bookend beers

Instead of a post per film, I'm squeezing them all into one, very efficient.  I do have two German beers to drink though, so it looks like I can do bookends.  They are actually both the same source, Berliner Kindl.  I have not had the flavored versions before, although I have occasionally seen them in the stores, but it feels like the time has come for it -  German films, German beer, summer heat.  I start with the Waldmeister.  It looks very St. Patrick-y, with it's clear but distinctly green color, and even a little green tinge in the head.  I was expecting the aroma to be somewhat medicinal, but it's kind of sweet, like a lime or apple candy.  The flavor is more herbal, tangy, with a little licorice sort of surfing on top and a sour apple chaser.  Despite its clear and light appearance, the beer feels a little sticky, like liquid candy perhaps.  A melted green Jolly Rancher.  I keep getting hits of mint in the first second of sipping, but that might be something psychological since the color also has something of mouthwash to it.

The first pick was Bilder (M)Einer Mutter/Imágenes de mi/una madre, a memoir film about the sacrifices made by a German woman in the late 20th century for her family.  The filmmaker was there to talk a little about the film afterwards, and there were a few Germans in the audience, so I guess everything is back to normal.  The film starts about when her parents started their relationship and when her father started to film her mother on Super 8.  They were from small-town Bavaria and her mother's parents were on the conservative side, so her mother was not very happy at home.  The family wasn't well-off, and two children had to sleep in the living room.  With no privacy, the (future) mother never felt like she could develop into her own person in her house, and her parents certainly didn't encourage it.  When she started to go out with her children's father, she wrote in her diary about how much she loved him and enjoyed their time together, but there is also a sense that she saw a relationship as an escape from her traditional family.  The filmmaker says the last time she smiled on film was shortly before the filmmaker's birth, but even then it seems that she was unsatisfied with her married life.  In her diary she writes about being unhappy with everything she tries, studies, hobbies, jobs, although once she has children she doesn't have a lot of job opportunities.  The filmmaker's father says when she interviews him that he gladly paid for courses and took care of the children when his wife was in class, but nothing was ever enough.  The filmmaker suggests that her mother might have wanted to have a professional life and asks if her father would have chosen to have only hobbies in her place.  The father says, vehemently, that if he had had to make the choice he wouldn't have had children, but he had been the one who was expecting to have children in the marriage.  At first I thought the mother had gotten sick of everything and abandoned the family, but it turns out she was diagnosed with cancer in the '80s and finally died of it in 1993.  Interspersed with the family story are snippets of feminist politics moving forward in Germany from the '50s to the '70s, underlining the changes that were happening in society, and the hope that people should have had in those times.  And yet, so many remained hopeless, without knowing why, like her mother.  In the Q&A afterwards, the filmmaker said she and her family had worked through their feelings of guilt before she even started on the project, but people working with her did have some quite negative emotions come up.  She also mentioned that it wasn't until they were finishing with editing that she realized she had been trying to bring her mother back to life.  Although the story actually leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the mother, it is a reflection of people living through a certain era, and the filmmaker said herself that it was only a story, not the story.

Second, I chose Je Suis Karl, which to my surprise was produced by Netflix and in fact still available to watch on the platform.  I don't have Netflix, so biggie that I bought a ticket for the festival.  I was expecting a story of a somewhat confused young woman who gets suckered into far-right ideology without any trigger, but that's not the story at all.  We begin with a couple who turn out to be the protagonist's parents smuggling a Syrian refugee from Hungary (I think) into Germany.  A few years later they are living their normal lives in Berlin when a package arrives for a neighbor and the husband takes it into their apartment as a favor to her, since she's 80 something years old.  The package turns out to be a bomb which explodes, blows up a good chunk of the building and kills a dozen or so people, including the wife and two young sons of the man who accepted the package.  Everyone assumes immediately that it is an Islamic terror attack, although we never see any actual reasoning behind this, and the man's daughter, our main character, has a lot of trouble accepting what has happened.  She also gets hounded by the press, which does her mental health no favors.  She gets rescued from a couple of reporters by a nice-looking young man who seems sympathetic to her and her situation and invites her to a youth conference in Prague, where the future of Europe will be discussed and "saved".  She hesitates, but in the end she goes, without telling her father anything.  It turns out the conference is a gathering of right wingers, strategizing to take over as much public space with populist slogans as possible.  They even coopt a number of feminist talking points by giving them a heavily xenophobic twist, as if the only men who don't respect women are non-Europeans.  After the conference, where the main character has become close to her savior, the titular Karl, they travel to Strasbourg to offer support to a far-right candidate in upcoming elections.  The top of the group have decided that they need a big event to kick off a sort of revolution, a call to action for all of their followers across the continent, and that event is a murder.  More of a suicide really, although another person will pull the trigger, but they decide that Karl will be "assassinated" after giving a moving speech in favor of this French politician, but it will be his own comrades who do the deed.  Total false flag - just like the package bomb, which was delivered by Karl in disguise to stimulate anti-immigrant feeling in Berlin.  All goes according to plan for them, the speeches, the murder, the ensuing riots.  The main character's father has come to Strasbourg to find her, with the refugee he smuggled years before, who he sought out after the bombing.  It isn't clear whether he thought this man might have information about the bomb, or if he is just afraid that his old friend might be having trouble with all the growing anti-foreigner sentiment.  As violence explodes all around them in the city, and others as we see on the news, they hide in the sewers, planning to escape, although we don't know where they can go safely now.

The last film for this year was Bornehomer Straße, the story of the first border control to open after the East German government declared free travel for its citizens.  The guards hear the announcement on the TV one night and are confused, thinking it can't be a serious change in policy, and their direct supervisors give them no guidance.  People show up at the gate, expecting to be allowed to cross, and are told to bring visas as usual or to go home.  The crowd grows bigger and more unruly and the guards get more and more nervous.  Finally, the head of the control point decides to release some pressure by letting people cross, but the trouble-makers won't be allowed back in, although nobody informs them, of course.  When the first people are told they can't re-enter East Berlin, there are more protests and pleading, which the head guard finally gives in to, allowing people to come back without any problems.  In the end, he just opens the gate and lets people cross with out any sorting or marking of good or bad on their passports, something that almost seems like treason to his colleagues.  So strange a choice is it, that when he returns home and tells his wife about his night at work, she takes it as a joke.  I did not know this story before seeing the movie, and while there were some funny moments, like the dog "infiltrating" the DDR, it didn't seem to be the comedy that it was described as.  It has the same director as Je Suis Karl in fact, so maybe we should have expected a little bit of misdirection.

One thing I noticed this year was the amount of errors in the subtitles.  It's not too weird to see things that don't seem to be exactly what the actors are saying, due to space and time concerns, but these were straight up mistakes.  You don't excuse changing "the 20th century" to "8 o'clock" with any bullshit about formatting needs.

And now the dessert beer - Berliner Kindl Himbeer.  If the Waldmeister looked like a St. Patrick's treat, raspberry looks like Valentine's.  It has the same aroma as Mort Subité, very fruity but a little bit sharp and with warning of syrup.  It's much more delicate than cherry and raspberry Belgian beers actually, with more of a hint of fruit over a mouthful of...very mildly sour candy.  There is a little bit of that candy feel that was in the Waldmeister, but not quite as much.  It's actually a bit lighter in feel.  I'm finding the raspberry to be less sticky and more refreshing than the Waldmeister, which is not how I expected it to go, but I'm happy with the experience.

no rose colored glasses

Everything comes to an end, even pandemics.  This one is still hanging around, though, and it showed in the German Film Festival this year - few people in the audience, and hardly any Germans, if any at all.  Also fewer films than last year, but more than enough for the three movie pass, and this was the third movie.  Walchensee Forever is a biopic of a family primarily consisting of women and their experiences over the 20th century.  At first I thought they had some very good effects with films of the family in the '40s and '50s, especially the interview style film, but it seems the family has had interest and talent in photography and art since the grandfather married the grandmother.  He was an art student and eventually became a photographer in Munich, while her parents had a cafe/inn on the Walchensee which she carried on with all her life.  The filmmaker's mother says her mother only worked in the cafe out of a sense of duty to her parents, who were very happy with their profession, and in a short clip the filmmaker took after mother and grandmother argue about running the cafe, the grandmother says she would enjoy being young at the end of the 20th century instead of the beginning.  She could be a computer geek, she says.  A lot of the film focuses on the mother's younger sister, who killed herself after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.  The two had been a duo performing traditional Bavarian music in the 60's and had fallen into a lot of the other cultural trappings of the time, including drugs and Indian spirituality.  The mother met the filmmaker's at a peace conference in Mexico City after her sister's death, and went to live with him in San Francisco.  The films of them together during her pregnancy are very of the time, being naked in nature, living in a sort of half-wild area and having a homebirth.  Eventually the mother goes back to Walchensee to help her mother with the cafe, the relationship with the filmmaker's father having run its course basically as soon as she was born.  The filmmaker seems to be on a quest to define home and belonging with the interviews.  At the end she has her own child and goes with her mother to San Francisco to visit her father, giving the impression of their acceptance of the wheel of life turning, since the grandmother had passed away a while before at age 104.

I have another Berliner Weisse today, although the movie doesn't take place in or near Berlin at all.  Still a German style, dammit!  And it's not a German beer again, I admit, but it's Spanish and it's good to support local industry.  Maglia Rosa, with raspberries, comes from Cierzo, and it was a hard decision between that and some nice black beers.  They weren't as German, though.  La Buena Cerveza is packing up to move to a new location, so I have an excuse to go back for one or two stouts next month.

Much rosier than the strawberry weisse, with a party pink head of foam that quickly vanishes.  It gives the visual impression of a red berry soda.  It smells more like Mort Subité than Fanta, though, to my relief.  While there is a touch of sweetness and raspberry pokes here and there, the beer is definitely not sweet overall.  Now it's more like that strawberry one!  It's especially tangy at the back of the tongue, giving a little kick on its way down.  It has a champagne-like dryness that keeps it from any kind of fruit beer sticky, although I don't tend to find dry drinks especially refreshing.

Supplier: La Buena Cerveza

Price: €5.55

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

first film back

Last year was Heimkino, but this year the Film Festival is back in person.  I'm actually a little disappointed; it was so easy to just watch all the films on my couch, and now I have to go downtown and be in a theater with people... Well, at least there is a festival at all.  The first film was No Hard Feelings, about immigrants and refugees in Germany, with a touch of LGBTQ+.  I think if you don't read the synopsis beforehand you wouldn't know that the main character is doing community service as a translator for Iranian refugees, you might think he's just volunteering for some reason.  The story goes over his quest to accept himself as an Iranian-German, I guess, and a gay one.  He has trouble with different accents, and some Iranians make fun of him for his more German accent.  He starts a kind of secret relationship with one of the refugees and a firm friendship with the refugee's sister, who ends up having her case rejected by the government and her deportation ordered.  I was surprised by how little fuss people made about homosexuality - the main character's family doesn't seem to care at all about who he's attracted to, and even the refugees are not especially bothered.  There are a few comments, but nothing to make you worry about anyone's life.  The main character's parents seem to be planning to return to Iran, which he struggles to understand, but his mother tells him that they just can't let go of their connection to their homeland, while at the same time she hopes that his home is Germany.  The refugee woman ends up going on the run from the police to avoid deportation, and asks the main character to take care of her brother, who he's already started to be pretty serious with.  At the end, she's gone, and the two men are together, happy with each other, but wounded by the situation.

I did go looking for a German beer, and ended up buying one at the German supermarket.  A nice märzen, a little hilariously with the line "like in the good old days".  It's lighter than expected, clear and orangey.  Fine white head, although not very resistant.  There's a very, very mild scent of bitter, not the typical lager grain.  There's plenty of lager flavor, though, full and round, somewhat sweet.  It's kind of a thick feeling beer, not exactly sticky, but it doesn't go down completely cleanly.  It's not a bad beer for movie watching, to be honest.  Too bad I couldn't have it in the theater.

Heimkino Ende

Well, I didn't get around to getting a real German beer to finish up with the German films, but you'll see it is a German style.  So that's something.  The last film was billed as a young adult film, since the protagonist is a teenage girl, but it is about depression and suicide.  A pretty dark story, even if it seems to have a happy ending on the surface.

SPOILERS

Nothing More Perfect begins with teen Maya in a CPR class with her friends.  Like typical teens, they aren't paying much attention to the class, but planning their own activities.  They are in a running club, competing for the fastest, longest runs, and losing the most weight.  Maya is also part of an internet group focused on suicide ideation, which her friends probably don't know about.  She shares live videos talking about how she's preparing to end her life and how hopeless she feels about everything, and her followers send her encouraging messages, weirdly encouraging about her as a person and at the same time about her suicide plans.  Her mother at first seems to be just a little flaky and artistic, and her father a typical divorced dad in another city with another partner, but they decide to take a trip to Prague all together.  On the road her mother covers her father's eyes and he drives blind while she tells him to move right or left on the road.  Maya ends up throwing up, maybe from the swerving car or maybe from the stress of the situation, but this is the first indication that her parents are just douches.  Maya and her mother check into a very nice hotel room, and her father into another in the same hotel.  Maya has already decided to kill herself, romantically, in a park in Prague.  The family goes to a disco and she goes to the bathroom to talk about her plans to her followers and a local drug dealer follows her in.  He agrees to sell her sleeping pills and tells her to meet him the next day.  They drink vodka in a park, Maya passes out, and he takes her to an apartment where a friend of his lives.  Maya recovers and leaves with the pills.  When she gets back to the hotel, her parents are drinking wine and discussing their day at the art galleries.  They ask her what she did and she tells them: she met a boy in a park, they drank vodka together and went to his place.  Her parents stare at her and then start laughing.  "Great joke!" they say.  Maya starts to develop of crush on the drug dealer, but when she sees him in another disco he refuses to talk to her, and she starts to go downhill.  Her mother is focused on purchasing art, or pretending to want to purchase art, her father gets drunk and says he hates them all, and Maya swallows all the pills she has along with several tiny hotel fridge bottles of alcohol in the bathtub.  She passes out...and then wakes up.  She realizes the pills haven't worked so she runs out of the hotel to the apartment where she was with the drug dealer, running into a lamp post on the way.  At the apartment the friend insists the dealer doesn't live there and that Maya should see a doctor about her nose.  Back home, Maya's friends think she got a nose job, and Maya buys herself a plane ticket back to Prague, to find the dealer who admitted that he sold her vitamins because he thought she couldn't be serious about the suicide.  It seems her obsession with suicide is turning into an obsession with this guy.  I guess it's supposed to be a happy ending, since Maya has found a "reason to live", but it still leaves her dependent on outside factors for her happiness, and unable to find value in herself and her own life.  It's not a badly done film, but I did not particularly enjoy it.

Berliner weisse is a weirdly light style to have with such a heavy topic, but Nómada can make a beer that you don't mind drinking with anything.  Passiflora Sour is just barely colored beerishly, hardly bitter at all, and crisply fruity.  It has a champagne sort of dryness to it, in keeping with the style.  With its low alcohol it's not a bad choice for celebration, since it won't cause too much damage the morning after.

Heimkino zehn

It's coming time to finish the German Film Festival for this year, and there's one more documentary to go.  I'm kind of digging the documentaries that I've been able to see this year, but to be honest, I probably wouldn't seek out the docs next year if I had to choose.  I'm just too invested in my fictional or "based on actual events" movies.  This documentary goes by the name Lost in Face.  It's a series of interviews with a woman who has suffered prosopagnosia or face blindness her whole life.  She explains that she has never been able to recognize her face in the mirror, but she knows her clothes and her house, so the person in the mirror must be her.  She can't recognize anybody she's ever known by their face, instead she can identify their gait, posture, or general attitude, and identifies people in family photographs by how they face the camera.  She is something of an artist now, creating semi-cubist works because of her inability to retain details of faces.  They come out with several eyes or no really identifiable eye, lines that could be a mouth or not, and yet the hairstyles are often quite exact.  "Charlotte" did not give her real name at first, being suspicious of how the interviews could develop, but later developed something of a rapport with the interviewer.  He takes her to a hospital for a brain scan, to see if there's a physical problem that can explain her condition, but in the scans the part of her brain that is supposed to process faces appears to be perfectly normal.  The malfunction is at a smaller level of detail than the machine can detect.  The interviews are interspersed with animations of her brainspace, with her "self" cutting the strings of other faces and people and letting them fall into the abyss of nothingness.  She talks about finding friends through her horses, which are kept at a fairly snooty stable, although she doesn't pay any attention to the other people who board there.  A young girl showed up one day with no horse to ride and was just watching the others, so Charlotte, riding without tack or "proper" riding habit, asked her if she wanted to ride Charlotte's horse. They became close friends, and Charlotte was worried about how to handle a long distance friendship when the girl eventually moved to Australia.  Charlotte also talks about her birth mother, who had been very young, perhaps a teenager, when she was born, and had given her up for adoption.  Charlotte's adoptive parents allowed her birth mother to come around as an "aunt", although eventually she managed to get ahold of her birth certificate and see who her birth mother was.  I think no father was actually listed on the certificate.  They continued their friendship until her birth mother's death.  The interviewer spends some time in the beginning encouraging Charlotte to try new ways of knowing the forms of faces but at first she rebuffs him.  At the end, though, she tries to use touch to "see" the features of a face to draw it.  She makes a portrait of him and gives it to him as a present.

Weihenstephaner, is that what I'm left with?  Don't get me wrong, it's a good beer, but it's so normal for something to go with such a surreal kind of story.  It's Vitus, the weizenbock, so at least there's a certain weight to it to help you digest the strangeness of the film.  It's a pretty typical German beer, with the touches of grain in the aroma and flavor, but also some good shades of fruit coming in.  Nothing too exotic, apple and banana for the most part, but it's a playful sort of beer, perky and bright after a story showing somebody living a life that we can only comprehend in the most basic way, understanding her words but not her reality.

Heimkino neun

I have never gone to the collection of shorts that the German Film Festival puts on, preferring to see a whole movie for my euro.  A few of the films have a short shown before them anyway.  The collection is a ... really extensive one, not just 30-40 minutes, and everything in a couple of particular genres.  There are regular love action shorts mixed in with animation and blended live/animation.  The highlights for me were the personal, portable border wall and Mascarpone.  Others were more of a documentary style, like Formas, the interviews with spinal problems, talking about how they worried about their posture and symmetry in the eyes of others, or had come to disregard it in favor of their own comfort in themselves.  In Jupiter a family seems to be running from the end of the world when a comet crashes into the earth, but it turns out they are part of a sect that believes the comet is a ship coming to take them back to their true home.  The daughter in the family doesn't quite believe them, even at the very end.  Liuetenant Luna and Nest have beautiful images and simple stories, La Boutique and Der Junge im Karohemd examine love among our everyday companions, Die Tinte trocknet nicht shows us two Muslim girls discussing how they hope their future relationships to be.  In the beginning they're wandering around a church and one is telling the other how ceremonies are performed to the best of her knowledge.  It sounds like some Christian friend has dragged her to church before, possibly she's even had a Christian boyfriend.  One animated short shows a village fleeing armed conflict, children grabbed up and carried off by their parents with only the barest of necessities,  Finally they reach a dock and the children are offered up by their parents to sailors on the ships to make sure they can get away, although at the end it looks like everyone is reunited.  I don't know if I'll choose to see the shorts in the future, but it was quite the selection for this year.

Another Andechs beer for this installment, this time a standard helles.  Not as much fun as the doppelbock, but something much more predictable and in line with what you're expecting.  It's not super alcoholic, but has a heavy feel, and doesn't even give off a lot of aroma to let you imagine what you're in for.  And what that is is a calm and relaxing lager, nothing demanding or attention grabbing, just in the framework of the style, if that's what you're looking for.

Heimkino acht

I read a few very positive reviews for this film, although I also saw it was "in the style of You've Got Mail", so I should have been more wary.  As it was, I ended up unimpressed.

SPOILERS

A Linguistics professor gets dumped by his girlfriend and at the same time begins to receive emails from an "E. Röthe", who wants to cancel a magazine subscription.  The emails become more and more upset as they appear to be ignored, and finally Leo writes back to say they have the wrong address.  Later he gets a generic Christmas wish email and responds thanking them for their spam.  This gets answered with, "Passive aggressive idiot."  And so the game begins.  E stands for Emma, but a slip of the finger makes her Emmi in their conversations.  They start a kind of flirtation even though Emmi is married with two step-children, and supposedly happy.  Leo tries to get over his ex-girlfriend, who pops up from time to time for sex and disappears again, but when he goes out with women his sister sets him up with, he can't stop thinking about his next message to Emmi.  Emmi also starts to get more caught up in their virtual relationship, and starts seeing the deficiencies in her relationship with her husband.  He is a respected orchestra conductor and spends a lot of time at rehearsals or in performance, while she gives piano lessons and works as a magazine editor, I think, from home.  They almost meet by design in a coffee shop but don't recognize each other yet.  Then, they almost run into each other in a supermarket, but Leo gets a call from his sister that their mother is in the hospital.  He is offline for a few days looking after her, and then taking care of the funeral.  He did not have a close relationship with his mother, so he is maybe more upset by the loss of opportunity to improve the relationship than the loss of a relationship itself.  His sister scolds him for this, too, saying their mother said he was the most like her because both of them kept the people they claimed to love at arm's length.  Leo starts to want a "real" relationship with Emmi, who resists because she doesn't want to rock the boat with her family.  She has a strong relationship with her stepchildren, and even though her husband seems preoccupied with his work, they seem to have a loving relationship.  She even tells her stepdaughter that when they met he took her breath away.  But, after some prodding, she starts to wonder if she could have a great love story with a stranger and she and Leo make plans to meet.  Then, Leo gets an email from her husband.  He asks Leo to have a night with his wife, to destroy the fantasy that they have built together, so that he can fight for her as a reality against a reality.  Leo hesitates, feeling guilty, but eventually continues with their plans.  At the same time, he organizes a transfer to a university in New York, so the meeting would be a goodbye anyway.  Emmi gets ready to go to see Leo and says goodbye to her husband, who tells her to have a good time, as she expects.  What she doesn't expect is that he calls her Emmi, which tells her that he knows everything.  She goes back to her bedroom and sits on the bed until late into the night, missing the date with Leo.  Then, at some early hour of the morning, she puts on her coat and shoes and rushes out the door, driving desperately to Leo's place, just making it before he gets in a taxi to the airport to fly off to his new American life.  They see each other for the first time and smile.

It could have been and interesting story, examining the ways people try to protect themselves from disappointment and pain, settling for something safe but unexciting, taking partners for granted, or getting caught in a cycle of the grass is always greener.  Instead, Leo's sister tells him that he never lets people in when we have seen him ready to marry his ex-girlfriend.  Emmi has a warm relationship with her husband and never lets on that she regrets any opportunities she has missed by marrying him and taking care of his kids.  The part about not being able to compete with a fantasy as a real person rings true, but since it comes at the very end of the movie it isn't explored.  We might imagine that Leo and Emmi see each other and then go their own separate ways to continue the fantasy, or the most Hollywood of endings could happen, where she joins him, with no luggage or anything, on his move to New York and they live happily ever after.  I much preferred Meine Ende, dein Anfang.

Some might say I should have had a gose ready with this movie, since I'm so salty about it.  So luck there, just a weissbier.  It's Andechs, in one those nice, big half liter bottles, to take the bad taste of a disappointing movie out of your mouth.  This is a fruitier beer than a lot of German ones I've had, with hints of banana and apple popping up here and there.  It's also fairly sweet in aroma, with sort of a cakey smell to it.  It's on the heavy side, filling, and better company on a summer evening than some movies.

Heimkino sieben

Another documentary I probably wouldn't have chosen to see if I had been limited by tickets and time.  Also quite interesting, though, it's about an art workshop for intellectually disabled people.  Some of them have even become quite well-known as outsider artists, bringing more attention and, one hopes, funding to the center and its mission.  Kunst kommt aus dem Schnabel wie er gewachsen ist shows several of the beneficiaries of the program working on their projects, on one hand for their personal therapy, but also with an eye to sales.  At one point the head of the center tells some visitors that, while the art is more helpful than the repetitive work of assembling ballpoint pens, it's the factory style work that ends up paying the bills.  You never know what kind of art is going to sell the best.  Two of the participants are preparing shows and pieces to lend out during the filming.  One is a woman who often paints copies of classical works with rooster heads instead of human ones, although she also makes models of famous buildings and creates other, more personal works.  Another is an elderly man whose past is mostly a mystery, since records are not very detailed he doesn't like to speak very much.  He creates highly abstract drawings of precise and repetitive lines that so often go off the paper he's using that his easel and table are also sometimes displayed as parts of his work.  Their names are Suzy van Zehlendorf and Adolf Beutler, if you're curious.  The patients seem to enjoy creating pictures as part of their therapies, and fit in a regular schedule of activities.  Some of them get nervous when their patterns are changed, even though they're preparing for an important art show.  The show appears to be successful, with an appreciative public, and the catalog impresses the patients, who are delighted to see their works in a shiny, important looking book.

As luck would have it, I get a kölsch to go with today's film.  It's not what I would have chosen if it were up to me, I would have thought something heavier would go better.  This time, though, the Früh Kölsch has more weight to it than I remember.  It's also a deeper bitter and more typically beery, not as light and effervescent.  Still, very much a summer beer, it's just too bad I'm not at a street table just off of Gran Vía after seeing the documentary in Palacio de la Prensa.  Surely, there would be someplace with German beers down there.  No Casa de la Cerveza, Kloster, or Oldenburg, but something would do.

Heimkino sechs

Coming off of a good show, you have hope for the next one.  Coup is supposed to be based on actual events, but a cursory Google search didn't give me anything.  Maybe the name changes have hidden it, or maybe it just isn't a story of note outside of Hamburg...it really seems like something people would talk about, though.

SPOILERS

We begin with a young man explaining how he got interested in motorcycles and engine work, when he fixed a thrown out lawn mower as a young boy and a moped later, and got his own motorcycle when he turned 18, under the approving gaze of his father.  He goes to work at a bank, but is also part of a motorcycle club, two worlds that look at each other with disdain and suspicion.  He doesn't much enjoy his job.  He is the only person at the bank who knows how to do certain operations, since they're boring and unglamorous, so none of his apparently high-society coworkers want to do them, and one of those functions is distributing interest to clients who bring in their interest tickets.  The paper tickets are supposed to be marked so they can't be used again, but everyone is too lazy to bring the special scissors from the basement, so he just uses a hole punch.  If there's a big stack of tickets, he has to divide them into groups for punching, and the holes don't line up.  He realizes he could swipe a bunch of tickets and use them himself in other banks.  He recruits a couple of friends from the biker club to help him, and they open an account in Luxembourg, where the bank manager just barely manages to hide her discomfort at the long hair and skull rings that one of the accomplices sports.  Everything goes smoothly, the three men go to different banks throughout the day and cash in their interest tickets, a few thousands of marks at a time, until they have over 2 million marks to share.  Our hero and one of his associates flee to Australia and start to live it up.  He calls his girlfriend and directs her to get on a plane with their son and join him, but she refuses.  The whole thing sounds ridiculous to her, and besides she's pissed off that he has just been MIA for a whole week.  The police start to harass her and she gets angrier and angrier, while the two financial criminals in Australia start to get homesick.  Eventually, they try to negotiate a return to Germany, saying they'll give back all the money they have left, they only spent about 100,000 marks, in return for all the charges being dropped.  They never quite get the deal finalized, but the man goes back anyway, out of love for his girlfriend and son.  He loses the money he has left, has to go to trial, and after a few years his girlfriend leaves him anyway.  He continues to have the most interesting life he can, though, later buying a yacht with another girlfriend to sail around the world in.  They have some trouble getting out of Thailand.  Now he's back in Hamburg, giving an interview to go with the movie, and when the interviewer asks if he regrets anything, he says, "I only regret coming back."

Is Schlenkerla the best known rauchbier?  It's certainly the one that I see most often.  A rauchbier seems to be fitting for a story like this, where somebody vanishes like smoke after committing a crime.  Obviously there's a smokiness in the aroma and the flavor, but I find it interesting that the beer has a certain creaminess to it.  It gives the feeling of a smoked cheese, with the tiniest hint of saltiness and sourness behind the bitter smoke.

Heimkino fünf

And the German ride continues!  It's a good thing they're showing all the films on two days; even not having to spend a lot of time out of the house it's a lot of time to spend watching three or four movies a day.  Here we have Meine Ende, dein Anfang/Relativity, which I wasn't sure about since it looked so much like a cute little romance in the trailer for the festival.  It is not that, however.

SPOILERS

The movie starts with a bang, a couple getting together after the man's presentation of his doctoral work at the university, going to the bank, and being caught in a robbery.  The woman manages to sneak her phone out of her bag, but one of the robbers sees her and starts screaming and threatening her, causing the man to come between them, and get shot.  After this we watch a story being told in two directions, with scenes of the woman's grieving going chronologically forward mixed with scenes from her relationship with the man going backward.  The story of one of the thieves is also mixed in, from before and after the robbery.  It turns out he was only willing to rob a bank to pay for his daughter's medical treatment; she has some genetic marker that makes her a bad candidate for normal treatments, but an experimental one does exist - not covered by the normal health care system.  The robber loses his job after he gets caught stealing a bracelet for his daughter while he was supposed to be doing night security at a kind of big box store, and the family is left without private insurance.  He returns to the scene of the crime, feeling guilty about the murder, and happens to see the woman leaving a candle in front of the bank.  Then she turns to walk into the middle of a busy street and the robber rushes out to pull her back.  They begin a strange sort of friendship, with her looking to forget her pain a little bit and him trying to assuage his guilt, not only at his part in her partner's death, but also his betrayal of his family for losing his job, and possibly having an affair before the events of the movie.  The flashbacks show the woman feeling insecure at being the checkout girl girlfriend to the man, who comes from a well-off family, and apparently has never had a job at all while studying.  They manage to build a tight relationship, which lets the woman feel able to blow off her needy and manipulative mother.  Finally, the woman goes into the police station to give her statement about the robbery and the detective in charge of the case shows her the security footage in case she can give him more details about the robbers.  He has to talk to another cop for a moment and leaves the footage paused as one of the robbers reaches up to paint out the camera lens.  The woman sees a bracelet under the robber's glove and recognizes it as her new friend's.  She is furious, but doesn't tell him what she knows right away.  Instead she follows him to the hospital and sees him with his daughter in her room.  Flashing back again, we see the robber and his friend go to buy the guns for the robbery, and he buys blanks, not wanting to actually hurt anybody.  His friend, though, takes real bullets without him knowing.  This leads to the robber accidentally killing the woman's boyfriend.  Now the woman is aware of all of this and takes her new friend the robber out to a park to talk with him.  He suspects nothing amiss, but when they are alone she pulls a gun and demands an explanation.  After he tells her everything she pulls a piece of paper from her pocket and throws it at him before walking away.  The paper is actually the results of a compatibility test that show she could be a donor for his daughter (bone marrow, I think?).  She goes through with the donation and it looks like the little girl will make a recovery.  The last scene of the movie is the first thing that happens in the story, really.  The woman just misses the train in the U-Bahn and when the next one comes in she runs into a man who she feels an instant connection with.  He seems to feel the same, but they only have time to give each other their names - Nora, Aron.  My end is your beginning, he says.

A nice doppelbock ought to be good company to a head-scratcher kind of film.  Not too strong with the flavor, but a good kick of alcohol to keep you in your seat.  Schneider Weisse presents Hopfenweisse Tap 5.  Not quite what I expected, similar to the film.  Unfortunately, this time I was disappointed.  While there's a pleasant bit of spice, it's overridden by sort of a rubber taste that I found distracting and rather unpleasant.  Can't all be winners, I guess.

Heimkino vier

I don't generally choose to go to the documentaries, and there aren't that many that come to the German Film Festival.  Sometimes they aren't documentaries as much as a personal report and musing, like that one on slower living a few years ago.  This year there are several documentaries offered, mostly arty stuff.  One is a biography of German artist Christoph Schlingensief, a man who always wanted to make movies, and managed to do it, although they were certainly not "popular".  Upon viewing one of his films as part of his application to film school, a professor told him that the film made it clear he would never love anybody.  Schlingesief took this as a challenge to prove that he could, in fact, love other people, even though he had to apply to film school several times, and was only accepted with some very influential recommendations from established directors.  His vision was to share provocation and make people reconsider their view of the world, not too uncommon among artists, really.  Schlingensief had the same idea about violence on film as Tarantino, apparently, in that it isn't something to be careful of, but to exaggerate and exploit.  Schlingensief was trying to remove the power of taboo by forcing it people's faces, making uncomfortable and ugly things mundane.  He was hired to direct plays, which he found an interesting challenge and was not immediately successful at.  He created installations in public spaces where people would be faced with the realities of xenophobia or racism, or be encouraged to face their socio-political worries in the Church of Fear.  His parents appear in his early homemade movies, not terribly excited about it.  He made television appearances to defend disgusting or upsetting art, bringing arguments of freedom of expression and honesty with oneself.  Sadly, he was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and died only about a year and a half later.  He isn't very well-known outside of Germany, but seems to be something of a figure in the German art and cinema world.  Certainly, his films, which look like grosser versions of Ed Wood or other B horror movie makers, could be enjoyed even if just as junk entertainment.  I'm sure Schlingensief would want us to read between the lines, though.

A doppelbock does seem to go with this style of art somehow.  And Korbinian is a formidable kind of doppelbock, with a royal reddish color and a dessert-laden taste.  I've met Korbinian before, but this one came in a selection box, and it never hurts to try things again.  While fruity, there's also a definite chocolate flavor hiding in there, giving the beer a richness and smoothness that surpasses a lot of the style.  And bocks are a nice group, so that's saying something on my part.

Heimkino drei

In other years, this would be my last German film, but since it's online streaming this time around I have quite a few more coming.  Now it's time for a sort of war film.

SPOILERS

Im Feuer starts with a woman sneaking into a refugee camp in Greece.  Well, she doesn't exactly sneak, she just walks right past the guards checking everybody's papers and they are possibly too tired of everything to chase her down.  She's there looking for her mother and sister, who she sent money to escape from Iraq.  She finds her mother in the food line, but her sister refused to come, preferring to stay behind and fight for an independent Kurdistan.  She talks to one of the social workers there, who is skeptical that she is a German citizen herself, but eventually she is allowed to leave with her mother.  Rojdan, the German citizen, is in the military, maybe how she got citizenship.  Her family had moved to Germany when she was a child, but for some reason her parents and sister returned to Iraq, leaving her with other family.  Her mother runs into old friends and neighbors in her new city, and Rojdan is troubled to see how they offer asylum applications for €20, "but just because we're like family," when the form is actually free.  She is also bothered by the other refugees insistence on watching Kurdish news, because it's all just lists of dead and missing to Rojdan.  She is still determined to get her sister out of Iraq, so she finagles her way into an assignment in the country, helping to train women freedom fighters.  They were looking for somebody who not only spoke Kurdish, but understood the culture.  Unfortunately, Rojdan is really more German than Kurdish by now.  At their first meeting she mixes Kurdish, German and English, but eventually settles into Kurdish.  However, she can't explain to the freedom fighters why the European military demands a clear leader for the group, or explain to her fellow German soldiers how the Kurds can act as a group without a hierarchy or chain of command.  She also doesn't have a lot of interest in being a team player with the other soldiers, hardly talking to them at all.  In one training exercise in a destroyed village the Kurds discover a mass grave with clothing and hands just peeking through the dirt.  Rojdan thinks she might recognize her sister's shawl, but it turns out one of the Kurds knows her and knows where she is.  After they decide to spend the night in the abandoned village, this woman takes Rojdan to another encampment across the hills and there Rojdan is reunited with her sister.  She tries to convince her to come back to Germany but her sister is determined to stay and fight, since it's the only thing she has left of herself.  The encampment is attacked and Rojdan's sister is killed.  Rojdan returns to Germany to be with her mother and the two of them share a coffee, Greek coffee, although her mother says it isn't the same.  Although it's somewhat stressful to watch, being set in a warzone some of the time, it's an interesting look at culture clashes and assimilation.  The Kurdish refugees aren't angry with Germany or German customs, but they hang onto their traditions as much as possible, since they are expecting to be able to go home one day.  Those who assimilate like Rojdan are almost foreigners among people we would call their family.

It would have been nice to link a darker beer to this story, or something with a lot more bitterness, but what came up was a weissbier.  Karg Weizenbock is an interesting thing, very fruity with a lot more complexity of flavor than a lot of its kind.  I think I get some apple and vanilla in there, hardly any of the typical wheat aftertwang.  It does have some power in it, though, the alcohol is pretty strongly present.

Heimkino zwei

I get all the movies this year, just have to try not to run out of beer.  Since they're included I might as well watch the kids' films, maybe I'll even understand the language a little better.  Eh, wishful thinking.  The next film was Alfons Zitterbacke, a colorful and uplifting movie about kids following their dreams, or something like that.

SPOILERS

Alfons is a tween with dreams of being an astronaut and a room full of space paraphernalia.  His father and his teachers do not appreciate his interest in the smaller details of space research, such as how toilets on space stations work.  He isn't the most popular kid in class and the douchey rich kid in particular likes to make fun of him.  Alfons decides to try his luck in a competition of flying inventions, and just to spite him the rich kid decides to participate too.  Maybe the kid himself isn't rich, maybe it's just his grandfather, who picks him up during a free hour from school and they go shopping for radio controlled helicopter parts.  Alfons follows them and hides several parts so it seems like the store has run out, and the impatient grandfather just buys a helicopter, even though it's against the rules of the competition.  "Oh, just put some paint and stickers on it, nobody will know," he says.  Alfons has more and more trouble with his father, who just wants his son to be a normal kid.  Alfons desperately needs to find something impressive for the competition, so he decides to sneak into the chemistry lab and experiment with fuels, but when the teacher comes in by surprise and startles him he pours out too much of the chemicals into the mix and blows up the lab.  He is then suspended from school and potentially out of the competition.  It comes out in the meeting with the principal and a couple of disgusted teachers, however, that his father was not the best behaved kid himself.  Still, his father is disappointed in him, and Alfons takes all of his space related stuff to trash.  His father sees what is happening and regrets his past anger and attempts to make Alfons "normal", so he brings all the stuff back to his son's room and assures him that he will support his space exploration, however he does it.  Alfons is allowed to take part in the competition because his friend, a future lawyer, insists that since they are part of a team and the team was not expelled, Alfons must be allowed to participate with the team.  The principal seems to have reconsidered her idea of Alfons and encourages him to do his best, shouting down the teacher who was so disgusted by the space toilet presentation.  Their invention is a water-rocket, which sends their space capsule up into the sky, where it deploys a parachute to return to the ground.  The douche is also there with his store-bought helicopter, and he sends it to cut the parachute off his rivals' capsule.  Unfortunately for him, the parachute gets tangled up in the parts of his helicopter, which sends it crashing into a pool of green gelatin.  Meanwhile, the capsule has crashed to earth, but the astronaut figure inside has been safely taken at a more acceptable speed by the tiny remote controlled drone Alfons had assembled much earlier.  Naturally he wins the competition, and the approval of everyone present.  It is a cute movie, encouraging kids to reach for the stars, literally.  A German astronaut even appeared in it, transmitting a message from orbit to Alfons' computer, thanking him for all his letters and telling him to keep working on his dream.

Another German beer from the collection: Scheider Weisse Aventinus.  It's a European Strong Beer, rather high alcohol, and very Christmasy for the time of year.  There are lots of little hints of ginger, clove, even cinnamon hiding in there.  There is a touch of licorice in the aroma, thankfully for me not in the taste.

Heimkino eins

So this year things are a little different.  The German Film Festival goes on, but online.  On one hand, you miss the ambience of the theater, the crowd, the opportunity to listen to the director or actors talk to you about their work.  On the other, I'm not restricted by travel time or other obligations in my choices.  So I went all out, got my pass to all the films they're streaming.  Might as well fill my days still at home with something cultural.

SPOILERS

Freies Land/Un país libre It turns out the first film is a remake of a Spanish movie, of all things, one that won a bunch of Goyas a few years ago.  It's a police drama, with two detectives assigned to investigate a disappearance of two sisters, and in their poking around the small town and its characters they uncover some kind of underground plot to kidnap, torture and murder young girls on a yearly basis.  The setting is the old East just after German reunification, so people are not super excited for a cop from the West to come in and stick his nose in their business.  They are getting a little sick of Western German capitalism already, with its cheaper prices on products meaning lower wages for them.  They seem equally unexcited to have an ex-Stasi there too.  The Western detective is suspicious and a little condescending about his new partner's methods, telling him he can't just beat information out of informants in a democracy.  The taciturn townspeople don't give them many other options, though.  As the days go on and the detectives uncover more clues about what is really happening to girls who everyone thinks have just run away to Berlin or another big city in search of opportunity, threats start to come their way, even against the Western detective's family in Hamburg.  They persist, however, and manage to pin the kidnappings on "Handsome Charlie", who had dated many of the missing girls, and was leading another one off to slaughter right under their noses.  The detectives save her and kill another man who is part of the murder ring, but they don't quite get to the head of the organization.  Still, they are treated as heroes for saving the girl and arresting at least one of the culprits.  The Western detective has developed respect for his partner over the course of the movie, although a journalist does make him wonder about his Stasi past.  The partner explains that it was a misunderstanding, and he was just covering for a colleague who lost control, saying that he will always have his parters' backs no matter what.  This calms the Western detective's suspicions, until the end when the journalist shows him photos of his current partner aiming his pistol at protestors and standing over their bodies lying in the street.  He leaves the town, refusing to give his now former partner a lift to Rostock.  One thing that seemed very odd to me in a German setting, but less so in a Spanish one, is the psychic.  She tells the detectives that they have to check out an abandoned farm outside of town, and there they find a purse in a well and eventually the bodies of both sisters.  The psychic and her husband work on a fishing boat in the river, but apparently they all make more money from drug smuggling.  The boss of the operation gets his underlings to tell the detectives some things they had seen in exchange for the police leaving the river, and the smugglers, alone.  The drugs are something I wouldn't think as out of place, but the psychic doesn't seem very German to me, and even less in just barely ex-communist Germany.  Maybe they did have people like that in small towns, but it feels a lot more natural in a Spanish movie or series.  It would be bizarre if that character wasn't in the Spanish movie (La isla mínima, if you're curious).

Did I have a German beer with my movie?  I actually had one from a few days before that I got as part of a selection of German styles.  The beer stores have been more limited in their services for a while, but they have not abandoned us.  The first out of the box was Augustiner Helles Vollbier, a good standard German style.  I found it a little oddly toasty, but overall tasty.  Not as much grain as some German beers throw at you.  A good balance in sweet and bitter, very mild and easy to drink, but with a presence in the mouth.  It's not watery, but not overly forceful either.  The beers in the film were pilsners, and probably not quite as nice.

no beer (sob)

spoilers ahead!!

And there had to be a last movie, since everything comes to an end.  It was Das Ende der Wahrheit/El final de la verdad/Blame Game (who's doing crazy title translations now?).  This is a political thriller, in which a journalist is murdered for asking questions that are hitting too close to home for the German secret service, and her boyfriend decides to do some digging himself.  Her boyfriend is, in fact, a secret service agent, which she knew, although she didn't know his real name, apparently.  There are some power shifts in the agency and the boyfriend finds himself blocked out of important decisions and missions, because he favors keeping sanctions on a Middle Eastern leader who has connections to a "legitimate" mafia organization, which has connections to the German secret service.  This organization is involved in "security" and "stability", providing logistic support for humanitarian organizations as well as shipping arms and components that can be used to manufacture them.  The boyfriend pulls some strings and gets information on the links between members of the secret service and the leader and his lackies, despite being run off a lonesome highway, injected with alcohol and left as a drink driver in the police station.  The underling to the mafia-secret service agent has a change of heart when he realizes that nothing in the whole situation is about the safety of the nation or peace anywhere on earth, and he decides to tell the agency director what he knows along with the boyfriend.  They manage to catch the director at the airport about to fly to the small country in question, bordering Pakistan in this movie universe.  Their convoy is attacked and almost everyone dies - except the boyfriend.  He returns to Germany to recover from his injuries and try to build a relationship with his daughter.  While she is staying at his house for the weekend, he realizes that a matryoshka doll was missing from his girlfriend's house the last time he was there.  He had been given her belongings from the hospital since nobody else claimed them, and the doll is in the box.  It contains a tiny digital camera with a film of a meeting between the logistics company and members of the German secret service, plotting to end trade restrictions and make all the money selling weapons in the Middle East.  With this recording, the boyfriend finally gets the higher-ups to take notice and take action against this agent.  What he doesn't show is that his friend in the agency, who is now going to take over as director, was also at the meeting.  He says now she'll have an obligation to cut ties with the logistics company, and take out the assassin who orchestrated the murder of the journalist, which she does.  The boyfriend goes back to the journalist's lakeside cabin and slides into the water off the pier, maybe trying to show her that he is involved in things (in the first scene she is swimming and he tells her he prefers the view to the experience).

I think I did alright this year, being a little limited in my schedule.  The films I saw were all enjoyable and not such big surprises as there have been other years.  Little surprises I guess, but pleasant ones.  They were varied in genre too, which is nice.  The only thing I miss is a good classic, black-and-white.

smoke and clocks

I still need something suitable for German films, but German craft beers are like Czech ones in that they do not travel.  There are German beers, mind you.  Just not a whole great many.  Schlenkerla is pretty much limited to the beer stores, and it's not a great wonder.  After the tastelessness of industrial Spanish beer, a rauch would really put you off.  But, there's also Schlenkerla Helles Lager, which is maybe another thing.  The label does warn that it's a little smoky, but that just makes it a unique specimen.  

It certainly looks like most typical lagers, with its light color and near transparency.  It's mostly fields of grain in the aroma, but yes, there is a touch of smoke there too.  At first the taste is like a watered down version of the rauchbier, not with less flavor, just with less robust substance, but a little sourness also seeps out at the end.  The smoke is upfront and tough, but that sort of bacony flavor that rauchbiers have makes you want to go back and make sure it's really what you were tasting.  It's a beer that definitely calls out for a little snack to go with it, preferably something a little salty, maybe greasy.  Actually, fried cheese sounds really good right now...

Supplier: La Birratorium
Price: €2.60
 
spoilers ahead!!

 
The second film for me this year was Cleo - If I Could Turn Back Time, which purported to be an exploration of urban legends in the city of Berlin while the characters looked for treasure with an old map.  Cleo is another woman with bright red hair who dresses in bright colors through most of the movie, and is also surrounded by blue in a number of scenes.  She is born in front of the Berlin Wall, about to come down, where the crowds prevent her parents from getting to a hospital and her mother dies during her birth.  Her father does his best to maintain a joyful life with her, taking her on magical adventures in the city, but when they are digging for a time machine they hit an old WWII bomb, which explodes, killing her father and leaving her alone in the world.  From then on she makes a rule for herself never to get close to anyone because it will kill them.  She ends up working as a tour guide, and when a man comes in asking for somebody to guide him through a treasure map, she can't help herself and dives back into the world of secrets and hidden fun that she had with her father.  Her elderly neighbor, who is always asking her to visit, authenticates the map, and Cleo promises to visit her.  She also starts to get closer to the man with the map and his exuberant spirit for adventure.  They pick up a couple of strange thieves/misfits he knows to break open an old safe, and later to break into an abandoned spy station that was built over the burial site of the treasure.  Before they know where exactly the treasure is, Cleo has a vision of the makers of the map, a pair of bank robbing brothers from the 1920s, and they give her the code to reading the map after she promises to make sure everyone remembers them.  When they finally read the map and finalize the plan to break into the mountain, Cleo goes home and finds her neighbor has died, and she realizes she never visited her, even though she meant to.  Her feelings have killed another person in her life, and she starts pushing the map man away.  In the depths of the mountain they separate and she finds the treasure, but the space it's buried in starts collapsing.  She manages to drag the trunk up the tunnels to the map man, but the tunnel collapses on him, killing him.  Cleo frantically goes back to save her mother even if it means she herself will die, which apparently happens because everything stops and disappears.  She is in a void, alone, except for a version of her younger self, which tells her if she isn't born nobody can find the time machine to save her mother, therefore nothing can happen.  If she chooses to save herself pain, nothing will ever happen, but if she chooses to feel, the world and all the joys and pains of everyone will exist.  She returns to the moment of finding the treasure, but when the collapse begins this time she leaves it behind.  Without the trunk, she and the map man get out alive, but he is so hurt by her past rejections that he disappears with plans to leave the city.  Cleo realizes she wants to risk pain in order to feel love and finds the map man at his houseboat, and projects a video onto the bridge to admit her feelings.  The end of the movie is a little too heartstring-tuggy for my taste, but I guess it's fine for people who really want that happy ending.  Cleo is giving tours still, but to children, who are doing treasure hunts all over the city, learning about the people who made each part famous or interesting, including the bank robbing brothers.  Then, the map man shows up with his daughter, and it's clear that he and Cleo are together.  The ghosts of past residents of the city look on approvingly, including her parents, together in the afterlife.

The main actress and the director were in town for the showing, but the actress had to leave before the film was over to catch a plane.  She told us before the showing that she was very proud of the film and it was a project that was close to her heart, and we all applauded and settled in to watch.  Then, as she left she waved and said, "Adios!" to the audience, and we automatically replied and waved too.  Some people next to me said she seemed so nice, what a shame she had to leave.  The director did have time to talk a little at the end, although he also had a plane to catch, and he even spoke Spanish.  Not perfectly, but quite well, although he said he had forgotten a lot of words.  Asked about the genre of the film, he proudly said it wasn't easy for anyone to classify, although he would settle for it being a romantic comedy.  German audiences found it a style suitable for children's film, which occurred to me as well at several points in the film.  I also thought there was a touch of Amelie, with the colors, the fantasies from Cleo, and some of the quick cuts.  It turns out the director's wife is French, so maybe that's where that came from.  Although I was hoping for an adventure or fantasy movie over a romance, it's an enjoyable film, with a sort of quirky indie feel to it.  And if there's anything to take away, it must be have no regrets.

no zombies here

I'm a little whistful, thinking of those packed shelves in Hamburg, laden with German craft beers.  Oh sure, there are German beers available in Madrid, but they all have that solid Teutonic calm about them, knowing they're just fine and not being too interested in taking risks with flavors and ingredients.  Oh, that's not a reference to anybody's film industry, is it?  In any case, there are some seasonal offerings, like Ayinger Frühlingsbier.  I haven't actually checked, it might be available all year, but it has a suitable name.

A little spluttery to open, but not too foamy when poured.  Light straw color, almost rosy gold, clear and with a moderate snowy white head.  The scent is a little off-putting actually, a sort of sour graininess that you get with a number of German blond beers, but the taste is quite different from the smell.  Not sour at all, mostly sweet in a clean and "natural" sort of way, just a hint of bitter underneath.  It's very light and practically evaporates in the mouth, a real spring-like beer.  Warmed up there is a little perfume poof, but it's pretty subtle and doesn't distract from the overall cleanness of flavor.

Supplier: La Birratorium
Price: €2.90

spoilers ahead!!


There is no classic film this year, which grieves my heart a little, but there have been past years without it and it's come back.  I'll try to be patient and optimistic.  There does seem to be a theme of apocalypse though.   Lots of last people on earth and stuff.  The first film did have zombies, although they aren't a super huge part of the story.  Endzeit involves two women who sneak out of one of the last cities on Earth to get to another one, where the zombie disease is being treated instead of having everybody infected killed immediately.  They're the typical tough girl and not-so-tough girl, and do not appear to be getting to be good friends through most of their interactions, even though the tough girl saves the soft girl from a zombie or two and the soft girl fixes the tough girl's camera.  Both of them are haunted by the people they let die in the initial outbreak, although the tough girl is haunted by a crowd of strangers she locked out of a building while the soft girl is haunted by her own little sister.  The soft girl actually wants to find her sister and have some closure, while the tough girl was scratched by a zombie at some point and is going to see if she can be cured.  They irritate each other and separate, and we see the soft girl get stalked by a zombie they had run into before, but she is saved by a sort of Mother Earth.  This woman, whose face is half vegetation, tells her that the disease was always with us but we made the conditions right and the loss of most of humanity is simply natural.  The tough girl ends up buried in Mother Earth's garden and the soft girl pleads for her remaining life, which Mother Earth grants, although she says there's no hope.  The tough girl leads the soft girl off, even though she had promised to stay with Mother Earth, and eventually they get attacked by a huge herd of zombies.  The tough girl sacrifices herself after closing a fence behind the soft girl, who runs off and ends up in a seemingly abandoned mansion.  She wanders around looking for food and comes across some candy and a book in braille.  Then the zombified owner of the house shows up, blind as he was in life.  He tracks her to the attic and they fight because she isn't graceful enough to sneak away and not strong enough to fight him off - at first.  One of her eyes gets gouged out by a rack of antlers she tried to defend herself with and that gives her enough adrenaline to push the zombie off her and smash his head in with a shovel.  She bandages her eye and leaves the house, leaving a sad dog loyal to his owner even beyond the grave behind.  She ends up in a wild place where she finds the body of a young girl in a red swimming suit, like she remembers her sister wearing.  The body is long dead and she lies down beside it to die herself, perhaps, but grass and other plant life begin to grow on her and she "wakes up".  She leaves her sweater with the body and goes on to find the other city.  As she looks at the fence and the city behind it, she realizes somebody is watching her, and she turns to find the tough girl, who is probably a fresh zombie, but certainly not alive.  The soft girl says the people in the city won't accept her and the two walk off hand in hand.

The movie is based on a graphic novel and it does have that typical color scheme for graphic novel-zombie movies, with everything kind of washed out.  The soft girl has red-dyed hair and in some scenes it's a very bright red, almost like her sister's swimming suit, and her clothes are a dark, bright blue in some early scenes.  The synopsis implied that there was some kind of ideological reason for the women leaving, some anti-patriarchy sentiment, but the movie doesn't show that explicitly.  At first the tough girl clutching her abdomen in private makes it seem like she's hiding a pregnancy instead of a zombie wound, which is a normal symbol of women escaping The Man's control by taking control of their own bodies, but it's also pretty normal in a zombie movie for somebody to be secretly infected and only slowly transform for dramatic effect.  The soft girl tries to kill herself in the bathtub and is cured by a shadowy figure who says, "You'll be needed again tomorrow," which is pretty creepy, but not quite Gilead-like.  It's not a bad zombie movie, although the typical fan of such things would probably be disappointed by the sweetness of the ending.