MAMMUTH - forget all this art bollocks, just give me an extremely fat Frenchman on a motorbike. Absolute genius.
The competition is about to reach its annual orgasm of tiny, shiny bears, but don't ask me for predictions. Despite my determined efforts to neglect the rest of the festival this year so that I'd have an informed opinion at this stage, I find that I have only seen eleven of the twenty competition films.
So I have no idea who will win what and when I find out, there is a good chance I won't know who the fuck they are. I might as well have been at a jazz festival in southern Ukraine. Buggery bollocks. Why is this, even though the doorman with the earring and the posh glasses at the Berlinale Palast began to show unnerving familiarity whenever I hove into view? It's because of that bastard asterisk next to the title - the asterisk designating that although the film is 'in competition' it is in fact 'out of competition' - that asterisk makes the film a kind of Schrödinger's Cat, and I am drawn to the paradox. So I saw nearly all of them.
So, with my half-knowledge, here's my prediction/advice to the jury: just give all the bears to MAMMUTH, the vehicle for Gerard Depardieu's 'Wrestler' role. It's apparently the only funny and moving film that has not been slapped with a restraining order and ordered to stay at least 50 metres away from the competition and never phone it.
Here is the assessment of a German who has seen all of them (except he apparently wrote it yesterday, and so missed En Familie, The Killer Inside Me and Mammuth.) He reckons the Berlinale competition has become an embarrassing parade of mediocrity, and blames festival director Dieter Kosslick for "not understanding anything about art" and the selectors for being under the influence of certain distributors - interestingly, he identifies a German company responsible for five of the official selections.
Like this esteemed German, I also found a lot of the films a bit boring. But when it comes to choosing his favourite, it turns out he likes Caterpillar second best, an experience which I found similar to being repeatedly punched in the face by an angry child. So there you go. The competition is probably as good as it's ever been, this bitter bastard is probably just jealous of Kosslick, and it's all a big bag of bollocks anyway.
He did comment on "En familie" and hated it - sorry if I can't take someone like him seriously. Perhaps the fact that this was one of the standout films in the Competition means the rest wasn't brilliant, but the film was incredibly accomplished, moving, heartfelt, complex - what more do you want?
ReplyDeleteAh, thanks, missed that. Don't you think all this talk of a 'weak competition' is a bit overdone? I bet it wasn't that much better in the 70s.
ReplyDeleteI really wouldn't know about the Seventies, I'm not THAT old. But seriously, I don't think most people can judge it unless they watch the WHOLE Competition, and who does that? But I was definitely missing big-name films (except Polanski and Scorsese, and as much as I liked the latter, they were both pretty lightweight). What about films like "Up in the Air"? "Agora"? They were ready ...
ReplyDeleteBut seriously, from a film freak-perspective, it's the Forum and the Panorama, as well as the retrospective, that really count. I understand that the Competition needs to shape up in comparison with Cannes, Toronto, Venice because that's really all about who can piss farther.