first film, eighth beer

My first German film of the year!  I'm a little restricted by my schedule, so I chose movies on the weekend to avoid as much conflict as possible.  No silent film this year, since the one they're showing I've seen recently.  Even with a live soundtrack I doubt it's going to impress me more than it did the first time (not a whole lot, but Der Müde Tod is a decent film).

Spoilers - Tod den Hippies! Es Lebe den Punk! is a sort of almost bio-pic, based on Oskar Roehler's biography of his time in the Berlin punk scene in the 1980s.  The main character leaves Munich for West Berlin when his roommate at boarding school gets kicked out for drugging a teacher and (presumably) trashing a classroom.  In the city, he finds a friend working at a strip club and gets a job there.  His father also lives in West Berlin, mourning the loss of his girlfriend, who was a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang and seems to have left a large amount of the money they stole in the father's apartment.  He refuses to do anything with it, saying she's still alive in his memories.  The main character and his friend cook up a scheme to get rich running drugs from the East, and that money will buy them a supplier.  They steal the cash while the father is drunkenly sleeping, although he wakes up when they clumsily fall into some furniture trying to leave, and he chases after them firing a pistol as they speed away on a motorcycle.  At the same time, the main character is beginning a relationship with one of the strippers, an American whose lawyer father is "an asshole" (lots of English swearing in this movie.  Not actually that surprising in Berlin, but a lot of these characters are from other cities).  The main character's mother is also an asshole: before he leaves town she asks him to kill her brother for the inheritance; she visits him in Berlin to have him ship her drugs; in an interview she flatly states she did everything she could to provoke an abortion while she was pregnant.  The infatuated lovers promise to kill each other's asshole parent, before they can put any plan into action, the drug trade goes sour.  The main character's friend is arrested and fingers the main character's father as the source of the money.  Then, the main character is arrested too.  He refuses to give any information and is released, but then immediately re-arrested.  His crime of possession is not severe enough for jail time, but he gets a year of community service in a retirement home, which he gets out of by pretending to attempt suicide.  Then he just pisses off to Egypt, thinking to find a way to New York from there and reunite with his girlfriend, who he hasn't been able to contact since getting away from his community service, and maybe before.  He's riding on top of a truck through the desert, when who should appear on the side of the road to hitch a ride?  The friend who went to pick up the drugs.  He now plans to start a line of sausage stands in Egypt, not aware that Egyptians don't eat pork.  As the truck trundles on, the reunited friends discuss optimism and the beauty of life, while just over a sand dune several workers dump a bunch of metal drums with radioactive symbols painted on them.  They are not careful.

It's an interesting film in that it lasts almost two hours, but when it ends you feel like it's incomplete.  It jumps around between scenes and times, and some things feel unexplained.  For one, how does the main character even get to Egypt?  He's just there all of a sudden.  There's also kind of a strange scene where he breaks up with his girlfriend in the beginning.  It looks like they've been together for a while, and she's planning their future as a power teaching couple.  He goes to the bathroom as she's planning and gives himself a mohawk, which causes her to break into hysterical, angry tears, and oddly gets praise from her mother, who can't stand long hair on boys apparently.  His roommate at the boarding school is also something.  Specifically, he's a gay neo-nazi.  He even has a German Shepherd named Blondi.  When he gets thrown out he also goes to Berlin, ending up hooking around the gay bars and working for Rainer Werner Fassbinder - sort of.  The American stripper is actually played by a Russian actress, but she does a damn good job with the accent.  It's only when she has a bunch of lines in a short time that you can tell there's something not quite native.  It's mostly in the vowels.  It's also interesting to see how uptight fascist minded people give in so desperately to the lack of control in punk music, either listening to it or playing it.  I guess extremes can only be balanced with other extremes.

After the movie I went next door to Casa de la Cerveza, where I was hoping to find a nice German beer to treat myself with.  Years ago, the beers offered on tap were much more conventional and there was a large menu of bottled beers.  Now, craft beers take up most of the taps and I haven't seen the beer menu for a while.  The only German beer I could see was Spaten, but that's fine with me.

Spaten doesn't make big enough glasses?

Served in an icy mug, it's a summery drink even without the tang of ales and saisons.  Spaten is a little darker than you might expect light German beers to be, and it doesn't have the often grassy aftertaste that the wheat beers sometimes have.  It's a reddish gold color and just a little sweet.  It goes very well with the standard accompaniment of potato chips.  It's also from Munich, like the main character of the film, so I can tell myself that it was fate or something.