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.

movie two

First I had to find another German beer.  Somehow, there are fewer in the shops than I remember, but I got me a couple for the rest of the festival.  Andechs is in the better bars, but I don't think I've brought it home.  Andechser Doppelbock Dunkel seems like just the thing for a sort of sci-fi movie, you know, to go with those dark, German twists and turns.  It has the color of a nice red ale, actually, brown but with a ruby tinge.  The smell is not particularly strong, but typical of German beers.  It tastes very much like German lagers at first, but without the sort of grassy aftertaste I often find.  It's a bit sweet, but also very smooth.  It's a happy taste, something I'd have enjoyed in groups around the Kneipe table, yelling out trivia and waving down servers for more onion rings.  It's a lot happier than the second movie, it turns out.

Might be wanting a drink after

Supplier: Cervecissimus
Price: €2.70

spoilers ahead!

My second film was part of the Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk cycle the festival is running this year.  One of the cycle was actually a classic 1920s film, but my schedule just didn't allow me to see it.  Oh, well.  Wir Sind die Flut/Somos el diluvio (there's no English title, apparently) is about a modern natural mystery, in a world where the sea pulled away from a small town on the German coast in 1994.  Nobody can explain why this happened, and even stranger, why all the children but one disappeared from town that day.  Now the town is under military guard at the outskirts, but tourists are allowed in to sea the empty coast and marvel at the strangeness of it.  A physics student at Humboldt University has made up his mind to figure out what happened by taking painstaking measurements and calculating some kind of gravitational anomaly.  He's so set on doing this that he leaves with a forged permission for his study, equipment stolen from the lab, and the help of his advisor's daughter, who was once his classmate.  They find the town quiet and creepy.  The owner of the pension they find a room at is suspicious but takes their cash payments, one man mistakes one of the students for his son, and another man tells them angrily to leave town.  Then they meet the last child, who is now about 20.  She wishes the feeling in the town would change, go back to normal, but she seems to have accepted that the other children are safe in some other place.  The students try to get measurements from a radio tower that was once in the sea but is now in the middle of restricted mudflats.  Somebody smashes the transmitter on the shore so they put on hazmat suits and walk out to the tower like astronauts on a mud planet.  Strangely, they don't seem to leave any footprints, but looking at the photos they took, the determined student sees a barefoot human footprint in the mud.  He runs back to the flats, takes off his shoe and steps in the mud.  Suddenly, a small boy appears in front of him.  He's distracted by people shouting on the shore and the boy disappears, but now he's obsessed with finding out who the boy is and how he can be there.  Meanwhile, his friend is talking to the last child and the man who mistook the student for his son.  She says she understands what it's like to lose somebody before you should, which is later clarified as an unplanned pregnancy, although we never learn if she had an abortion or gave the baby up.  She did go to Portugal, which doesn't sound like the place to get an quick and easy abortion to me, but what do I know, fortunately.  The last child starts filling the old swimming pool in an attempt to make things the way they were, and they notice that the water isn't level, even though the pool is.  This discovery excites the woman tremendously and she's ready to continue the investigation now, when she was ready to leave before talking to the last child.  The other student is now less interested in the water than in the boy and he discovers that the man who yelled at them before was the boy's father.  This boy did not disappear with the others, he died of some long illness the day all that happened.  The student goes to the man's house to get more information and sneaks into the boy's room.  He is shocked and delighted to see that the boy had the same toys and books that he did as a child, and had even made the same calculations about the anomaly as he did, before it happened.  There is some dust-up with the soldiers since they find out the permission he gave them is falsified, the pension owner is afraid they're causing trouble, and the confused old man kills himself.  The student takes off his shoes and walks out into the mud, where he sees all the children waiting for him.  The angry man finds a cassette in his son's room and plays it; the boy says he feels bad that his father doesn't know what to tell him when he asks, "Why?" - why he's going to die, I suppose - and he's figuring out a way to freeze time.  At the end of the tape he says he's going to take all the children to a place where nothing will change and nobody will ever die.  The adults listening to the tape all sit down in the bar and have shots.  Before they drink, the angry man says, "Maybe the children are in a better place now."  The student has disappeared and his friend returns to Berlin with her father, but when she goes to her apartment he is sitting out side the door to the building, where she said he wasn't the day she left for Portugal.  And back in the town, a wave washes up on shore.

I enjoyed most of the movie, but the ending bothered me.  First of all, it seems too magical.  Even though the boy supposedly calculated the way to access a place where time is frozen, now all you have to do is step in the mud with bare feet to find it?  And if he's with the children, how did he get to the woman's building?  Just zapped there?  Maybe he's a ghost, or a hallucination.  Also, despite the glowing treatment the boy is given in the film - he's a mathematical genius, he's a poor, sick boy, he has a heart of gold etc. - the fact that he just up and took all the other children with him without any explanation makes him a little asshole.  To a place where they won't grow up and die?  Little Peter Pan wannabe jerkass!  And the connection between him and the student is never explained, since the student made his calculations before he ever set foot in the town, and is too old to be a reincarnation of the boy.  It's too bad the director cancelled his visit to give us a talk about the film, because I had questions and I'm sure other people did too.