redeye

I had some time to kill before my movie yesterday and I thought I could hit up Fábrica Maravillas, where I haven't been for more than a year.  I got delivery from them during lockdown, but now they are allowed to serve beer in the establishment and again, and even got some outside tables to expand their seating.  The Beer Garden also has a small street garden now.  Weirdly, FM is not allowed to run the projector to show the tap menu or play music.  Maybe the projector blows viruses around and music encourages them to come in?  Who knows these days.  The NEIPA I had isn't the beer for this movie, however; I found a strawberry Berliner Weisse at La Buena Cerveza that ought to do the job very nicely.  It's not a German beer, actually, it's Polish, but it's the style that counts I say.

It doesn't have a strawberry drink look at all really, more of a grapefruit soda.  The aroma is heavy on the strawberry to make up for that I guess.  The flavor is much more acidic than the scent suggests, very clearly a Berliner Weisse, but a little fruity softness comes out later.  It's a bit more like strawberry flavoring than real strawberries, though.  The beer demands your attention when drinking, so it's not an especially good conversation beer, unless you want to talk about it specifically.  It has a touch of salt swimming around, so it feels like a good summer drink, replacing your reserves of sweated out minerals.  

Surprise!

My Saturday movie was Cortex, listed as a thriller.  The synopsis makes it sound like a man with a sleep disorder starts to doubt whether he's hallucinating or whether strange things are really happening around him, and while there's a little bit of that, it's more like a non-funny version of Freaky Friday.  Hagen, the man with the sleep disorder, seems to change bodies with Nico, a man he has seen in his dreams, who has been having an affair with Hagen's wife.  It confuses both of them, and it's hard for the audience to tell whether it's the truth or not.  At first you think both of them are just having some kind of breakdown, but later the movie pushes you to believe that they really have switched bodies somehow.  Hagen as Nico visits a doctor asking for medication to help with his "delusion" of having become Nico and the doctor prescribes some kind of sedative and suggests a visit to a psychiatrist.  It turns out he is Hagen's doctor, and he calls Hagen's wife to tell her a young man was just in his office impersonating her husband.  She urges Nico as Hagen to go back to the doctor and he says he would rather wait, to which she replies that she doesn't want him to end up like the baby seal.  The baby seal was something that Hagen had told her about from the day he proposed to her, a lost baby that probably died soon after they saw it swimming around near the beach.  Nico as Hagen has no idea what she's talking about, although he tries to feign that he understands.  Hagen as Nico sees more information about Nico's life in his dreams, but Nico as Hagen has to go through the house looking for information to be a better Hagen.  Hagen as Nico gets his prescription filled and the pharmacist warns him about the strength of the medication.  Later, after Hagen as Nico has had to flee his house before a trio of gangsters with business with Nico's brother come in to kill him, the pharmacist finds him in an U-bahn station.  They start talking about dreams on the train and the pharmacist turns out to be kind of a mystic on dreams.  He takes Hagen as Nico to his house and gives him tea to help him enter the dreamworld and find out what he is supposed to do.  He also tells him that dying in a dream isn't death at all, but the sign of a new beginning in life.  Hagen as Nico sees the gangsters track down his family after Nico as Hagen tries to save his brother by returning some goods he stole from them, and he races to his house to stop them.  He kills all three gangsters and wanders out into the rain after seeing how upset his daughter is.  Not far from the house he crosses a police blockade and when they see the pistol in his hand they yell for him to drop it.  He remembers the pharmacist saying that death is only a new beginning and he raises the gun, provoking the police into shooting him.  Coincidentally, behind him Nico as Hagen has run up on the curb as he is dying from a gunshot wound given to him by his own brother, who came looking for the stolen goods.  We see Hagen in a field of tall grass, calling for his wife, and then his wife and daughter come out of the grass to meet him, reminiscent of a reunion in heaven, although we saw Hagen as Nico shoot the gangsters and save his family.  At the last second, in the car, Hagen's eye flies open.  The movie has a Lynchian quality to it with the dream sequences zipping in and out and the weird, upsetting sounds that accompany them and Hagen's attempts to understand them.  But, while Lynch only hints that the movie might be a dream, Cortex is actually supposed to contain dreams, so more like Inception in that way.  It does seem to try to trick you a few times; in the beginning Hagen and his wife wonder if he has depression, and he looks sadly at a family photo where he's holding a child.  We haven't seen any sign of a child yet, so maybe the child died and they are still getting over it?  No, the daughter is alive and well, just somewhere else for the first half or so of the movie.  One might also wonder if Nico is some kind of manifestation of multiple personalities for Hagen, since we don't have any assurance that he and his life really exist other than Hagen dreaming him for a while.  It seems like that isn't the case, though, since the gangsters really exist and show up to threaten Hagen's family after he meets them, and since they don't recognize him it can't be a Fight Club kind of situation.  I guess the question at the end is who gets to stay in Hagen's body, since his awakening makes it look like he might survive.

Supplier: La Buena Cerveza

Price: €3.99