Gossip Central

How German Is It?

Truth be told, I am bedazzled/repelled by all things German. The oxymoronic title, The Good German, had me twitching. I was not alone. At a private screening in December the response among the attending moviemakers and stars was mixed. Director Steven Soderburgh, himself ambivalent, introduced his latest as an “experiment.” When asked, what were you doing in this film, George Clooney said simply, “I was the girl.” The “girl” of course was Cate Blanchett and the Holocaust era movie with its Casablanca spin received no awards. Nevertheless, I was enraptured.

One of my picks for Best Foreign Film, however, is from Germany: The Lives of Others (opening February 9). While the Holocaust has provided a fair number of excellent features (look out for the coming Blackbook), the period after remains to be mined. Riveting throughout, the film’s story involves artists, a playwright-actress couple in East Berlin, when writers especially but all creative people were watched scrupulously by the notorious Stasi, the official security arm of the Communist government. It is shocking how far a regime can think itself entitled to invade the privacy of individuals, developing a system of spying only the curious brew of Soviet and post Nazi paranoia could produce. You need to see the documentary at Film Forum (7-13 February), The Decomposition of the Soul, written and directed by Nina Toussaint and Massimo Iannetta, to get the real picture of what that Kafkaesque life was like for ordinary citizens. The fictive The Lives of Others gets it right: Years of extensive research went into every period detail: the gloomy colorlessness, the stark furnishings, the joyless sensibility. Oscar-winning Gabriel Yared composed the bittersweet score for this love story set in this repressive historic moment, as forces begin to encroach on the lovers (Martina Gedeck and Sebastian Koch) in the form of a Stasi operative, Ulrich Muhe in a chilling, outstanding portrayal that begs the question: what does it mean to be human?

In a recent interview the director, writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck talked about his inspiration and the numerous awards, including his country’s Lolas, the film has so far garnered. What impressed him as a child was seeing fear in grown-ups as his family crossed the divide between West and East Germany to visit relatives. Once as he waited in the car at a checkpoint, his mother was held for hours, strip searched and humiliated. Deftly, the film recreates this terror of personal violation.

I asked about Sebastian Koch, starring in his film and also in Blackbook (he plays a “good” German) is he as much a heartthrob in Europe as he is among women here in the know. [Okay, I have a crush.] “He is best known as a television actor in Germany. What people don’t realize is, as he is handsome, he is even better as an actor. He can play anything.”

When asked about the Oscars, Florian said, “Of course I want to beat Guillermo [del Toro, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth, the favorite to win]. But then I met him. If I have to lose to him I won’t mind. He is such a great guy.”

I am sure Guillermo is saying the same about Florian.

A note: The period is limned in a new biography of Leni Riefenstahl from Germany that wants to redeem her legacy: Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn (Faber & Faber). And, the latest novel by Martin Amis, House of Meetings (Alfred A. Knopf) and , looks back at that post-war period in an astonishingly powerful evocation of life under a totalitarian regime. Two brothers in love with the same woman are imprisoned in a slave labor camp in the gulag of Soviet Russia. Well, it doesn’t have to be German . . . .

-- Regina Weinreich

 

Stilettos and Spandex

More was more at last night’s launch of Mao’s Mag celebrating those who march to a different drummer fashion-wise: The large glossy semi-annual, its cover a signature psychedelic dreamscape by Peter Max gorgeously printed, begs the question: where have all the Originals gone? Brothers Roger and Mauricio Padilha noted a paradox: while we live in an era where individuality is encouraged, everyone looks pretty much the same. Bored of being bombarded by images of gaunt movie stars donning the same designer gowns picked out by stylists, they want to bring attention to those who have created their own style by being brave enough to be themselves. And so their spotlight shined on counter-culture celebrities in the “History of Cool:” Deborah Harry, Brigid Berlin, Michael Musto, Marisa Berenson, Jane Forth, Ann Magnuson, Norma Kamali, Kenneth Jay Lane, Kenny Scharf, Julie Newmar (“who will forever remain the original and best Catwoman to us”), and others, in photo spreads and interviews.

The Broad Street Ballroom was abuzz: dancing in between its early 20th century mosaic columns were a chandelier headed man in baroque, women in outsized wigs in bubble gum pink and tutti frutti, Jayne Mansfield blonds, the usual dandies in tweed waistcoats over leopard ballet flats and small brimmed befeathered fedoras, someone tall in a suit elegantly coiffed with bull horns—these looks suggest that massive amounts of mascara and sequins do not alone make the man. A hybrid gender now marks the official start of fashion week, neither fish nor fowl, even though some were distinctly wearing stuffed birds. Hard to say how “Original” this remix really is, in its borrowing from a vaguely defined past of camp meets colossal, sort of John Waters dressing Divine. Or an evocation of the Metropolitan Museum’s “Glitter and Gloom” exhibit of German portraits of the 1920’s redubbed “Glitter and Glee.” A dapper gent asked me the question of the night, are you Old School? I countered, are you? Oh yes, I’m ‘80’s and ‘90’s, he said. Amazing what is nostalgia for NOW! Meantime projections of the original Originals flickered overhead. Onstage, defying the anorexic aesthetic of runway models, large women in scanty retro bustiers and gartered nylons draped their round rippled rears over a couch. Odalisque, anyone? Proudly they mugged for the crowd who mostly had eyes for one another, snapping shots during sets of naked painted performers in blues and grays with cat’s eyes in the image of Karen Black.

-- Regina Weinreich

Fashion, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, New York Fashion Week, Fall 2007 Collections, Mao Mag, Fashion Designers

Sundance Envy

I have a rare and often misdiagnosed disease: Sundance Envy. The main symptom is celluloid deficiency indicated by breathless longing. Dr. Freud, are you listening? Many of my film critic colleagues attend this premier film festival, getting the scoops on the parties, the celebs, the shwag, the buzz on movies before anyone has seen them! What reporter in her right mind wouldn’t want to be there?

Fortunately I get potent, rehabilitating doses of expert and vivid reportage from Roger Friedman’s Fox 411 column and from The New York Times Carpetbagger David Carr. The news however on the latest films seems mixed: some are even more disturbed than I am. Take, for example, a new movie featuring the graphically filmed rape of the lovely, precocious 12-year-old Dakota Fanning. According to Fox 411, even sicker than the film are the preteen’s parents for allowing her to participate in such exploitation particularly as the scene is gratuitous, the movie bad, and, in a peculiar twist, defended by various anti-rape organizations. As well meaning as these groups may be regarding an issue that is certainly urgent, the cure may be to avoid this movie altogether.

Perhaps we will be spared. As of this writing, no distributor has wanted to touch it. And how about the movie about the vagina with teeth? Well now we veer close to Portnoy! One question: do the biting genitalia belong to anyone’s mother?

-- Regina Weinreich

Sundance Fim Festival

Salma’s Yelp

If you were glued to the set yesterday morning as I was, listening for this year’s Oscars nominees, you could not help but hear announcer Salma Hayak’s joyful yelp for her pal Penelope’s Best Actress nod. Not presidential hopeful Howard Dean’s “barbaric yawp,” heard ‘round the world, the soft, friendly petard broke up the rather formal proceedings. Too bad the academy did not acknowledge Cruz’s film, the crowd-pleasing Volver, a comic,
magic realist tour de force by Pedro Almodovar, in which the ghosts of the past do not rest until the sins of the fathers are redeemed. Cruz famously has a padded rump in the manner of full-bodied movie legends Sophia Loren or Anna Magnani. And let me assure you, that bottom did not look as good on Ellen Degeneris. Of course Almodovar had already won an Oscar, for All About My Mother in 2000. When I asked the Spanish auteur then how it felt, he said winning an Oscar was like having a baby and introducing it to all your relatives. Everyone wants to hold it, touch it, and tell you who it resembles. So this year he will not be birthing its twin in neither category of Best Foreign Language Film nor Best Picture, as many Oscar watchers predicted. Oh well, this director is infinitely imaginative. If he makes his movie Tarantula, based on Mygale, a gender-bending French noir by Thierry Jonquet (City Lights), he’ll be up to his old kinky, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! tricks. Maybe Antonio Banderas, an actor he made famous, will star. You know, says Almodovar, he’s very big now. He may be too hard to get.

The Foreign Language list is always odd. I don’t always agree with the choices but this year The Lives of Others (Germany) and Pan’s Labyrinth (Mexico) vie for my vote. You can see Guillermo del Toro’s layered masterpiece, a political parable cum fairy tale, in theaters right now. You will have to wait until early February for the pre-Glasnost film by young director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, about East Germany’s Stasi, the Communist era secret police who spied on citizens they deemed suspicious. Do not miss either one.

Nobody I know thought David Lynch’s Inland Empire starring Laura Dern would be nominated; depending on your taste you either love his weaving of bizarre non-narratives, or hate it. For the record, I sit on the love side, finding his extravagant subjectivity mesmerizing. Surprise surprise, the man is capable of a linear story. His book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Tarcher/Penguin), influenced by such classics as The Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita is his take on the relationship between meditation and creativity, a kind of how-to manual. Positing that “Ideas are like fish,” he basically says that if you want to get them, you have to dip into deep water. Before you say, “DUH,” read this quote from the chapter called, “Light of the Self:” “Negativity is like darkness. So what is darkness? You look at darkness, and you see that it’s really nothing: It’s the absence of something. You turn on the light, and darkness goes.” Simple, right? But guess what? It works. I’m writing this blog after all.

(Photo: People's Daily Online)

-- Regina Weinreich

Academy Awards, Oscar Nominations, Oscars