Another
month is in the bag, but for scheduling reasons it was a little quieter on the
Cinema Joes front as we adjust to a new recording schedule.Nonetheless, we still have three lovely new
episodes out for you all to enjoy, viewing and downloadable on our Itunes page.
March
7th: Our Favorite Post-2000 Best Picture Winners (mini)
With
another awards season finally fading into the rear-view mirror, we looked back
at nearly the past 20 years of Academy Awards history to discuss which Best
Picture winners we feel have and will continue to stand the test of time.
March
11th: Mute/Is Netflix In Trouble?
We’ve
had an extraordinary run on Cinema Joes of us picking films to review that, by
and large, we all loved or at least enjoyed watching.With Mute,
one of the latest original works by Netflix, that changed, and for the first
time we found ourselves at an utter loss to try and understand the
decision-making process.The result was
one of our most frustrating, but also one of our funniest, discussions
yet.
March
18th: Our Favorite Underappreciated Character Actors
With
Sam Rockwell finally winning an Oscar after years of acclaimed-work, we decided
to sit down and discuss which of our favorite character actors that, in our
eyes, are still yet to get the attention and love they deserve.A follow-up on actresses will also be out
soon, so stay tuned!
Please
continue to follow, like, subscribe, and recommend us further!
**blanket
alert: pretty much ALL of Arrested Development will be spoiled in the following
article**
Few TV shows
have proven to be as enduringly meme-able as the glory that is Arrested
Development.Created by Michael Hurwitz
in the early 2000’s, the show originally aired on Fox until low viewership led
the studio to pull the plug.Things
stayed that way for a while, with the show accumulating a larger and larger cult
status, until Netflix got hold of the rights and produced a fourth season,
which debuted back in 2013.Starring
Jason Bateman, it was a tale of the hilariously sad antics of a perpetually
dysfunctional rich family forced to confront their demons after their father is
arrested and the company (along with their fortune) threatens to fall all to
pieces before anyone can say, “Banana.”
From
episode one onward, the show is a masterclass on how to build a story for the
long-haul.The lengths the show’s
creators went to set up jokes and plot twists episodes, and sometimes seasons,
in advance, and the myriad references to hilariously obscure movies or past
roles of the actors in the show are rightfully legendary, and may prove Hurwitz
and his team to be the greatest (or most terrible?) masterminds in television
history.And even beyond the writing, the
show constantly used shifting cameras, perfectly-timed sound effects, and
spot-on editing to throw just about every possible audio-visual gag at the
audience it could.
And
that could have been enough.It could
have been a show driven solely by its own pessimistic nihilism ala Family Guy
or South Park, and make bank on how fiendishly layered its fourth-wall breaking
plot contrivances were.But it didn’t. Instead, its creators went the extra mile and
ended up creating a damn-near perfect time capsule of America in the
early-to-mid-2000’s.There are probably
no two events as seminal to the fall of American public trust as the twin
hammer blows of the Iraq War and the Great Recession, so it is eminently
fitting to examine how they both became focal points of Arrested Development’s
ever-winking cynicism.
It
starts gradually at first, but as the second and third season go on more and
more of the story centers around the unique cultural myopia around the start of
the Iraq War and the fallout a year into the conflict, when people started to
wake up to just how extensively the Bush administration had lied and manipulated
to pull us into a war humanity is still paying for in spades today.Depending on how you swing it, in fact, the Iraq
War might be the most important external event in the show that affects the
plot and characters.
Some
(by no means exhaustive) examples; George Senior, we learn, is arrested and put
on trial in part for building palaces for Saddam Hussein in the 90’s (one of
which turns out to be hiding a veritable army of Hussein doubles). A side character Gob marries was a torturer in
Abu Ghraib.One episode revolves around supposed
proof the Bluth company was building WMD bunkers in Iraq…..except by the end
the “evidence” ends up being a hacked picture of Tobias’ testicles.Buster enlists in the army and is only taken
because of how direly low recruitment has gotten….because of the Iraq War.It’s his emotional struggle with the risk of
enlisting that eventually leads him to take his fateful swim in loose-seal-infested
waters.The show was one of the first to
parody the use (read: overuse) of “because 9/11” to justify the shitty, shitty
policies of the Bush years.Rob Cordry
has a brief side role as an NRA-fanatic who literally forces people at gunpoint
to accept his extreme interpretation of the Second Amendment. The use of a black hand puppet to skewer racism and police violence YEARS before Ferguson. And on and on and on.
The
show is the debacle of Iraq.It is
crass, 21st-century capitalistic commercialism at its nihilistic
peak.It is the devil-may-care economics
of the wealthy that directly caused the Great Recession.It is one dig after another at the demise of
reality TV and all it touched, and of the descent of local news organizations
into Nightcrawler-style pits of ethical
darkness.
With
the original show being such a perfect product of its time, it was perhaps
inevitable that the long-awaited fourth season could not possible match it,
being too far disconnected from the era and culture that spawned.…..
…..oh my God, there’s a subplot about
Lucille proposing a wall on the Mexican border to keep minorities out, and her
and George Senior searching for a politician dumb enough to latch onto the idea.And this aired in 2013.TWO YEARS before Trump opened his
Presidential campaign.
Guys.Arrested Development warned.They
fucking warned us.
And
once again, while this coincidence would be scary enough, the deeper I got into
Season Four the darker the rabbit hole became.Much as the war on Terror became central to the story of the original
three seasons, the Great Recession becomes a recurring theme tied to season
4.Family members constantly gripe over
who gets a cut from “the Stimmy.”Tobias
and Lindsay are directly roped into the housing bubble scam right before the
market goes belly-up.The season also
managed to slip in predictive digs at the sheer absurdity of the “bubbled
elites control the world, dude”
conspiracy theories currently in vogue amongst the left AND the right, a
phenomenon that proves stupidity is the only true equal-opportunity employer in
this world.In a passing remark, Ron
Howard suggests that he and other Hollywood producers knew about the housing
and market crash before it happened, implying an alternative world where
tinfoil-hat claims that a cabal of snooty leftist elites control the world are
real- and then never addresses these implications again, almost directly giving
the finger to people who buy into such crap.
Nothing
there?Overinterpretation on my
part?Maybe, but then this show has always
been so meticulously constructed that even thinking such a possibility feels
like a form of heresy.
The
fourth season, by the end, almost feels too harsh, too cold, too terrifying.People get really, genuinely hurt; Lucille 2
ends up dead, Maeby is going to prison as a sex offender, a desperate drug
addict is literally left to die in a trash heap, and the relationship between
Michael and George Michael- once treated as the show’s lone emotional center- is
left so broken and twisted in the season’s brilliant final scene that it’s hard
to imagine it ever healing again.
Sad?Harsh?Too much?Perhaps.But it’s a fitting conclusion for the Bluths,
because there ultimately is no happy end for people like this.Such constant lying, selfishness,
close-mindedness CAN’T end any other way.And it’s here the parallels between the Bluths and the Trumps, the GOP,
and American conservatism and evangelism writ large get downright uncanny.It’s not a perfect 1-1, obviously, but the
shallow ignorance, the vain superficiality, the obsession with toxic masculine “strength”
and the shows of wealth and might to hide the existential emptiness within- all
present and accounted for.
One
example in particular won’t stop haunting me.Every time an uncomfortable truth about his life rears its ugly head, or
he’s called out for his lies, cruelty, and hypocrisy, what does Gob do?Grab whoever confronts him by the neck and
shove a roofie down their throat so they forget by the next morning.If there is a functional difference between
that and the unceasing efforts of Trump and the GOP to cover up their lies and
corruption with even more of the same, we haven’t yet invented a microscope
strong enough to spot it.
And
what better summation is there of the mental state of any sane, moral, thinking
person in America over the past two years than the deep spiritual horror
signified when characters are faced with a terrible truth, stare into the
middle distance, and “Sound of Silence” begins to play in the background?If there is one, I haven’t found it yet.
There
is, of course, a very key difference between fiction and non-fiction to
consider in all this.The Bluths are
monsters, but they mostly just hurt themselves.The desolation of Trump and the GOP, however, could all-too-easily encompass
the world if we don’t fight back enough.
Guys,
Arrested Development tried to warn us.We
chose not to listen.And now we’re
paying the price.
Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer (2018): Written and directed by Lars Kraume. Starring:
Leonard Scheicher, Tom Gramenz, Lena Klenke, Isaiah Michalski, Jonas Dassler,
Ronald Zehrfeld, Florian Lukas, Joerdis Triebel, Michael Gwisdek, Burghart
Klaussner, Max Hopp, and Judith Engel. Running Time:
111 minutes. Based on the non-fiction
book of the same name by Dietrich Garstka.
Rating:
3.5/4
Despite
modern classics like Goodbye, Lenin
and Das Leben Der Anderen, the
experiences of life in Communist East Germany remain a topic relatively
untouched by German cinema. Why this is
I couldn’t say, except to hazard a guess that it’s still #toosoon, too fresh
for many still alive who remember it and could claim offense or
misrepresentation.After all, how many
decades did it take American WWII films to move beyond simple, unquestioning
sanctification of “The Greatest Generation?”
This
makes Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer a
bit of an oddity in the recent upswing of major German movies to come out in
recent years.Starring a bevy of young
acting talents, it tells the story of a class of Abitur students (the German
equivalent of a high school degree) who find out the hard way the price of being
a disobedient teenager in a restrictive society.At first, they think nothing of meeting in
secret to listen to RIAS, the radio station of democratic West Berlin that was
explicitly forbidden as capitalist propaganda within East Germany.One day in 1956, a chilling report comes
through of the Soviet’s brutal repression of an attempted democratic movement
in Hungary.This immediately strikes at
their clear-eyed sense of a morally simple world- the eternal prerogative of
the young- and they decide rather spontaneously to hold a protest minute of
silence at school the next day, as a show of solidarity with their fellow
Hungarian socialists.
Such
an unplanned act of deviousness obviously sets off every alarm bell in the
heads of the school leaders, fine-tuned to turn every unplanned citizen act
into the mark of an enemy of the state; the eternal prerogative of the authoritarian.What begins as a simple trick to anger their
teacher soon pulls in the school principal, the parents, and eventually the
higher-ups from the education ministry, all threatening dire consequences if an
instigator is not thoroughly named and shamed by the entire class.
Most
of the film follows Theo, Kurt, and Lena, three students whose uneasy love
triangle with each other is easily the film’s weakest link, but to its credit
it never draws much focus.They are all
fine as performers, but in the end the movie’s heaviest moments and biggest
surprises are provided by many of the (at first) seemingly less-consequential
side characters.This is especially true
for Erik (played by Jonas Dassler), a more distant classmate obsessed with
living up to the perceived legacy of his dead father.You might assume at first that you know
exactly where the film is going with his character, but the film soon reveals
hidden depths to his story that culminate in him having arguably the best and
most emotionally gripping scene in the entire film.The entire young cast acquits itself well,
but Dassler shines the most with what he’s given.
The
older characters are filled out with mainstays of German film and television,
and here too, most notably with Kurt’s parents, there are things we eventually
learn about them or see them do that contradict what we may have assumed about
them from the start.
Authoritarian
societies, by their very nature, force nearly everyone living within them to
resort to secrecy, to always find ways to hide what they really think while
still communicating it to others when needed.In looks, in glances, in how hard you hold someone’s hand, you have to
say more than you dare with mere words.The cast and crew of Das
Schweigende Klassenzimmer clearly possessed a firm grasp of this
fundamental truth in their source material, and continuously find remarkable
ways to bring that across throughout the movie, making this film seemingly
simple, quiet, and unassuming on the outside, but with more than enough
emotional depth to resonate with any attentive viewer.
Der
Hauptmann (2018): Written and directed by Robert
Schwentke. Starring: Max Hubacher, Milan Peschel, Frederick Lau, Bernd
Hoelscher, Waldemar Kobus, and Alexander Fehling. Running
Time: 118 minutes.
Rating:
3.5/4
A
man- dirty, ragged, desperate, possibly a deserter- is fleeing from a group of
Nazis who appear to be hunting out for nothing more than sport, calling out “little
pig, little pig” as he runs.He manages
to shakes them off in the woods, but finds life as a vagabond in wartime
Germany to be no less violent or deadly than life on the front.He finds an abandoned car with the full
uniform of a Luftwaffe officer that fits him perfectly.After putting it on, another soldier (also a
deserter?) mistakes him for a real officer and offers his services.Thus begins his wild and increasingly cruel
existence as the Hauptmann.
We
never learn his real name. Who he is, where he came from, what led to him being
hunted; he betrays none of it, stuffing it all deep within himself in his fight
to survive from one minute to the next.And
what a strange and surreal fight it is.In a world where all revolves around whether your papers are in order,
the man continuously bluffs his way past one obstacle after another by
insisting he’s been entrusted with a secret mission by Adolf Hitler
himself.Soon he’s practically handed
control over a small concentration camp with the expectation he will single-handedly
solve its overcrowding problems.If you
have ever seen a single film about Nazi Germany before, you can probably guess
where the end of this particular road lies.
That
the main character remains such an enigma from start to finish is ultimately the
main stumbling block holding this film back.The ever-more-complicated lies he’s forced to spin to keep up the
charade leads to him ordering and/or personally committing heinous war crimes,
but because we know nothing of who he was before, we don’t know if he was
already someone with a propensity for murdering people in cold blood or
not.Does he go through any sort of
personal transformation, and does this hurt or trouble or haunt him in any way?Is it all the act of a supremely skilled con
artist, or is he really as fervent an ideological Nazi as he pretends to
be?
Perhaps
the movie is simply meant as a meditation on the moral entropy we are all prone
to, especially in times of crisis.Perhaps we are witnessing an adaptation of Dante, seeing one man arrive
and welter in the deepest pit of hell.This would certainly fit with how the tone of the shift continues to
shift into more surreal and debauched territory in its second half, including a
shot of the man wandering alone across a literal carpet of human skeletons in a
forest before being swallowed up in the darkness of the pines.
Perhaps
the real story, the real narrative arc, lies with Freytag, the first soldier to
join the man.At first, he seems a
simple man and a simple soldier (if there is such a thing) content to help as
best he can.But you can see the shift
in his eyes as he slowly begins to realize something is terribly off about the
man he’s sworn himself to.
Ironically,
for all its horrors, this is a stunningly beautiful film to watch.Shot in crisp and piercingly clear
black-and-white, every frame is packed with a richness of detail few color
films could hope to match.A steady
knowledge of composition is clearly at play, because sequence after sequence
provides us with worlds of information about the various characters and their relationships
to one another without ever needing to explain much of anything.
Still,
at least a few moments of introspection on the man’s part would have done
much.I can’t help but feel that the
film does itself a disservice by ignoring a lot of potential depth in its
thematic material.This is, apparently,
based on a real-life war criminal named Willi Herold, but as of this writing I
don’t know enough about him to ascertain whether or not the film is
historically accurate.As it stands, I
see it as much more of a moral allegory for the depravity people are always and
ever capable of, once enough societal restrictions are lifted.This is a remarkable film I will not forget
seeing anytime soon.
