)

Each month (starting this month), I'm going to select one movie from the backlogs that I don't feel ever received its due credit, and I'm going to call it the Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM). Feel free to comment if you've seen them and have anything to share; these won't necessarily be classics or even considered good by most people, but I remember them fondly. Also, I probably won't have actually seen the movies since they were in theaters, so I'm mostly going on memory and a little research to remember why I thought they were so good.

The first Underrated MOTM is Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (known as The Princess and the Warrior in the U.S.), starring Franka Potente and Benno Fuermann, and directed by Tom Tykwer. It came out in the summer of 2001 and was quickly forgotten, mostly because people expected it to be another Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run), which came out in 1998 and made stars of both Potente and Tykwer (who were actually dating for years until they broke up in 2002 - I always find it strange how these film industry relationships work). When it was realized that Princess was in fact not Run Lola Run 2, it was immediately dismissed as plodding, slow, dragging, too long, boring, etc.

Do you remember Run Lola Run? It's like a Nike commercial/music video on crack set to a Prodigy song on repeat. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved it - but how do you follow that up? Tykwer made an excellent film in Princess, but it was "laborious" and "languorous" just because you didn't have a seizure while watching it. I just read one critic's piece about Princess on RT - "Crawl, Lola, Crawl." Really? Guess what, it wasn't meant to be a sequel!

OK, so you understand why The Princess and the Warrior wasn't better received. Well it's too bad, because I think it's an intense, suspenseful, gripping movie. VERY briefly: Sissi (Potente) plays a psychiatric ward nurse who gets mixed up in the life of Bodo (Fuermann), a distraught, aimless widower and would-be bank robber. Tywker heavily uses fate and coincidence to bring the two together in very dramatic ways, yet you never really see what's coming. If you're willing, you might even explore the deeper themes of loss, regret, love and hope. But if you really want to go there, you might as well watch Driving Miss Daisy. See The Princess and the Warrior for a taut, surreal story with interesting characters. If you have the attention span of an 8th grader, you should be just fine. Otherwise crack a Red Bull or eight and watch Run Lola Run again.

Tykwer has of course continued writing and directing since Princess, most recently with last year's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I haven't seen anything since Princess, but I am looking forward to his next film, The International, due out next year and starring Clive Owen as an Interpol agent.

By the way, bet you didn't know Tykwer is pronounced "tick-ver."