Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 8/30/2018
What I’m watching: a highly eccentric film by Terry Gilliam, a mind-boggling German TV mini-series and Matt Groening’s latest creation.
On Netflix: Babylon Berlin, Disenchanted
I love the great German director Fritz Lang – the filmmaker who gave us movies such “Metropolis,” “M”, “Woman in the Window,” “Scarlet Street,” and “While the City Sleep.”
In both his German work and his American films, he was noted for his jaded cynical attitude in some – his film noir productions are legendary – but he was also quite capable of romance and sentimentality.
This TV series is in many ways what Lang would have done if he was alive today and had the resources. It is an epic story set in 1929 in the Weimar Republic, an era of German history characterized by advances in art as well as political turmoil that eventually led to the rise of Adolph Hitler.
The story has many threads that are expertly woven together. The central figure is Rath (Volker Bruch) a detective from Cologne assigned to Berlin to track down the man who is blackmailing his father.
One of his principal aides in his investigation of Charlotte (Live Lisa Fries) a young woman determined to survive in the economically uncertain times. A part-time prostitute, she has acquired a job at the Police Department sorting grisly crime scene photos. She realized she has the ambition to be the first female detective on the force.
Rath is both helped and hindered by a vice detective named Wolter who seems to be his friend, but really is not.
At the same time, a train enters Berlin from the Soviet Union loaded with pesticide, but has another cargo: a car full of gold bars. Supposedly communist followers of Leon Trostsky have smuggled the bars out of Russia to aid him in his effort to overturn Stalin, but something else is happening.
A group of German army officers also want the train for their own sinister purposes.
The writers and director are not only scrupulous in presenting the complex story in an orderly way, but they have paid close attention to the history of the times. The result is an amazingly rich and satisfying drama.
The Netflix version is dubbed into English – I would have preferred hearing the actor’s own voices – and that is my only quibble.
Lang would have been proud I’m sure to see his influence.
Disenchantment
Cartoonist Matt Groening doesn’t need to keep creating – his successful shows “The Simpsons” and “Futurama” have made him rich – but clearly he wants to keep creating and his latest animated series is very good and very different than his previous ones.
“Disenchantment” is a serial with 10 chapters that ends in several cliffhangers. It’s a comic commentary on medieval fantasy set in the kingdom of Dreamland where Princess Bean, a rambunctious but amiable 18 year-old, is trying to find her purpose in life.
Her two closest companions are a demon in the form of a cat sent to lead her astray by some unknown enemies and an elf named Elfo who has been exiled from the elf kingdom.
Bean likes to drink and fight and is generally a thorn in the side of her father King Zog.
For Groening this is the first time his main character isn’t a complete idiot. Bean is likable but confused by what she should be doing in life and she gets no support from her father.
I liked the look of the series as well as its broad scope and teasing storylines. I can’t wait for the next series to start.
On Blu-ray: Tideland
I generally love the work of director Terry Gilliam, but he is known for his excess at times and this 2005 film is the most eccentric and self-indulgent production I’ve ever seen of his.
Essentially a film about child abuse that is presented in with an odd “Alice in Wonderland” sensibility, “Tideland” follows Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a nine year-old girl whose father Noah (Jeff Bridges), a former rock star, is now an addict living in a haze.
Noah brings his daughter to a farm he once bought, now abandoned and promptly overdoses and dies. Jeliza-Rose is left to her own resources with her only friends her four doll heads with whom she talks.
The only other people in her life are neighbors, Dell (Janet McTeer), a woman who was stung in the eye and blinded by a bee and lives in fear of them and her brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) who had a severe brain injury. Oh, and Dell is seriously into taxidermy.
In turns out Dell was in love with Noah when they were young and when she discovers his body; things take a really hard left turn to Weird Town.
This is supposed to be a funny, magical look at a child’s inner life, but instead it’s about her and the adults who abuse her. A sub-plot of the adult Dickens professing his romantic love for Jeliza-Rose is thoroughly creepy.
Arrow Video has done its usual great job in packaging interesting extras, but the film left me cold.