EXBERLINER Magazine's Berlinale Blog February 11-21, 2010

Day 11 - Final Mash-Up

2010-02-21T22:10:00.005+01:00

My traditional last-day cry for help came yesterday, so I don't have much to rounding up to do. The critical reaction continues to be luke-warm, though people agree that the Golden Bear winner, the Turkish film BAL, was a credible one. Weirdly, the critical reaction to JUD SÜSS was along the lines of "hm, it's a problematic portrayal that lacks a clear vision" rather than "It's a piece of shit created by an insane idiot." Which I found surprising. The mixture of embarrassment, despair and nihilistic delirium sort of engendered an entirely new emotion. But the best film was still Banksy's EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.

But the Berlinale is a brilliant institution, and the people of Berlin still love it, as this year's record ticket sales - 270,000 - show. So here's a good tribute: "Mashup trailers", created by a Berlin film student. Selected Berliners dance out the logo.

And in 3D

Benoît Delépine

2010-02-21T11:14:00.005+01:00

Benoît Delépine on his new movie "Mammuth" with Gerard Depardieu. from Exberliner on Vimeo.

The Turkish movie BAL won the Golden Bear (I've no idea) and the film industry once again celebrated its 'solidarity' with a child abuser, so here's my interview with one of the directors of MAMMUTH. Good times.

Day 10 - That Damned Asterisk

2010-02-20T18:30:00.004+01:00

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.

Day 9 - More Dad Bullshit

2010-02-19T15:05:00.003+01:00

Aleksi Salmenperä, writer and director of Bad Family, shows off his trendy t-shirt

A lot of American films are about fatherhood. Many, many, many. So many, in fact, that it's pretty much all of them. Even Hollywood films that are about something else are about fatherhood. Take Roland Emmerich's 2012, for example. Not about fatherhood, but about the end of the world. But the end of the world is really just a metaphor for how good a dad John Cusack is. The world is only healed when he gets back together with the mother of his kids, and the step-father is conveniently killed by the Earth's crust. In American films, dads get blamed for every evil in the world, including the apocalypse.

So it is with Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me, in the competition, about a psychopath who viciously beats two women to death. But only because his dad abused his sister. Otherwise, he would've grown up as a normal psycho. Dull, fake bullshit. Another American festival movie in which the dad is blamed for everything is Father of Invention, with Kevin Spacey. What would otherwise be a watchable comedy - maybe even close in spirit to Steve Martin's classic The Jerk - is completely ruined by the assumption that the dad is responsible for every evil in life and therefore everyone he has ever met has the right to shit on him. But it does have Johnny Knoxville falling over, so that's good.

A pretty good movie about being a dad is the Finnish comedy Bad Family. Here, the dad is as odd and freakish as any cheap Hollywood hack could want, but is also a real, well-drawn character and carries the audience's sympathy along with him. Overprotective parenting is driven to funny and satisfyingly dark extremes. And it's about time someone made a film about incest.

THOMAS VINTERBERG

2010-02-19T10:34:00.002+01:00

We meet Thomas Vinterberg, director of the competition movie SUBMARINO, and previously Dogme co-founder. This is by all accounts the most depressing movie at the festival. Denmark wins that prize every year. It is a matter of national pride.

Day 8 - Jud Süss

2010-02-18T14:35:00.007+01:00

Gives bad movies a bad name

There are bad films, there are terrible films, and there are movies that make your facial muscles twist up while your intestines attempt to make a hernia. And then there's Oskar Roehler's Jud Süss, depicting the making of the wartime Nazi propaganda film of the same name. It's so bad it makes your arms ache and all your organs shut down. Sometimes it is so bad you actually start experiencing a kind of sacred delirium, as felt by medieval monks and Native Americans on peyote, and you float into a parallel universe where Mel Brooks is God and break down laughing helplessly. But this film would make Mel Brooks blush and start a lecture tour about good taste. You'll be left staggering out of the cinema like a deer waking up from a heavy dose of rohypnol.

Moritz Bleibtreu plays Goebbels. He waggles his arms a lot. A LOT. It's a virtuoso display of arm-waggling. He must have had coaching from a professional arm-waggler. In fact, he must have spent six months on a special arm-waggling training camp. Actually, what am I saying? Talent like that you can't teach. Bleibtreu must have started waggling his arms aged 3 and kept working on it until he became the student and protege of a celebrated arm-waggler at aged 6, shortly after which he gave his first solo waggling. After that he won various young waggler's competitions, forfeiting a normal childhood and being emotionally stifled by his overbearing mother, who was obsessed with his career. All he ever cared about was waggling his arms.

This is a spectacularly bad, grotesque, horrific film. It redefines the concept of 'bad' in a way never before imagined by the human mind. You must see it.

Day 8 - In Defence of Frustrated Artists

2010-02-18T11:45:00.001+01:00

Working on a screenplay

You'd think there'd always be a frisson in the air at these press screenings. You'd think there'd be a prickly dissatisfaction, what with all these frustrated artists sitting about, judging and condemning, jaded by their tired unchanging opinions.

But much as I love Anton Ego's soliloquy at the end of Ratatouille, I think critics often make the most passionate and sensitive audience. And being a failed artist is no shame. You have to be failed artist to make a good critic.

Day 7 - Weak Competition

2010-02-17T19:21:00.002+01:00

Keep driving, Marty! We're getting the hell out of that competition.

Everyone says it's a weak competition this year. People say this every year, but this year my mate Ingo said it, and he's my most trusted source for movie opinion, even if he is a German film student. I can't help but agree, though I can't remember the competition being that much stronger in other years.

For what it's worth, here's my incomplete round-up.

HOWL - The story of Allen Ginsberg's obscenity trial + embarrassing animations. Quick capsule review: Turdburger

MY NAME IS KHAN (out of competition) - Bollywood style 9/11 soap featuring annoying autism acting. Quick capsule review: Please stop doing that face.

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE - tense Romanian young offenders drama. Quick capsule review: stark, scary and well-acted. But should he should chill out about his mum.

SHUTTER ISLAND (out of competition) - Scorcese does Hitchcock. Quick capsule review: Lightweight and silly, but very entertaining.

A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP - Chinese re-make of the Coens' Blood Simple, re-imagined in medieval China, as a farce. Quick capsule review: Bizarre and weirdly perfect in its old-fashioned way.

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (out of competition) - Banksy documentary. Quick capsule review: Fucking brilliant.

CATERPILLAR - Japanese amputation fun. Quick capsule review: AAARRGGHH!

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (out of competition) - American liberal lesbo-comedy. Quick capsule review: Really good acting and lovingly realized characters. But they may extremely annoy you, and there are a lot of bad bits.

HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER - Russian movie set on an Arctic weather station. Only two characters. One of them makes a decision near the beginning which makes absolutely no sense and therefore ruins the rest of the film. Quick capsule review: JUST TELL HIM!

Where does this leave us? Only one stand-out film (EXIT). The rest: Meh. What's for dinner?

Wang Quan'an

2010-02-17T14:49:00.001+01:00

Interview with Director Wang Quan'an - Berlinale 2010 from Exberliner on Vimeo.

Watch our exclusive interview with the director of the opening movie APART TOGETHER.

Day 6 - Japanese Porn Night (Amputation Special)

2010-02-17T01:59:00.006+01:00

In The Realm Of The Senses - a red cloth to a German policeman

Sometimes things just fall into place so neatly. Tuesday night turned into Japanese porn night for me, when I watched two Japanese movies involving a lot of sex and a bit too much amputation. The first was the dire competition movie Caterpillar, in which a WWII soldier returns home deaf, dumb, and with both arms and both legs amputated. Unfortunately, the one limb he still has is the one that got him into trouble in the first place - despite having come home highly decorated as a war-hero, flashbacks tell us that he was a rapist, and his vicious crimes may have led to his injuries. I managed to sit through the amputee sex with his long-suffering wife, but left when he finally went nutjob and bashed his head on the floor for what felt like half an hour.

But talk about out of the frying pan - what happened to be next on my schedule? None other than Nagisa Oshima's astounding sado-masochist classic In The Realm Of The Senses, being shown in the Retrospective section. This film, certainly some kind of ancestor to Caterpillar, but superior in every way, was confiscated by the German police after its first Berlinale screening in 1976, and faced censorship everywhere it went. But pornographic as it is, it is unlikely to make you very horny. At least not when things start winding up towards the end. Weirdly, it is a kind of anti-Caterpillar, because the male lead gets to keep his arms and legs, but is less fortunate in other areas ...

BEN FOSTER

2010-02-16T19:39:00.001+01:00

Ben Foster - Berlinale 2010 from Exberliner on Vimeo.

EXBERLINER's video-blogging, self-facilitating media node catches up with Ben Foster, one of the jurors in this year's competition. In case you were wondering, this is not the Ben Foster who is Manchester Utd's reserve goalkeeper. I don't think this Ben Foster ever spent a season on loan to Watford. Though by the look of him, it might have done him good.

Day 6 - Seat Saving Protocol

2010-02-16T11:09:00.001+01:00

This just in from one of our correspondents.

Before a press screening yesterday, a man described as a "pudgy, pale, and bitter-sounding German journalist" returned to a seat he had saved with his coat and bag from a previous screening. He found his things on the stairs, and the female journalist sitting in his seat said, "What, did you think we were in Majorca?"

According to eye-witnesses, his reaction was to have her banned from the entire festival. At the time of writing, it was not clear whether our pudgy protagonist was able to back up his threat.

I believe that by Berlinale protocol he was in the wrong. The accepted rule is that you can only save a seat by leaving your stuff on it in the same screening. This is defined as the time the door staff opens the auditorium. If you have left your stuff there from a previous screening, it automatically becomes trash and/or a security hazard. The German journalist was lucky his bag wasn't disposed of with a controlled explosion.

Does this kind of thing happen at Cannes?

Day 5 - Best Film At The Festival

2010-02-16T02:23:00.004+01:00

This is not him.

I've only seen about a dozen of the 400 or so films at the festival, but this is still the best one. A film by and featuring the artist Banksy, called Exit Through The Gift Shop. But it's not about him, but someone far more interesting, a Frenchman called Thierry Guetta who likes videoing things. You will fall in love with him. But is any of it true?

I'd call it the film of the festival, but unfortunately it was already the film of the Sundance festival in the USA. So it'll just have to make do with being the best film here.

TILDA

2010-02-15T15:13:00.002+01:00

Tilda Swinton from Exberliner on Vimeo.

Day 5 - There's rich and then there's wealthy

2010-02-15T09:32:00.002+01:00

We own the colour blue.

On the margins of the Berlin film festival there is something called the European Film Market. No-one cares about it, and you need a special accreditation to get in. It is the boring bit, or if you prefer, the "commercial arm" of the festival. There is even a special secret mini-bus service that transports EFM people from venue to venue, so that they don't have to walk in the snow. They go to special screenings of films you will see in two years time. Or not. They will decide.

This is where the film industry is made - those unassuming, balding men in nice shirts, holding court to desperate screenwriters in quiet corners of cocktail bars. Those men write Leonardo DiCaprio's cheques then go and have breakfast. Here you go Leonardo, go and buy yourself a bouncy car.

Here are some of these men, taking part in an "Industry Debate" on whether the Traditional American Movie Studio is dead or not. (I had no idea what they were on about. But apparently it is - and it isn't. I think the Traditional American Movie Studio is like Schrödinger's Cat. Depends whether you look in the box.) In case you're interested, the boffins at this table include representatives of Universal, Studio Canal, and some talent agency in America so powerful no-one has ever heard of it.

As Chris Rock said, there's rich and then there's WEALTHY

Day 4 - I've got a bag

2010-02-14T13:18:00.002+01:00

So much shinier than normal bags.

Three years of Berlinale, and I finally worked out where you get the bags from. It is pictured above. It's the one on the right. It's got that rich, lovely new plastic smell of new plastic stuff from school, and has a range of useful inside pockets.

Good thing: it lists every one of the 15,000 or so films ever shown at the Berlinale on it. Well, quite a lot of them.

One drawback: since the plastic is rather stiff, if you have the strap too short, it's hard not to slap yourself in the face when you open it.

Another drawback: when you walk around the city, everyone who sees you thinks: "You're a twat." It might as well just have "I'm a twat" written on it in big purple letters.

Day 3 - Gollum and I

2010-02-14T02:09:00.002+01:00

Keep still Master Frodo, I think there's a Nazgul behind us.

Other kids had other unhealthy desperations, but I loved Middle Earth. Not only did I work my way through the Silmarillion, I read the Unfinished Tales, the Lost Tales, the Lays of Beleriand (no, don't ask) including all of Christopher I-love-my-dad-a-little-bit-too-much Tolkien's footnotes. Masturbation, an Atari ST, Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - I was a simple boy with simple pleasures.

The Lord of the Rings movies came several years too late for me, as did Jurassic Park, the Arctic Monkeys and blowjobs, and when they did, the movies did not measure up to my childhood visions, faithful though they were. But Gollum was brilliant - a conflicted character of Shakespearean power, riven with shame, addiction and guilt. Far more interesting than Frodo, portrayed by Peter Jackson merely as a repressed homosexual (I couldn't remember this from the books.) The scenes in which treacherous Gollum bullies loyal Gollum were easily the most instantly dramatic, darkly powerful and psychologically persuasive. Except maybe for the bit with the battle elephants. But then I'm a sucker for an armoured pachyderm.

And here he is! Andy Serkis himself, promoting another astounding performance as British punk/reggae legend Ian Dury, in the great movie Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Serkis does it astutely, balancing the theatrical and the vulnerable. The original Blockheads also play all the backing music. If only someone outside the UK had heard of Ian Dury (who coined the titular phrase), we'd be onto a winner.

Day 3 - If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle

2010-02-13T11:37:00.002+01:00

We'll need to call the glazer again.

Things starting to pick up on the competition front. Just saw a Romanian film. Romanian films have started to attract more attention in the last few years, ever since that abortion drama that everyone says is amazing which I am too scared to see - the word "harrowing" frequently appears in connection with it. One of those words that have been invented by and for film critics, but how come the verb is never used? "This is going to harrow me." Or, "I felt very harrowed.")

But those Romanians, they are very good at harrowing people. This one, entitled If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle, was also very harrowing. It harrowed the willies out of me. It was a bit like one of my favourite movies, Cool Hand Luke, but set in an unbelievably dilapidated youth detention centre - with some very brittle windows - and with fewer funny bits. A young man is about to be released, but his mum wants to leave the country and take his little brother with him. He hates his mum, because he thinks she abandoned him. He allows himself to be bullied, fearing that his release will be deferred, but various provocations ensue, and a horrible sequence of unplanned and harrowing events unfold, fuelled by all of life's frustrations. It's really harrowing. And a heavy pressure of violence hangs over everything, but is rarely released, which only increases the overall harrowment factor.

Now for the new Scorcese, Shutter Island. Looks like I'm in for another right old harrowing.

Day 2 - Khan

2010-02-12T18:11:00.002+01:00

Whatever you do, don't look!

Just saw another competition stinker - that's two onions from two. Although this one was one of those "out of competition" competition films, which I think means that they have a famous person in them, but are rubbish.

It was called My Name Is Khan, featuring Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan, whose star power was enough to bring squealing crowds as far as the Berlinale two years ago. In fact, in 2008, Newsweek magazine named Khan the 41st most powerful person in the world.

But this movie, sadly, is not an autobiography, which would, I suppose, have been interesting. It is a soft-centred 9/11 melodrama set in San Francisco. It turns out that Khan is also the 1st most unconvincing portrayer of mental illness in the world. His character has Asperger's Syndrome, the main symptoms of which are apparently a concentrated pout, looking in the opposite direction when anyone talks to you, and stumbling instead of walking. For the first hour I thought he was pretending to be blind.

A steady stream of people left the press screening, from around the 4th minute. My moment came when the movie decided to bring African American culture into its sentimental mix, leapt back 150 years, to around the era of Gone With The Wind. It was all barefooted children running around and hearty, big-busted women eating chicken and going to gospel churches. I suppose this is the Indian film industry getting its own back for Slumdog Millionaire.

Day 2 - Howl

2010-02-12T10:47:00.001+01:00

What a howler!

The first competition movie, always disadvantaged like the first entrant in a talent show, also went and started at the impossible hour of 8:30. On top of that it was in that most difficult of genres, the Poetry Film. In this semi-biopic of Allen Ginsberg, culminating in one of those quaint 'obscenity trials' they used to have in the olden days, they solve the poetry on screen problem by the old trick of animation. Ginsberg's epic, and epically dated, poem 'Howl' becomes a stream-of-consciousness cartoons that look a bit like a mobile phone advert.

Charming though the Ben-Whishaw-type main actor is, (he's called James Franco), this movie was not crying out to be made. The struggles of the 'beat' people, now seem so irrelevant to us, and with Ginsberg it seems as if it was fairly irrelevant then too - the obscenity charge against Howl was thrown out! So much for the big us vs. them moment. People knew what a poem was in the sixties too, even if they didn't like them.

But what the film does show really well, and what is kind of an insight, is what a hit 'Howl' was - the kids loved it as much as they did the Stones. And the scenes depicting Ginsberg's early readings in San Francisco are exactly like a successful poetry slam in Berlin in 2010. People all wrapped up in it, or cheering and laughing. But a period piece is still a period piece.

DAY 1 - Snow causes chaos in the north

2010-02-11T23:38:00.006+01:00

The Opening of the 60th Berlin film festival, 2010

It's the snowiest Berlinale in living memory. At least in my living memory, which lasts about six months, then it lies down weeping in the cold. Jesus, it's snowy. I stumbled around, blinded alternately by big white lights and snow, was molested by a Filipino doorman in the Hyatt, scrambled past some photographers on the red carpet - briefly coming within clutching distance of Joschka Fischer, of all people (he was with a fit bird) and saw one of the SS officers from Inglourious Basterds (the one who notices the wrong three fingers) - tried to work out which of the other Germans milling around might be famous (it's so hard isn't it? They all look equally beautiful/neurotic) - and singularly failed to blag my way into the opening film, which was the Chinese movie TUAN YUAN - "Apart Together." (Isn't it poetic that the words for 'Apart' and 'Together' apparently rhyme in Mandarin? Or maybe that's one of those false film titles like they do in Germany, when they think translating the actual film title would be too dificult, as in The Holy Grail being Ritter des Kokusnuss or Airplane! being Die Unglaubliche Reise in einem verrückten Flugzeug, which really is explaining too much or like Avatar, which in German is Avatar - Aufbruch nach Pandora, as in Avatar - Going To Pandora. Imagine if that were the English title. Hello, I'm an Avatar, and fuck me it looks like I'm going to Pandora. I don't think it would've broken any all-time records then. That would've wiped that smug look off James Cameron's shiny face. So maybe TUAN YUAN just means 'Spaghetti Lego' or something.) But I did see the trailer for Tuan Yuan, because I was near the big screen outside. It had a car in it. And some people laughing. Looks brilliant.

Berlinale Hits 60

2010-02-09T23:25:00.008+01:00

Ahoy there, you people, and welcome to the EXBERLINER's annual Berlinale blog!

Yes, sail with me, your own EXB correspondent, in the fluctuating, desperate, crazy world of the 60th film festival. Take temporary leave from your job, tell your family you will be home by Christmas, and dip into the silver magic forest full of colourful bears.

So the festival is turning 60 this month. But 60 is no age. Just ask my mum.

So what's good this year? Well, if you need recommendations, this is a good place to start. The EXB's very own interviews with its favourite film-makers at this year's festival.

In the competition, I'm looking forward to Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, mainly because my mate Stuart is in it. You can see him in the trailer and everything (left of Pierce Brosnan's head at the airport.)

Then there's Howl, all about Allen Ginsberg, not be confused with Greenberg, by the indie director Noah Baumbach, the man who made The Squid and the Whale, which everyone says is really good.

Obviously, I haven't seen any of these films yet. But that's the whole point, right?

By the way, if you're interested in the history of the festival, why not read this very informative and entertainingly written whistle-stop tour. It covers all the major scandals and features a picture of a woman smoking and balancing on a load of men.