The following post was created in a spirit of lighthearted fun. For those of you who fear I’m getting soft in my old age, please be aware that I’m working on a review of Hard to Be a God.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Austin, Texas, on a vacation with my wife Jill. So of course we had to visit several prominent locations from Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Our first stop was the legendary Continental Club, a live music venue that originally opened in 1957, and which had also played itself as a live music club in Linklater’s Slacker in 1991. Here is the club’s lovely exterior sign:
The interior of the Continental Club is quite small. It’s really more of a bar with a small stage than a club proper. Jill and I arrived at “happy hour” and enjoyed delicious margaritas (made with tequila, triple sec and lime juice – none of that “sour mix” b.s.!) for $3.50 a piece. We chatted with the friendly bartender and listened to Guns ‘N Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. Here’s a photo Jill took of me taking a photo of the stage where Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and his girlfriend Sheena (Zoe Graham) watched the bluegrass band The Austin Steamers play (please note the margaritas in the foreground):
Next we headed over to Book People, the largest independent bookstore in all of Texas. This is where the scene of Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) attending a midnight book-release party for Harry Party and the Half-Blood Prince was filmed (although the scene actually takes place in Houston). Sadly, they did not have my book, Flickering Empire, in stock:
Finally, we hit up the Magnolia Cafe where Mason and Sheena memorably ate queso at 3am while engaging in some typically Linklater-esque witty and philosophical dialogue. Jill and I can confirm that the queso is indeed amazing — though it wasn’t the very best that we had in Austin (that would be at Torchy’s Tacos). Here’s the cafe’s exterior sign:
And here’s Jill enjoying some of that famous queso not far from the booth where Mason and Sheena sat:
Although it has nothing to do with Boyhood, I wanted to also include a shot of the “Blu-ray vending machine” at the Alamo Drafthouse, further proof that Austin is one of America’s best city’s for cinephilia. The less said about the movie we actually saw at the Drafthouse, the new Poltergeist remake, the better. (Cut me some slack — Mad Max was sold out.)
1. Khrustalyov, My Car! (German)
2. Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller)
3. Hard to Be a God (German)
4. Fear of Fear (Fassbinder)
5. The Story of Adele H. (Truffaut)
6. INLAND EMPIRE (Lynch)
7. Sherlock Holmes (Berthelet)
8. Poltergeist (Kenan)
9. Supervixens (Meyer)
10. The Magic Flute (Bergman)
I originally wrote the following reviews of films by Dan Sallitt and Samantha Fuller for Cine-File Chicago back in January to coincide with theatrical screenings. The Sallitt films can be rented on amazon (and you really should see them if you haven’t already) and the Fuller doc is happily still enjoying theatrical engagements around the world (with a home video release coming eventually).
Dan Sallitt’s HONEYMOON and ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA (American Revival)
When the enterprising distributor The Cinema Guild picked up the low-budget comedy/drama THE UNSPEAKABLE ACT in 2012 it considerably upped the profile of writer/director Dan Sallitt, a New York-based critic and filmmaker whose sparse filmography (he’s made exactly one film per decade over each of the past four decades) constitutes one of the hidden treasures of independent American cinema. Beguiled Cinema, the programming endeavor of local critics Ben and Kat Sachs, has teamed up with Chicago Filmmakers to present this rare double-feature screening of Sallitt’s second and third films at Columbia College’s Film Row Cinema, an event that should be considered unmissable for local cinephiles. Both movies are visually austere, dialogue-based dramas centered on two characters in conflict. The earlier of the two, 1998’s HONEYMOON, is a mature and astonishingly frank portrayal of marriage about two old friends, Mimi (Edith Meeks) and Michael (Dylan McCormick), who decide to tie the knot on a whim. These urban professionals seem intellectually and emotionally compatible and their friends have long remarked that they would make the “perfect couple.” It isn’t until their honeymoon at a lakeside cabin in rural Pennsylvania, however, that they first attempt physical intimacy–in a series of awkward and halting encounters that must rank as the most honest portrayal of sexual dysfunction ever committed to celluloid. Mimi and Michael’s decision to stick out the marriage ultimately leads to an ambiguous finale that will likely serve as a Rorschach test for the personal philosophy of each viewer. What’s not in doubt is the phenomenal chemistry between Meeks and McCormick, who convey the evolution of a years-long relationship telescoped into just a few days. Even more compressed, and impressive, is the 64-minute ALL THE SHIPS AT SEA from 2004. The lean running time of this virtual two-hander, about a series of philosophically-inflected discussions between two very different sisters, belies the wealth of feeling and ideas that Sallitt has crammed into it: respectable Evelyn (Strawn Bovee) teaches theology at the college level while her estranged, potentially suicidal younger sister Virginia (Meeks again) returns home after being kicked out of a religious cult. As the women struggle to re-establish their former sibling bond, the notion of exactly who is helping who is kept tantalizingly in flux. New City’s Ray Pride will introduce the screening. The A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky will lead a Q&A afterwards. (1998 and 2004, 154 min total, 16mm and DVCam) MGS
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More info at http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org.
Samantha Fuller’s A FULLER LIFE (New Documentary)
With A FULLER LIFE, Samantha Fuller, daughter of maverick filmmaker Samuel Fuller, has made an unconventional but entertaining documentary about her father. The first-time director daringly eschews traditional interview segments in favor of having a dozen motion-picture luminaries appear before her cameras only to read excerpts from her dad’s superb, posthumously published memoir, A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking. Among the readers, most of whom worked with or were friends of the late, great Fuller, are: Jennifer Beals, Robert Carradine, Joe Dante, Bill Duke, James Franco, William Friedkin, Mark Hamill, Monte Hellman, Buck Henry, Tim Roth, James Toback and Constance Towers. Some misguided critics have damned A FULLER LIFE with faint praise by likening it to a mere star-studded “audio book” but this is hardly a fair analogy since many of the film’s pleasures are image-based. The “chapters” are visual records of the subjects reading their texts in a specific location, one that seems suffused with an almost mystical energy: Fuller pere’s legendary garage-office, a place affectionately known as “the shack,” which functions today as a virtual shrine to his impressive careers as newspaperman, soldier and filmmaker. Each segment is also cleverly intercut with scenes from both Fuller’s official oeuvre, from 1949’s I SHOT JESSE JAMES to STREET OF NO RETURN 40 years later, as well as home movie and documentary footage he shot throughout his life (including powerful wartime images of a recently liberated concentration camp in Falkenau, Czechoslovakia, footage that was recently added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry). Finally, the film’s most disturbing sequence, the Dante-narrated “Sicily Black and Blue,” is embellished by an inspired use of animation. All of this adds up to a fitting tribute to a vital American artist, one whose ballsy and highly personal “yarns” were both ahead of their time and inextricably tied to the colorful, adventurous life of their creator. As a writer/director, Sam Fuller may have specialized in genre fare (especially war movies, westerns and crime films) but, whether working as an independent or within the Hollywood studio system, he stamped everything he did with his outrageously entertaining, “yellow-journalist” style. Within his idiosyncratic idiom, Fuller’s commitment to racial equality, long before such a stance was fashionable in American cinema, looks especially interesting today. A FULLER LIFE is a must for Fuller’s admirers and an ideal introduction to his work for the uninitiated. (2013, 80 min, DCP Digital) MGS
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More info at http://www.siskelfilmcenter.org.
My latest blog post at Time Out Chicago concerns the two most important surviving Chicago-shot movies of the entire silent era: Charlie Chaplin’s His New Job (the only film he made in my fair city) and Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (the earliest surviving feature directed by an African American). Both will be released in newly restored editions on Blu-ray — from Flicker Alley and Kino/Lorber, respectively — in the next year. Read about it here.
At Cine-File Chicago, I have a review of Slow West, a new Michael Fassbender-starring western (from which the above still was taken) by the Scottish musician-turned-filmmaker John MacLean. It opens at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre tonight and I highly recommend it. Peep my review here.
1. Little Otik (Svankmajer)
2. Xala (Sembene)
3. Inferno (Baker)
4. Variete (DuPont)
5. Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller)
6. Creature from the Black Lagoon (Arnold)
7. Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock)
8. The Iron Mask (Dwan)
9. The Player (Altman)
10. House of Wax (De Toth)
The invaluable National Film Preservation Foundation is currently in the process of restoring a silent one-reel comedy titled Cupid in Quarantine from 1918. In order to raise funds to cover lab costs for its preservation as well as the recording of a new score to accompany its online premiere, the essential movie blogs Ferdy on Films, Wonders in the Dark, and This Island Rod are hosting the annual “For the Love of Film” blogathon. White City Cinema is proud to be participating in this blogathon again by contributing reviews of two silent masterpieces newly released on home video in new restorations: Variete and The House of Mystery. Please consider making a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundation, no matter how small, after reading my review. Film preservation is a very worthy cause!
My two favorite home video releases of the year so far are Flicker Alley’s DVD of Alexandre Volkoff’s 1923 “cliffhanger” serial The House of Mystery and Edel Germany GmbH’s Blu-ray of E.A. Dupont’s drama Variete from 1925. Both films deserve to be called masterpieces of the silent European melodrama and both feature plots that revolve around bizarre love triangles. Yet their virtues are ultimately as different from one another as are the virtues of the new discs that house them. Both films have been the recipients of painstaking new photochemical restorations although each new edition is not without controversy: Variete has been saddled with an anachronistic new score that has silent purists crying foul and The House of Mystery has been released on DVD only and not the superior Blu-ray format. I nonetheless will argue that both releases are absolutely essential for anyone who cares about silent cinema.
Variete (also known in the U.S. as Variety and Jealousy) was Germany’s biggest box office hit of 1925 and it’s not hard to see why. It came out during the height of the movement known as German Expressionism but, in spite of the extraordinarily fluid camerawork of Karl Freund (Metropolis) and a clever plot about the sinister goings-on within a circus, E.A. DuPont’s movie actually feels closer to the school of social realism with which directors like G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box) and Josef Von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) would soon make their mark. The film begins with a long-time prisoner, “Boss” Huller (Emil Jannings in an uncharacteristically restrained performance), breaking a 10-year vow of silence and telling his warden the tragic story, seen in flashback, of how he came to murder his unfaithful trapeze-artist wife (Lya de Putti). The whole thing is great but the undeniable highlights are the exhilarating trapeze sequences, the deft camerawork of which seemingly puts viewers smack-dab into the leotards of the performers, creating a thrilling “you are there” effect.
Previously available on home video only in poor-quality and truncated editions, this definitive restoration of Variete by the redoubtable F.W. Murnau Foundation adds more than 20 minutes of footage unseen since its original release. While the image quality on the Blu-ray is predictably superb, the only option for an audio track is a controversial new score by the British musical trio The Tiger Lillies. This retro-cabaret act’s score features sung lyrics (a no-no for silent films, according to many cinephiles) that comment directly on the onscreen action. Personally, I love it; most silent movies did not have official musical scores so I have to wonder what the point is of commissioning contemporary musicians to compose new scores for silent films if one is only going to handcuff them into imitating something one would’ve heard in a theater 100 years ago (e.g., a generic pastiche of 19th century folk tunes)? Contemporary viewers are, after all, watching digital versions of these films in their own living rooms, no? The musical score for a silent film need only be effective, I say, not attempt to function as some sort of time machine.
Until recently, The House of Mystery was for me an unknown quantity — a film I had never heard of by a director I had never even heard of — but I purchased it sight unseen anyway simply because it is drumming up excitement in certain cinephile circles. Directed by Alexandre Volkoff, a Russian filmmaker living in France, and co-written by Volkoff and his star and fellow Russian emigre Ivan Musjokine, this 10-chapter “cliffhanger” serial feels like the missing link between Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang. Like Feuillade’s Fantomas (1913), it begins with a montage of close-ups of Musjokine’s character, Julien, a master of disguise, posing in each of the many drastically different makeup jobs he will sport over the next six-and-a-half hours. Unlike Fantomas, Julien is not a master-criminal but rather a good-hearted factory owner who is framed for a murder he did not commit by the factory’s villainous director (Charles Vanel, later a favorite of Henri-George Clouzot) because he covets Julien’s beautiful wife (Helene Darly).
Also different from the serials of Feuillade is how The House of Mystery‘s narrative follows a single clean story arc. Feuillade’s capers were beloved by the Surrealists in part because of their “we’re making it up as we go along” quality (often a cyclical capture-and-escape narrative-loop structure that perhaps best finds a modern equivalent in the endless death-and-rebirth narrative-loop cycles of the Resident Evil series). The House of Mystery, by contrast, is closer to classic “hero’s journey” epics like The Odyssey and The Count of Monte Cristo in its portrait of a man who escapes from prison and spends years attempting to clear his name and reunite with his family. There are many astonishing set pieces along the way — including a wedding sequence depicted entirely in silhouette and an exciting prison-break/chase scene involving a hijacked train being pursued by mounted police. Flicker Alley’s release represents the first time The House of Mystery has ever been released on home video in any format and also serves as a reminder of how much our knowledge of film history depends upon the vicissitudes of fate. While a Blu-ray would have been preferable to this DVD-only release, you should definitely buy this anyway; it’s so good you won’t regret upgrading when and if a Blu-ray ever does hit the market.
You can make a donation to the National Film Preservation Foundationhere.
You can purchase a region-free Blu-ray of Variete from Amazon Germanyhere. (Chicagoans should note I will be introducing a screening of my own projected Blu-ray of Variete this Saturday, May 16, at Transistor.)
You can purchase The House of Mystery on DVD directly from Flicker Alleyhere.
1. The Wizard of Oz (Fleming)
2. Robin Hood (Dwan)
3. Prometheus (Scott)
4. Cool Apocalypse (Smith)
5. The Band Wagon (Minnelli)
6. Goodbye to Language (Godard)
7. Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller)
8. The Graduate (Nichols)
9. Three Times (Hou)
10. Resident Evil (Anderson)
The following Mad Max: Fury Road capsule review was rejected by Time Out Chicago since they informed me they already have a “network wide” review (i.e., one that appears in each of Time Out’s city guides), which they also informed me is usually the case with “big box films.” So I’m posting it here instead. Enjoy.
Forget The Avengers, Mad Max: Fury Road is the Summer Popcorn Movie You Need to See
Even if it weren’t any good, I would probably recommend Mad Max: Fury Road just because, as an R-rated “tent pole” movie, it’s something of an anomaly. I’m happy to report, however, that it’s more than good — it’s flat-out amazing from beginning to end, one of the leanest and purest pieces of action cinema I’ve ever seen. The film it reminds me of most is, believe it or not, Buster Keaton’s The General; the entire first half is basically one long heart-stopping chase from west to east and the second half one long heart-stopping chase from east to west. Exposition and the illusion of “character psychology” are refreshingly absent but it’s also full of the kind of highly idiosyncratic, occasionally surreal production-design touches that have always been director George Miller’s specialty (a combination electric guitar/flamethrower, chastity belts with metal teeth, etc.) and it’s all beautifully cut together (the shots match!) by his wife Margaret Sixel who had never edited an action movie before.
While Tom Hardy is credible as the laconic Max (a role originated by a then-unknown Mel Gibson), don’t let the title fool you: Charlize Theron, playing a kickass heroine with the irresistible name of “Imperator Furiosa,” is co-lead with Hardy and arguably the more important of the two characters. She’s the one on a specific mission — the details of which I won’t give away — while he’s more or less just along for the ride. Furiosa is also but one of several intriguing female characters in a movie that should satisfy fans of the earlier Max films while also offering surprises at every turn; the more I think about it, the more this action movie strikes me as genuinely subversive in its feminist bent — yet another reason why this is the one summer “popcorn movie” that everyone needs to see.
This Saturday, May 16, I’m introducing a screening of E.A. Dupont’s silent German masterpiece Variete at Transistor Chicago. I’ll be screening my German Blu-ray of the 2015 F.W. Murnau Foundation restoration, which runs 20 minutes longer than all previous home video releases (and one should note there are no plans for a North American release). The event is BYOB and admission is free. Here is the description I wrote for the Transistor website:
A major masterpiece of Germany’s silent film era, E.A. Dupont’s tragic, darkly ironic tale concerns a love triangle between trapeze artists that ends in betrayal and murder. Emil Jannings is at his best as the cuckolded husband but it’s the brilliant cinematography of Karl Freund (‘Metropolis’) that really makes ‘Varieté’ fly. Only released in the U.S. in truncated form, this 2015 restoration by the F.W. Murnau Foundation magnificently revivifies Dupont’s film to its original glory. (1925, R, 94 minutes)
Enrique Buchichio is a critic-turned-filmmaker and the director of La Escuela de Cine del Uruguay. His first feature, the gay coming-of-age drama Leo’s Room, is available to stream via Fandor and his second, Operation Zanahoria, recently had its North American premiere at the Chicago Latino Film Festival. I spoke with Buchichio at length about his terrific new film, a gripping procedural about political secrets and journalistic ethics in the vein of All the President’s Men. A fraction of that interview has been posted at Time Out Chicago, but I’m printing the unexpurgated version here.
MGS: It seems like every year there are more Uruguayan films playing in international film festivals. Is that a result of increased production in your country or are the films just being more widely distributed now?
EB: A little of both, I think. I think that the national visibility of Uruguayan cinema began in 2001, 2004 with the production of CTRL-Z films, which were the films of Juan-Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stall: 25 Watts, Whisky. At that time there began to be more interest in Uruguayan cinema. I don’t know why but, being a very small country, Uruguay produces eight, 10 films each year. But many of those films get attention from film festivals around the world. It’s a rare phenomenon, I think. I don’t know why. But at the same time it’s true that in the last five, six years, the production has stabilized. I think as a result of national funds for film production and because of the existence of a new generation of Uruguayan filmmakers who are making films in a more systematic . . . There’s no “film industry” in Uruguay yet but there is a group of people who make films.
MGS: And they’re coming out of the film schools?
EB: Basically, yeah. And some of them are people who studied cinema overseas before the existence of Uruguayan film schools and then came back home to make films.
MGS: One thing that’s impressed me is how diverse the films are. I saw an animated film . . .
EB:Anina.
MGS: Yeah! It was very charming and different from the animated films we’re used to seeing in the U.S.
EB: Very good, yeah. This was made by my schoolmates – the same generation.
MGS: No kidding. That played here at the Chicago Latino Film Fest last year.
EB: That’s wonderful, yeah. And now there are a wider diversity of films: horror films like Silent House (La casa muda). . . the director of Silent House (Gustavo Hernandez), which had its American remake, is releasing his second film this year. Local God, it’s called. So there’s more diversity in the films.
MGS: Your first film, Leo’s Room, is a very affecting story about one person’s coming to terms with his sexual identity but Zanahoria is very different, it’s more about society. Was it a conscious decision to make something more ambitious in terms of scope?
EB: Not really. The story just came out. I was, actually before the shooting of Leo’s Room, I read the story. It was a chronicle about the relationship between two Uruguayan journalists with an anonymous informant from the armed forces. And something just made a click with me about the good material for a movie and, at the same time, the opportunity to approach some of the open wounds from the military dictatorship in Uruguay, which is a very polemic issue in Uruguay. It’s a very dividing issue in Uruguayan society between the people who believe that there are still things to reveal and to process, and another half of the country who believe that it’s a closed chapter and we have to move on, don’t look back, etc.
MGS: Is it controversial to depict that in a film?
EB: Kind of. For me, the interesting thing about the story, which I adapted (because it’s a real story), is that it’s actually the state of things today in Uruguay – not only 10 years ago when the story took place, but today. Today, it’s the same thing: 10 years after, we are still trying to come to terms with the recent past, with the brutal years and trying to understand what it meant to Uruguayan identity, what some Uruguayan people did to each other because of their ideological beliefs. It was a brutal regime, maybe not so brutal as in Argentina – where it had a bigger scale in terms of the “disappeared,” the political prisoners – but for a small country, it made a huge impact on society.
MGS: That came through in the film very strongly, especially the scenes where the journalists were talking to the families of the disappeared. It’s funny; the dictatorship ended in the 1980s . . .
EB: Yeah, in 1985.
MGS: That seems so long ago to me, as an American, but I guess for those who lived through that era in Uruguay, the wounds are still fresh.
EB: Absolutely.
MGS: And one thing I thought while watching it is that maybe it was more suspenseful to someone like me, as an outsider, who didn’t know the history. I thought it was gripping because I had no clue what was going to happen. I was guessing until the end: I thought the information Walter was giving the journalists was going to affect the election in 2004. I was wondering if maybe people in Uruguay had a different reaction.
EB: Kind of. Many people knew that nothing really happened about the clearance of knowing who did what to whom but some people didn’t know about it. And some people actually don’t know today what happened those years in Uruguay.
MGS: Because they’re too young?
EB: Yes, there are younger generations who didn’t live through the dictatorship years and some people because they didn’t want to know. They preferred to ignore it. Or, because of ideological differences, some people are convinced that that was necessary – that the brutality and the prosecution of leftist militants was actually a good idea. To those people, it’s very difficult to make them understand that that was traumatic for Uruguayan society. So, many people knew what was going to happen in the movie and other people didn’t know how the movie was going to end. They were very, very trapped by the suspense.
MGS: And so the character of Walter was based on a real . . . I guess you could say he was a con artist, right?
EB: Absolutely. The real Walter, whose name is not Walter, is a former military who was expelled from the armed forces and he made a career as a con artist trying to sell information not only to the disappeared’s families but also journalists. Jorge and Alfredo were not the only ones. They were the only ones who published a story about it but there were other journalists who were victims of this guy. But they didn’t tell anyone because they believed that there was no story in that story. And, at the same time, it was like recognizing that you were deceived.
MGS: It’s a little embarrassing?
EB: Yeah, for a journalist, it’s embarrassing. But that’s why the movie made sense to me: it was very important to make the story public to a bigger audience.
MGS: Where did you first read the story, in a magazine?
EB: In the newspaper. When I was writing the screenplay for my first movie, a friend of mine recommended to me the reading of this article. I read it and I thought, “This is film material. This is the material for a film.”
MGS: For a thriller?
EB: For a thriller, absolutely. And then I put it away for a couple of months and then I read it again and I start to really think about the possibility of making an adaptation in film form.
MGS: Did you interview any of the people who were involved?
EB: Yeah. Afredo and Jorge, the journalists, they were my main source of information apart from the article, of course. They told me many things, many small things, that they didn’t publish but things that made for me a richer story: tiny details about the relationship with this guy, how he acted, how he talked, how he smoked. And then I interviewed other journalists who were victims of Walter. And then I also talked with some families of the disappeared. They were actually victims of Walter too. At that moment I realized that at some point in the story they, as families of the disappeared, should be in the movie because I think that it was important for the audience in Uruguay who didn’t know or didn’t want to know about this tragic episode. At the end of the day it is a human story. It is not only of political interest, it is not only a thing about journalists, it’s actually a human story of human importance.
MGS: Absolutely. It’s very emotional. The scenes with the families are heartbreaking. And there’s a feeling of paranoia that’s very palpable that infuses almost every scene. It’s similar to other procedurals like, obviously, All the President’s Men but also David Fincher’s Zodiac. Did you see that?
EB: Absolutely.
MGS: That’s one of my favorite Hollywood films of this century.
EB: Yeah, it’s wonderful. Yeah, it’s also a very kind of slow-paced thriller. Actually, many people didn’t like Zodiac because of that, because, I mean, there was no action.
MGS: The murders all occur in the first 26 minutes and the film goes on for another two hours and 20 minutes!
EB: Yeah. And at the end of the movie the guy didn’t get caught. You actually didn’t know what really happened. That is very frustrating for many people. With Zanahoria happened something like that – in a different way, of course. Many people thought, “What’s the point to make a film about the guy that didn’t get caught?” I mean, for me it’s very important and it’s very . . . it’s the same thing as the real story. It was very frustrating for the journalists to never get their hands on the information that he promised. So it’s understandable that the audience also could feel kind of frustrated about that.
MGS: I think it’s good, especially when you’re dealing with something political. If it’s open-ended like that, I think you’re more likely to think about it after you leave the theater.
EB: Yeah.
MGS: Fassbinder said something I always liked: “Movies should have an unhappy ending so that life can have a happy ending.”
EB: Yeah.
MGS: When everything is tied up at the end, you often just forget about it; it’s like, the characters solved the problem in the movie so we don’t need to solve the problem in reality. In your film, the audience leaves the theater with a feeling of frustration and maybe rage.
EB: Absolutely. And the feeling that the story goes on. The story is not closed. There’s many things that we still don’t know about what happened. It’s the same today, as I told you before, not only in 2004 but in 2015. 30 years after the end of the regime. We don’t know everything that happened and that’s very frustrating.
MGS: I think your approach is the right one for this kind of material. I think that’s the way cinema should be.
EB: Thank you.
You can check out the trailer for Operation Zanahoria (without English subtitles) via YouTube below:
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