A Hidden Life (2019) – quintessential Malick.

August Diehl holds one of those physiognomies of the Klaus Kinski variety, instantly recognisable and very creepy, more suited to playing the villain or the unhinged than the innocent. Diehl almost stole Inglorious Basterds (2009) from Christoph Waltz with his tavern-set scariness (in full Hugo Boss clobber). Here he pulls off the Jesus role with aplomb, a performance very much devoid of … dare-I-say-it – pretension. The worst performances by actors are the posturing sort which embarrassingly scream for an Oscar; none of that bombast here. And to give the movie more of a deathly air, Michael Nyqvist and Bruno Ganz both star in their final roles.

22 years after the release of The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick casts his spiritual magic once again on WWII, this time not on the soldiers at Guadalcanal but the German home front. Malick ticks all the Malick boxes = sweeping cinematography, incessant voice over, melancholic score, metaphysical monologues, and lots of nature and all that. It is a long sesh but with reason, and in no way a ‘slog’. The story of Franz Jägerstätter is one worth telling.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/story-austrian-catholic-resister-franz-jagerstatter

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/19/a-hidden-life-terrence-malick-review

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/a-hidden-life/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-hidden-life-movie-review-2019

New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.

Autobahn.

I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.

Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.

Midnight fireworks.

Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).

Freezing run action in this park.

Goodies.

Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).

All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).

The fall of the Berlin Wall – 30 years on.

The Berlin Wall has been down now for longer than it was up (1961-1989). A lot of stuff seemed to happen during that Cold War era but since the wall’s … demise it’s like very little of significance has actually happened, even though it has. When you live through the decades rather than read about them things are less dramatic.

Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History’ is of course absolute pampers but for me at least, it does often feel like history is indeed over, the Manichean structure of it gone, and we are now living in post-historical times. And nothing means anything anymore. Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle, the desensitisation to carnage as a result of its hourly reportage.

Anyway, here’s a mediocre snap of the Berlin Wall from my first trip there in 2009. Later that day I went to Checkpoint Charlie with a pal of mine and said to him: “This is fucking shite.” I don’t know why I was expecting something magical.

And check out these two stunning movies:

 

Berlin 2009 was my own private kick-starter.

A full 10 years next week since I first set foot in Germany, this extended Berlin jaunt the beginning of many more liver-swelling shenanigans. In a decade the following have been … surmounted:

Amsterdam, Munich, Bratislava, Vienna, Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Kraków, Amsterdam again, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Bremen, Gothenburg, Tallinn, Amsterdam again, Munich again, Stockholm, Frankfurt again, Poznań, Bangkok, Oslo, Hamburg, Osnabrück, Bremen again, Tokyo, Kaunas, Riga, Warsaw, Gdańsk, Dublin, Kraków again, Oslo again, Sliema, Geneva, Copenhagen, Bremen again, Dortmund, Cologne, Bonn, Amsterdam again, Milan, Venice, Rome, Dublin again, Warsaw again, Berlin again, Basel, Bilbao, Reykjavík, Salzburg, Sliema again, Albufeira, Straubing, Berlin again, Szczecin, Salzburg again, Munich again, Wroclaw, Porto, Sofia, Straubing again.

Hitler’s Bunker today.

Berlin 2009 was unique in that I did it entirely internet free. I had no snazzy smartphone and wasn’t on any social media platforms. I had a mere camera and that was it. Consequently, I actually saw shit and took it in. No phone = no distraction, no barrier between me and the Grey City’s peculiarities. It was the most productive slice of tourism I’ve ever done and the last time I’ve used a paper map. In a sense it was a crossroads trip, the last archaic adventure.

Bavaria. Booze. Bantz.

Straubing.

Back in the Fatherland again for more lazy gallivanting, a week of Lidls, pubs, and killer insects. This is my seventh trip to Bavaria, so only a few new insights. I do quite like the place – it’s quiet (mostly), civilised (mostly), and people have manners (mostly).

Ice cubes.

All of these goodies and no ice cubes. Tragic.

Why the dearth of them in supermarkets? Is this some ‘German thing’ in which they’re too ashamed to purchase the cubes ready-made, that the locals would rather be all labour-intensive and concoct the beverage coolers at home? Irritating.

Lidl. 

These convenience stores continue to be an experience. One can always unearth a wee treat in here, from cut-price protein bars to knock-off Jägermeister. I also admire the checkout staff; they don’t attempt to initiate pointless small talk when you’re more dishevelled than Jimmy McNulty during his peak Baltimore mishaps. They get on with it, which is how it should be done. British people suffer from an affliction: talking about the weather. It’s boring chat and you get no such gibberish from these Germans.

Mosquitos. 

These fuckers need wiped out regardless of the wider ecological ramifications. They attack O negative blood like those choppers in Apocalypse Now (1979) taking down the village to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. I’m a so-called ‘universal donor’ and this is how I’m rewarded – bites in double figures to my face, arms, legs, and arse. Charming. “Burn them all,” as Aerys Targaryen would have wailed.

Wheelchairs.

Where are the people in wheelchairs? In Straubing and Passau I didn’t see a single Ironside. Strange. Are they kept indoors or something?

Chernobyl connotations. 

Lined up my midget e-cig with this and felt quite grateful I didn’t grow up anywhere near Ukraine circa 1986. I thought this snap quite the arty-farty creation; it will be doing the rounds on Instagram.

Overall, another cracking jaunt. I’ll be back next year for an Aldi blog.

 

Conrad Schumann – life as an icon.

Until the other day I thought this photograph, the so-called ‘Leap into Freedom’, was the criterion for liberty, no less. A cursory Google search (the snap came up in some morbid conversation about David Hasselhoff’s ‘Looking for Freedom’) says otherwise. The power of images is propaganda above all, the human story often discarded. It appears Schumann was the prisoner of *our* image, and reading about his life post-1961 – depression, solace in alcohol, his eventual suicide in 1998 – one can’t help but feel for the guy.

That primary life-changing decision with all its what-ifs, and he had to be reminded of it daily, us lot ascribing meaning to the photograph that wasn’t there, like we’ve owned his experience.

20 years later.

I suppose the contemporary equivalent is becoming a meme and spending your life trying to supersede it.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-leap-of-hope-that-ended-in-despair-1167101.html

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/conrad-schumann-defects-west-berlin-1961/

http://100photos.time.com/photos/peter-leibing-leap-into-freedon

https://www.buzzfeed.com/audreyworboys/famous-people-from-memes-then-now

 

The Das Boot reboot is awesome.

What an experience this spin-off was.

I first saw the Wolfgang Peterson stunner (1981) in April 2000, purchasing the VHS tape with The Phantom Menace (1999) in HMV, Princes Street. I had no idea what it was about but the movie was £4.99 and Empire magazine called it scintillating in a retrospective. The writer wasn’t wrong, unlike their four-star review of the Jar Jar Binks fiasco.

The movie works within the most claustrophobic milieu of pre-Nuclear warfare. It was apolitical, much like the Kriegsmarine’s attempts to portray themselves after the conflict, this despite them nonchalantly torpedoing ship after ship.

This reboot more expansively amplifies upon the rampant extremism of the submariners, their appropriation of ideology as an alternative to the Allies’ eventual superior resources and sound tactics. There are also thriller elements, La Rochelle, home of the U-boat pens, the backdrop to French Resistance efforts to disrupt the German occupation. This place also has a special meaning for me: on a French exchange trip the police chased us around the town centre because one of our party set off a firework in a gift shop. Ah, the memories.

That score as well, used in both the film and this masterwork. Oaft.

Further reading:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/nazi-uboat-pens

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-03-06/das-boot-tv-series-uk-sky-atlantic-day-date-time-channel-plot/

Berlin – Metropolis of Crime (1918-1933).

An excellent wee doc here from DW, the anything-goes bacchanal of the Weimar Republic captured in all its glory. What a time to be alive – left vs. right, paramilitary chaos, Fritz Langesque serial killers, rampant crime, easy credit, and in the middle of this ‘Golden Twenties’ expressionist bonanza, Berlin’s loonies shagging, drinking, and sliding down poles. Just lovely.

Further reading:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-series-on-berlin-history-the-golden-twenties-a-866383.html

The Great War (1964).

I finally got around to viewing this epic 26-episode series from 1964. It’s an incredible compendium of WWI in all its participants’ hubris and misguided adventurism, and is majestically narrated by Sir Michael Redgrave (this bloke sounds more Laurence Olivier than Laurence Olivier himself).

This is how to do a documentary – with sweeping scope and intricate detail, no half measures. With terrifying archive footage and an expert use of primary sources read by contemporary actors, as well as interviews with those serving on the military and civilian fronts, it set the benchmark for such works, acting as a precursor to The World at War (1973).

The wonders of the Internet ensure it is free to binge-watch.

 

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – colourised reality.

Viewed through the prism of black-and-white, Charlie Chaplin-speed film footage, it’s axiomatic to view actors from the past as otherworldly, alien even, and simply not blessed with the smarts and skills we believe ourselves to possess. We forget they are people of their time using that era’s technology and science and its harnessing of military doctrine.

Then the grainy kaleidoscope of war gets colourised to the max and all hell breaks loose. You’d think this is GoPro stuff sent back to Flanders in a time machine and then propelled back to the future by Marty and Doc, such has been the collective hyperbole over Peter Jackson’s colourised tribute to our great-grandparents.

And that’s the thing – as the red, green and blue is blitzed the more we can relate. Yet war today is some distant thing we flick through on CNN or whatever. Fully realised 3D depictions of car bombs and RPGs ambushing armoured personnel carriers we have decided are too graphic, this in an age when students find clapping traumatic. But the carnage of the Somme is somehow acceptable because it’s a centenary old. Weird.

Perhaps we need a WWIII to make reality (people die, war is hell) more palatable to our viewing tastes.

Further reading/viewing:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/16/they-shall-not-grow-old-review-first-world-war-peter-jackson

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45910189

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/they-shall-not-grow-old-peter-jackson-review-first-world-war-ww1-lord-of-the-rings-hobbit-a8586401.html