MCguidance
Footballguy
Probably the perfect way to describe it.
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Recently viewed movie thread - Rental Edition (6 Viewers)
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El Floppo
Footballguy
Wings of Desire is my favorite movie. Like you, I struggled to get through a first viewing- but give it another shot... definitely worth it.i had tried to watch wim wenders wings of desire several times before, but didn't make it to the end... it wasn't boredom, i thought the beginning was interesting, but it did have a loose plot and languid pace... probably i was just coincidentally tired and busy, so there were long gaps between aborted viewings. anyway, i watched it recently, found it enthralling, got the criterion blu-ray, and have watched it a few times recently (once with the commentary)... when i checked out since the reviews, they seemed to be universally good... no doubt not for everybody, especially if you aren't into foreign, sub-titled, existential-themed movies & prefer action/adventure...
this experience has made me re-appraise wenders... my favorite by him is alas OOP, the state of things (trailer below)... i really like the score by jurgen knieper, who also contributed to the soundtrack for WOD... state of things had an unusual genesis... after the success of american friend (which is near the top of my netflix queu... like with most of wenders movies, haven't seen for a while, and this is supposed to be one of his best), coppola invited him to the US to helm a script called hammett for zoetrope studio... to make a long story short, it took four years and was plagued by difficulty (it is available on on netflix & i found worth a watch, if a flawed, blurring of noir and biographical genre, about the author of the maltese falcon... coppola forced him to reshoot it, i think took control of editing and ultimately only 30% was wenders footage, so hard to sy what it could have been?)...
at one point coppola took over the studio and resources, interrupting the production... not one to sit idle, he used the time to make a few movies (3-4?!), one of which was the state of things... in some ways it is a lot like fellini's probable best 8 1/2... in that case, the director uses his writer's block as material for the movie itself, informing the subject matter, structure and direction... wenders was in portugal and helped out a broke project/production team complete their film out of his own stock, if they helped him make a film once they were done... it turned out to be state of things, which mirrored events in portugal and in his dealings with coppola...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrWzvW4a87A
for movies that are IN PRINT (), i had seen paris, texas a few times, but not for a while, and remembered it as ponderous but intriguing as the puzzle of harry dean stanton's (only starring role?) shattered life unfolds SLOOWLY!
watched wenders until the end of the world on itunes recently... it was another movie i recalled as having potential but being severely flawed, due to its rambling and disjointed nature... a 4-5 hour version exists (highly recommended by a critic i respect, the DVD savant site), but it is only avail on region 2... an amazon reviewer there said it is easy to convert most DVD players (not sure about blu-ray) to region 0, which is universal? in the z channell doc (a movie about movies if there ever was one), james woods talked about how once upon a time in america was initially butchered by severly truncated 2 1/2 hour edit... when it was later released in a pioneering (at the time - now routine and almost de rigeuer), restored, director's cut of four hours, it was called a masterpiece (woods laughed that critic maslin went from calling it one of the worst movies she had scene and incoherent to one of the best movies of the decade - what a difference editing and respecting the director's original vision of length, tempo, intercutting plot elements, etc makes)...
of course buena vista social club about the cuban music scene (with ry cooder, who scored paris, texas - wenders worked with familiar people a lot, writers, DPs, scorers, editors, etc) was a great doc and musical document...
also in netflix queu, two movies that were sequels to WOD and state of things (reportedly not as good - i just found out they had sequels) - so close, so far (?) for WOD and lisbon story (?) for state of things...
* my art film criticism penance for dabbling on the dark side (avatar)
Chaka
Footballguy
Haven't seen it in years. Think I might revisit it now.ThanksWings of Desire is my favorite movie. Like you, I struggled to get through a first viewing- but give it another shot... definitely worth it.i had tried to watch wim wenders wings of desire several times before, but didn't make it to the end... it wasn't boredom, i thought the beginning was interesting, but it did have a loose plot and languid pace... probably i was just coincidentally tired and busy, so there were long gaps between aborted viewings. anyway, i watched it recently, found it enthralling, got the criterion blu-ray, and have watched it a few times recently (once with the commentary)... when i checked out since the reviews, they seemed to be universally good... no doubt not for everybody, especially if you aren't into foreign, sub-titled, existential-themed movies & prefer action/adventure...
this experience has made me re-appraise wenders... my favorite by him is alas OOP, the state of things (trailer below)... i really like the score by jurgen knieper, who also contributed to the soundtrack for WOD... state of things had an unusual genesis... after the success of american friend (which is near the top of my netflix queu... like with most of wenders movies, haven't seen for a while, and this is supposed to be one of his best), coppola invited him to the US to helm a script called hammett for zoetrope studio... to make a long story short, it took four years and was plagued by difficulty (it is available on on netflix & i found worth a watch, if a flawed, blurring of noir and biographical genre, about the author of the maltese falcon... coppola forced him to reshoot it, i think took control of editing and ultimately only 30% was wenders footage, so hard to sy what it could have been?)...
at one point coppola took over the studio and resources, interrupting the production... not one to sit idle, he used the time to make a few movies (3-4?!), one of which was the state of things... in some ways it is a lot like fellini's probable best 8 1/2... in that case, the director uses his writer's block as material for the movie itself, informing the subject matter, structure and direction... wenders was in portugal and helped out a broke project/production team complete their film out of his own stock, if they helped him make a film once they were done... it turned out to be state of things, which mirrored events in portugal and in his dealings with coppola...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrWzvW4a87A
for movies that are IN PRINT (
watched wenders until the end of the world on itunes recently... it was another movie i recalled as having potential but being severely flawed, due to its rambling and disjointed nature... a 4-5 hour version exists (highly recommended by a critic i respect, the DVD savant site), but it is only avail on region 2... an amazon reviewer there said it is easy to convert most DVD players (not sure about blu-ray) to region 0, which is universal? in the z channell doc (a movie about movies if there ever was one), james woods talked about how once upon a time in america was initially butchered by severly truncated 2 1/2 hour edit... when it was later released in a pioneering (at the time - now routine and almost de rigeuer), restored, director's cut of four hours, it was called a masterpiece (woods laughed that critic maslin went from calling it one of the worst movies she had scene and incoherent to one of the best movies of the decade - what a difference editing and respecting the director's original vision of length, tempo, intercutting plot elements, etc makes)...
of course buena vista social club about the cuban music scene (with ry cooder, who scored paris, texas - wenders worked with familiar people a lot, writers, DPs, scorers, editors, etc) was a great doc and musical document...
also in netflix queu, two movies that were sequels to WOD and state of things (reportedly not as good - i just found out they had sequels) - so close, so far (?) for WOD and lisbon story (?) for state of things...
* my art film criticism penance for dabbling on the dark side (avatar)
saintfool
Dead sexy
it's a perfectly lovely film. original and fresh. i had a bit of a thing for solveig dommartin following it. she and elina lowensohn were my euro-inflected infatuations in the early 90's...
jdoggydogg
Footballguy
I am on the fence on this one, though I will surely see it some day.
jdoggydogg
Footballguy
The voiceover really cracked me up. Not your typical movie, but I give it points for originality. And it's actually poignant at the end despite all that weirdness.
cosjobs
Footballguy
Phenomenal novel, well worth the effort.
Bob Magaw
Footballguy
while on the subject of scores/soundtracks, one of my two favorite bond scores by john barry, along with on her majesty's secret service (with louis armstrong's last recorded song)...my favorite scene from manhunter, probably because of the music, by the obscure prime movers (dolarhyde doesn't deal with rejection too well)...
buena vista social club
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9jo7p-tClU
*** a literate (maybe TOO literate) review, from the criterion booklet... also, the cinematography (back & white AND color) is beautiful, by henri alekan in his 80s... he also did wenders state of things, and was famous for beauty and the beast, by cocteau, many years earlier...
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1288
3Nov09
Wings of Desire: Watch the Skies
BY MICHAEL ATKINSON
If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987). Marking Wenders’s career midpoint like a lightning strike cutting across tree rings, the movie is at once audience-seductive and demanding, holistic and aestheticized. It has beguiled the Wenders aficionado as reliably as it’s absorbed the spiritually hungry civilian, the rogue filmhead, the bookish square, and the nondenominational seeker. It seemed upon its release closer to the effervescent fantasias of Michael Powell, Maya Deren, Georges Méliès, and Jean Vigo, as well as Victorian postcards, than to Wenders’s earlier New German Cinema existentialism, or to the troubled legacy of German cinema as a whole. Even after the two-decades-plus of global exploration that has followed for the filmmaker, it appears to be sui generis, born from its own shadowy nitrate soup.
So, let’s think subjectively, you and I, about possible ways to look at the movie, and if none suit you, others are not hard to find. In thumbnail, Wings of Desire belongs to a trafficked subgenre, the angel-on-earth ballade (Victorian, modern-comedic, or otherwise, and usually trifling), but it’s clear we’re a world away from Raoul Walsh’s goofy 1945 Jack Benny comedy The Horn Blows at Midnight (though perhaps closer, in the first half, to the sylphlike angel presences chaperoning the sermonic fables in Lois Weber’s 1915 dream film Hypocrites). There’s little doubt as to the originality of the experience from the very first airborne camera patrols of autumnal cold-war Berlin. In Wenders’s silvery black-and-white view, this is the paradigmatic city wasteland of its age, still war-torn and withstanding a historicized physical and political schizophrenia like no other, symbolized, like the elephant in the parlor, by the wall itself, snaking through the urban spaces covered with graffiti, obliterating your view, wherever you stand, of the city’s other half. This cognitively dissonant urban experiment had frequently been the grim arena for sixties spy noir, but never had we seen Berlin become Berlin so clearly, so eloquently before. (The more sober and evocative German title translates as The Sky over Berlin.) Of course the city is haunted.
Haunted by angels, that is, like Bruno Ganz’s questing hero Damiel, saturnine but benevolent men and women in black coats occupying the thick of human flow, but in a quantum way, in between molecules, present but unseen, and always listening. The details of Wenders’s concept are everything: the fact that the angels’ eavesdropping is both empathetic and voyeuristic, the precise way the angels exude patience and sympathy (not, say, the detachment of analysts observing human folly), the manner in which they slowly lean in and gently place mollifying hands on human shoulders, the unpredictable weft of languages and ethnicities they meet, the fact that most of what the angels hear from their earthling subjects is worry, worry, worry. Arguing, silent recriminations, trauma, doubt, an ambulance in which the pregnant mother addresses her unborn baby (“I can’t wait to see you”) as the husband focuses on the wife (“If only I could suffer in her place”), a public library crowded with angels listening to the hum of learning and inquiry, the occasional child who sees the angels outright but only smiles—this all constitutes a genuine vision of humanity, one that at its heart comes bearing a moral idea. Ironically, given the iconography, it’s a passionately humanist film, suggesting by its very texture and rhythm a prescriptive notion of how we should regard our compatriot Homo sapiens, and how we should seize the mundane moments as they catapult by. It’s a soaring anthem for everydayness, as Buddhist as it is Christlike, but defined by its own metaphysics.
Still, it’s not a pedagogical work but a poetic one, filthy with Keats’s “negative capability.” The film’s revelation of a heaven and earth infrastructure does not absolve mysteries but compounds them. Nevertheless, despite this spirituality, the film’s mysteries turn out to be largely cinematic. Wenders has always been a quintessential Euro movie-lover of the New Wave generation, and Wings of Desire has a rich vein of cinephilic self-reflexivity running through it. After all, although the angels we see can subtly affect human behavior (Damiel steers a suicidal subway rider toward the future, and calms a dying bicyclist after an accident), they, like the moviegoer, are mostly observers.
To watch is to love, as we see in the scene where Damiel, having fallen for Solveig Dommartin’s trapeze artist, Marion, loiters in her trailer, and is galvanized when she begins undressing. He tries to touch her but cannot. Like James Stewart in Rear Window, the angel can only watch, and he is as much defined by his helpless voyeurism as we are in the audience. On one level, the angels are pure-hearted documentarians, bearing witness to life (cinema began as documentary, after all), yet their work is not action but attention. Is there a culpability inherent in the distance of being an observer? (Michael Haneke, among others, has clearly thought so.) Damiel is an idealized surrogate for us and our role, hypnotized and passive and all too human; and if Hitchcock’s film was about the anxiety of viewing, then Wenders’s is about its melancholy, its beauty, its final limitations.
The allegorization of our experience as viewers is bedizened by the spectatorship of the traveling circus (which is regularly breached by the chaos of the active participation of children, something Damiel experiences as rapturous), the film history references (Damiel explains his desire to mix in by saying he wants to be like Philip Marlowe and “come home to a cat”), the news footage of postwar Berlin’s rubble and ruin, and of course the film being shot within the film, some kind of dire concentration camp thriller starring Peter Falk, who senses the angels because, as he explains, he converted to humanity himself “thirty years ago” (and 1957 was indeed when Falk made his first appearance on American television). But Damiel ultimately becomes dissatisfied with his role, and his position as an observer begins to dissolve once he sits beside the costumed Nazi-victim extras, who are “living” in multiple time periods at once, self-observing ruminators as well as subjects, for the film-in-the-film’s cameras, for the angels, for Wenders, and of course for us.
As the angels haunt Berlin, Wings of Desire also has its haunters—the audience, observing the observers. As it dawns that we, at least in the viewing moment, might be closer to the ineffectual angels than to the people they hover over, Damiel edges nearer to surrendering his angelic immortality and omnipotence for a short life of love, books, coffee, wind, children, and urban messiness—in effect, exiting his own private movie house and entering the throng of unaestheticized life. He desires, in a sense, to leave the movie he’s in and join us on our way home. Is the plot arc of Wings of Desire a cry against cinema, even as it equates watching with love? Or does it suggest, to the choir, only a more engaged participation for us, the give-and-take of art film as opposed to the utterly passive experience of Hollywood dross, the Godardian sense that cinema is not an escape from life but life itself? Once Damiel goes human, awakening in the no-man’s-land between the east and west sections of the wall, we as viewers may have an experience akin to Greta Garbo’s after she’d seen the Beast in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast transform into the clean-shaven Jean Marais: “Give me back my Beast.”
But confronting the prosaic Damiel (in color, dressed like a thrift shop retiree, and as penniless as an illegal alien) is part of the strategy, the engagement, the awakening away from the dream of cinema and toward contact. Who said watching movies was a simple or responsibility-free act? When Damiel and Marion meet in a nightclub bar (where, onstage, the angel played by Otto Sander listens in to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds but hears nothing), they launch into a notorious, full-frontal logorrheic climax (a Wenders trademark) that effectively leaves us in the dust. But they’re building a mythos outside of the parameters of cinema, and by that point it’s not about us, the audience, any longer, or Wenders. It’s life, carrying on.
Michael Atkinson writes film criticism for IFC.com, Sight & Sound, and Moving Image Source. His newest books are Exile Cinema: Filmmakers at Work Beyond Hollywood and the novel Hemingway Deadlights.
criterion's companion essay, by the director...
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1289
2Nov09
An Attempted Description
of an Indescribable Film
BY WIM WENDERS
The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire.
And we, spectators always, everywhere,
looking at, never out of, everything!
—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy”
At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a desire.
That’s how it begins, making a film, writing a book, painting a picture, composing a tune, generally creating something.
You have a wish.
You wish that something might exist, and then you work on it until it does. You want to give something to the world, something truer, more beautiful, more painstaking, more serviceable, or simply something other than what already exists. And right at the start, simultaneous with the wish, you imagine what that “something other” might be like, or at least you see something flash by. And then you set off in the direction of the flash, and you hope you don’t lose your orientation, or forget or betray the wish you had at the beginning.
And in the end, you have a picture or pictures of something, you have music, or something that operates in some new way, or a story, or this quite extraordinary combination of all these things: a film. Only with a film—as opposed to paintings, novels, music, or inventions—you have to present an account of your desire; more, you even have to describe in advance the path you want to go with your film. No wonder, then, that so many films lose their first flash, their comet.
The thing I wished for and saw flashing was a film in and about Berlin.
A film that might convey something of the history of the city since 1945. A film that might succeed in capturing what I miss in so many films that are set here, something that seems to be so palpably there when you arrive in Berlin: a feeling in the air and under your feet and in people’s faces that makes life in this city so different from life in other cities.
To explain and clarify my wish, I should add: it’s the desire of someone who’s been away from Germany for a long time, and who could only ever experience “Germanness” in this one city. I should say I’m no Berliner. Who is nowadays? But for over twenty years now, visits to this city have given me my only genuine experiences of Germany, because the (hi)story that elsewhere in the country is suppressed or denied is physically and emotionally present here.
Of course I didn’t want just to make a film about the place, Berlin. What I wanted to make was a film about people—people here in Berlin—that considered the one perennial question: how to live?
-
And so I have “BERLIN” representing
“THE WORLD.”
I know of no place with a stronger claim.
Berlin is “a historical site of truth.”
No other city is such a meaningful image,
such a PLACE OF SURVIVAL,
so exemplary of our century.
Berlin is divided like our world,
like our time,
like men and women,
young and old,
rich and poor,
like all our experience.
A lot of people say Berlin is “crummy.”
I say: there is more reality in Berlin
than any other city.
It’s more a SITE than a CITY.
“To live in the city of undivided truth,
to walk around with the
invisible ghosts of the future and
the past . . .”
That’s my desire, on the way to
becoming a film.
My story isn’t about Berlin
because it’s set there
but because it couldn’t be set
anywhere else.
The name of the film will be:
“THE SKY OVER BERLIN”
because the sky is maybe the only thing
that unites these two cities,
apart from their past
of course. Will there be a common
future?
“Heaven only knows.”
And language, much invoked,
THE GERMAN LANGUAGE,
would seem to be shared also,
but in fact its plight
is the same as the city’s:
one language comprises two
with a common past
but not necessarily a shared future.
And what of the present?
That’s the subject of the film:
“THE SKY OVER BERLIN.”
“OVER BERLIN”?
In, with, for, about Berlin . . .
What should such a film
“discuss,” “examine,” “depict,”
or “touch on”?
And to what end?
As if every last particle
of Berlin hadn’t been
tapped, taped, typed.
Not least because it’s now
750 years old
and has been promoted to
LEGENDARY status,
which, while not unreasonable,
doesn’t do anything to clarify
the condition “Berlin,”
rather the opposite.
“THE SKY”?
The sky above it is the only
clear thing you can understand.
The clouds
drift across it, it rains and snows
and thunder-
and-lightnings, the moon sails through it
and sinks, the sun shines on the divided city,
today, as it did on the ruins in 1945
and the “Front City” of the fifties,
as it did before there was any city here,
and as it will when there is no longer
any city.
Now what I want is starting to emerge:
namely to tell a story in Berlin.
(With the right stress—not for once
a STORY but:
A story.)
That requires objectivity, distance,
or, better yet, a vantage point. Because
I don’t want
to tell a STORY OF UNITY but
something harder:
one story about DIVISION.
Oh, Berlin isn’t easy.
You’re delighted to find moral
support on the back of the catalog
for the exhibition Legendary Berlin,
in this sentence from Heiner Müller:
“Berlin is the ultimate. Everything else
is prehistory.
If history occurs, it will begin
in Berlin.”
Does that help?
In the film, of course, it’s not HISTORY
but A story, though of course
a STORY may contain HISTORY,
images and traces of past history,
and intimations of what is to come. Anyway:
HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS!
You need the patience of an ANGEL
to sort all that out.
STOP! It’s right here at this point
that the film,
DRIFTING
into my mind, begins:
with ANGELS.
Yes, angels. A film with angels.
I know it’s hard to grasp,
I myself can hardly grasp it yet:
“ANGELS”!
-
The genesis of the idea of having angels in my Berlin story is very hard to account for in retrospect. It was suggested by many sources at once. First and foremost, Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Paul Klee’s paintings too. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. There was a song by the Cure that mentioned “fallen angels,” and I heard another song on the car radio that had the line “talk to an angel” in it. One day, in the middle of Berlin, I suddenly became aware of that gleaming figure the Angel of Peace, metamorphosed from being a warlike victory angel into a pacifist. There was an idea about four Allied pilots shot down over Berlin, an idea about juxtaposing and superimposing today’s Berlin and the capital of the Reich, “double images” in time and space; there have always been childhood images of angels as invisible, omnipresent observers; there was, so to speak, the old hunger for transcendence, and also a longing for the absolute opposite: the longing for a comedy!
THE DEADLY EARNEST OF A COMEDY!
I’m amazed myself.
What’s a film going to look like—what can it look like—possibly
a comedy, that has angels as its main characters?
With wings and with no flying??
-
I’m not after a “screenplay” here. All I can do is go on describing what’s “ghosting around” in my imagination.
Inter alia, a WORKING METHOD for this film.
First I’ll write down everything I want it to be, my ideas, images, stories, and perhaps something like a rough structure, as well as a lot of research on Berlin, old newsreel footage and photographs. I’ve already begun on a street-by-street recce.
Then I’d like to shut myself away with the main actors and a writer for several weeks, and together mull over this material on “angels” and “Berlin,” extend it, test it, adapt it or reject it, and finally come up with something we can all agree on, from which we can go on to make the film.
-
I spoke to Peter Handke about the project, and he agreed to be involved, provided it was the kind of film you could pull out of your hat.
I agreed.
If my angel story is possible, then it is not as a calculated and sophisticated special-effects movie but as an open affair, “something pulled out of your hat.”
Particularly in Berlin, the city of conjurers.
-
If I were to give my story a prologue, it would go something like this:
When God, endlessly disappointed, finally prepared to turn his back on the world forever, it happened that some of his angels disagreed with him and took the side of man, saying he deserved to be given another chance.
Angry at being crossed, god banished them to what was then the most terrible place on earth: berlin.
And then he turned away.
All this happened at the time that we today call: “the end of the second world war.”
Since that time, these fallen angels from “the second angelic rebellion” have been imprisoned in the city, with no prospect of release, let alone of being readmitted to heaven. they are condemned to be witnesses, forever nothing but onlookers, unable to affect men in the slightest, or to intervene in the course of history. they are unable to so much as move a grain of sand . . .
-
An introductory passage might go something like that. But there will be no introduction. All will gradually be brought out in the film and make itself felt. The presence of the angels will explain itself.
(But that too is still at the stage of scheme and desire.)
-
After the prehistory, the story itself.
The angels have been in Berlin since the end of the war, condemned to remain there. They have no kind of power and are only onlookers, watching what happens without the slightest possibility of taking a hand in any of it. Previously, they had been able to influence things; as guardian angels, they could at least give whispered counsel, but even that is now beyond them. Now they are just there, invisible to man, but themselves all-seeing.
They have been wandering around Berlin for forty years now. Each of them has his own “patch” that he always walks, and “his” people, of whom he has grown particularly fond and whose progress he follows with more attention than that of the other people he watches over. The angels don’t only see everything, they hear everything too, even the most secret thoughts. They can sit next to an old woman on a bench in the Tiergarten and hear her thoughts, or stand behind a solitary train driver on the underground and follow his thoughts. They have access to people in prison cells and hospital wards, and there is no business or political conference so secret that they aren’t able to overhear it, nor any confessional, any psychiatrist’s couch, or any brothel. And if anyone lies, the angel can right away hear the difference between the thought and the spoken word.
People are unaware of their presence. Sometimes a child will catch a glimpse of an angel, and immediately forget it again. A grown-up can see them only in dreams, but on awakening he will forget them and dismiss them as a dream.
The years have gone by for our angels in Berlin imperceptibly, in a recurring rhythm. They have seen almost two generations grow up and die, and soon it will be a third. They know every house and tree and shrub.
And more too:
They see beyond the world that manifests itself to people today. They can see it as it was when God turned away from it and they were banished, at the beginning of 1945. Behind the city of today, in its interstices or above it, as though frozen in time, are the ruins, the mounds of rubble, the burned chimney stacks and facades of the devastated city, only dimly visible sometimes but always there in the background. There are other ghosts from the past too,
shadowy presences visible to the angels: previously fallen angels and grim demons that had rampaged through the city and the country and put on their worst and bloodiest spectacle. These past figures are also hanging around Berlin; they too are unhoused and even more accursed. Admittedly, they have hardly any effect on the present, which apathetically lets them glide by. Unlike the angels, these spirits are indifferent to present-day life. They keep their own company in gloomy corners and past strongholds. Or they ride around in armored personnel carriers, on motorbikes with sidecars, in tanks or black limos emblazoned with swastikas. When our angels appear, these figures run like rats. But there is hardly any contact or interaction, certainly no violent altercation between them and the angels.
Also dimly visible are the people of those times, queuing for food, on their way to the air raid shelters, the “women of the ruins” standing in long lines among the rubble, passing buckets from hand to hand, the abandoned children and the buses and trams of the time.
-
This latent past keeps appearing to the angels on their turns through present-day Berlin. If they want, they can brush it away with a wave of the hand, but we know: incorporeal and timeless, this yesterday is still present everywhere, as a “parallel world.”
-
Even though the angels have been watching and listening to people for such a long time, there are still many things they don’t understand.
For example, they don’t know and can’t imagine what colors are. Or tastes and smells. They can guess what feelings are, but they can’t experience them directly. As our angels are basically loving and good, they can’t imagine things like fear, jealousy, envy, or hatred. They are familiar with their expression but not with the things themselves. They are naturally curious and would like to learn more, and from time to time they feel a pang of regret at missing out on all these things, not knowing what it’s like throwing a stone, or what water or fire are like, or picking up some object in your hand, let alone touching or kissing a fellow human being.
All these things escape the angels. They are pure CONSCIOUSNESS, fuller and more comprehending than mankind but also poorer. The physical and sensual world is reserved for human beings. It is the privilege of mortality, and death is its price.
So it can’t come as a complete surprise that one day an angel has the extraordinary notion of giving up his angelic existence for a human life!
It’s never been done. Perhaps the angels know as much. But the consequences are unknown.
The angel who had this astounding idea was falling in love with a woman, and it was his desire to be able to touch her that gave him the idea, with all its unpredictable consequences. He talks it over with his friends. To begin with they are shocked. But then they think about what it might entail, with the result that several of them agree to take the step together: to exchange their immortality for the brief flame of human life.
What persuades them is not the new experience they might have, or wanting to put an end to their troublesome impassivity, but the hope that something important might flow from their “changing sides”: the hope that by renouncing everlasting life they might cause prodigious energies to be released, which they hope to be able to collect and invest in one of their number, the most respected of them, an “archangel,” whom banishment reduced to the same level of powerlessness as all the others. He is the angel who lives in the Angel of Peace, and the great hope is that by releasing this energy, he might become a real “angel of peace” and help to bring peace to the world.
-
Anyway, the first (black-and-white) half of the film takes us to this point: a group of angels go over to human life and leave a transcendent, “timeless” city for the actual Berlin of today.
One night, during a terrible storm, these new arrivals turn up in the city. Each in his own way, as befits his new human identity: one of them spins his car round a corner into a mercifully empty street, another finishes up on a roof, a third in a packed bar, others in a cinema, in the gutter, a bus, a backyard . . .
So now they are there, finally and irrevocably there. And it’s in the second half of our story that the most extraordinary and thrilling things happen. For a start, everything is in color. Not that it’s “more real” than previously. On the contrary. Perhaps the “all-seeingness” of the angels was “truer” than the colorful, three- rather than four-dimensional vision they have now. Anyway, their new type of seeing excites these recent earthlings. In fact, everything is thrilling, all these fresh sensations of the things they thought they were familiar with but had never felt. Like Berlin itself.
As angels, they knew it better than any human did, but now they learn that it’s all really completely different. Suddenly there are obstacles, distances, regulations and restrictions, among them the wall itself, which has never previously been a barrier to them. That takes some getting used to.
-
But first come the “sensations” of living. Breathing. Walking. Touching things. The first bite of an apple, or perhaps a hot dog at a corner stall. The first words addressed to a fellow human, and the first response. And finally, far into that first night: the first sleep. The bewilderment of dreams! And waking to the reality of the following morning.
All these “feelings”!
They assail our adventurers like viruses attacking a man with no immunity.
There is fear, previously unknown to them. Nothing in their angelic existence had prepared them for it. In eternity, there was no fear; now, in this death-shadowed world, it’s there. Several of the angels despair at it, one in fact almost goes mad, and another soon takes his own new life. But most adapt. Especially when they remember there was one human faculty that, as angels, they had had a particular admiration for: a sense of humor. “You’ve just got to laugh”; now they understand why, and they feel liberated by it. They realized earlier that it does no good to a man to take everything seriously.
All in all, they still know a lot of what they knew as angels. And they know about all the other spirits around them—though they are no longer visible. They know their old friends are there, and they know they are continually being watched and “shadowed.” They walk their old “beats,” insofar as they are still accessible to them. And they talk to the angels, knowing they are there and merely unable to reply. They tell them about their new experiences, both joyful and painful. Because of their conversations with angels, they are looked at askance by their new fellow humans.
I hope that won’t befall the author of this “story with angels.”
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beer 30
Footballguy
Can you unpack this a bit for me Bob? Not following here.
Cliff Clavin
Footballguy
District 9: I was thoroughly disappointed. Went in expecting some great and got average... at best. I even held out on watching this until a bought a new TV. The start was interesting but it just crumbled from there. I fell asleep with about 30 minutes left and have zero interest in turning it back on. The aliens/cgi were great. 2/5
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Bob Magaw
Footballguy
my last post which prompted your response was too terse (i'll try and expand on that and flesh it out a bit more
)omniscient angels know/see/hear all, one is bored, is captivated by a beautiful woman and becomes mortal to be with her.* to paraphrase the director's description/explanation of FILM as ART... it is unique in that, at its best, it can offer the combination of reading a novel, viewing a painting (or succession of paintings) and attending a concert... when images, sounds, thoughts and feelings are consonant, with unified themes, in the hands of a master like wenders at fusing them, it holds the capability of becoming a higher, more powerful art form than GENERALLY possible by one of the other, more isolated and delimited media, alone and by themselves (ie - their dynamic interplay like "synaesthesic chords" that resonate/reverberate across different levels of our being - physical, emotional, mental, etc.)...
** few other reviews (looks smaller with just link?
)hi-def digest
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/2578/wingsofdesire.html
dvd savant (glenn erickson)
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3050wing.html
bonus - dvd savant on until the end of the world
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s53until1.html
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snogger
Footballguy
Interesting as I was the complete opposite. I was
ing the first 30 to 45 minutes, but enjoyed the rest of the movie. 
Osaurus
Footballguy
For Sale by Owner
It started out as an interesting haunted house film tying into the lost colony of Roanoke believe it or not. A bit slow and not very suspenseful, but an interesting story IMO. Then came an extremely stupid ending that seemed like they ran out of money for production and just ended it. Disappointed. 2.5/5
It started out as an interesting haunted house film tying into the lost colony of Roanoke believe it or not. A bit slow and not very suspenseful, but an interesting story IMO. Then came an extremely stupid ending that seemed like they ran out of money for production and just ended it. Disappointed. 2.5/5
KarmaPolice
Footballguy
Yeah, I would place this on a "worst 10 movies I've seen in the last few years" list.
MCguidance
Footballguy
Paul Blart: Mall Cop - if I had seen this a few weeks earlier I'd of drafted this over Troll 2 in the Bad Movie category as part of the Great Movie Draft.
The_Burning_Bush
Footballguy
Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs is awesome.
SmoovySmoov
The Way of the Samurai
STEVE!!!!!!!!!!!!If you "didn't consider his portrayal of The Joker to be in line with the comic books" then you haven't read the best Batman stories. I know you said you're old school, but most comic book observers would agree that when Frank Miller came upon the scene is really when Batman became relevant again. The Joker that I know from the comics is dark, sadistic, twisted, inhuman, and psychotic... which is exactly what Ledger delivered. It's what's hardcore Batman fans dreamed of.
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Im guessing execrable means something along the lines of intolerable. That said, I thought that movie was fairly funny.
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Maybe Jim Carrey's most underrated/overlooked movie? Im with you in that I didnt like it much the first time (although after Ace Ventura and Dumb & Dumber, he set a pretty high precendent), but seeing it again probably 10 years after it came out I liked it a lot more. Id say being like 22 instead of 12 made a difference in that as well
Chaka
Footballguy
I enjoyed it. Nothing special but funny and charming enough. Dylan Moran was hysterical, definitely the highlight of the film (see my sig).
hooter311
Footballguy
Yes & Yes
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Terminator: Salvation Went in with moderate to low expectations, and enjoyed it. I thought the opening seqeunce was pretty bad (why is the human savior risking his life for not much in return in this instance??), but it got better. Still, it was missing something though. Mood? Story? Dialogue? I dont know, but what T2 had perfected wasnt really going on here. That said, I think it was better than Rise of the Machines in basically every aspect except storyline. I bet Sam Worthington wishes he made this movie now instead of before Avatar. He'd probably be like $8 mill richer.......6.8/10
hooter311
Footballguy
Zombieland
Absolutely loved it. It was great fun for what it was. Reminded me of playing "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" on Sega as a kid. Very reminiscent of two of my other cult horror favorites: From Dusk Till Dawn and Evil Dead 2. I'll probably watch it at least once again tonight.
4.5/5
Absolutely loved it. It was great fun for what it was. Reminded me of playing "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" on Sega as a kid. Very reminiscent of two of my other cult horror favorites: From Dusk Till Dawn and Evil Dead 2. I'll probably watch it at least once again tonight.
4.5/5
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Yeah, that guy was great. He shouldve had about twice as much screen time whether it felt forced or not
hooter311
Footballguy
Worthington was living out of his car during the early days of Avatar's production, he probably was more than happy to take what he got.That middle action sequence that starts when the roof comes off was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. The rest was pretty meh.
hooter311
Footballguy
I really liked How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, but I'm probably more like the main character than most people would care to admit.
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Chaka
Footballguy
mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("Are you referring to why Worthington decided to donate his body or Bale's assault on the facility? Either way this movie fell way short of the mark for me particularly the ending. Okay so let me get this straight, they performed a heart transplant surgery with a donor of questionable compatibility who also happens to be the resistance's most significant strategic asset, not to mention that this all occurred in a field hospital. A FREAKING FIELD HOSPITAL! Did they travel back in time and bring back Hawkeye Pierce to do the surgery?
Beyond that Bale jumps out of a helicopter into the ocean for no apparent reason (the ensuing conversation was of absolutely no strategic significance), the attempted rape scene was completely incongruous with the preceding and subsequent scenes (was only there to show that Worthington was 1) a bad ### and 2) not a bad guy), and there was absolutely no reason for the machines to keep Kyle Reese alive to enact their plan to trap Connor.
I could go on and on about the flaws in this film.
CGI Arnold was the best part of the film, I probably should have seen that coming but didn't.*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***
");document.close();I also had trouble watching this film because Bale's performance was perhaps the worst of his career and I couldn't help but think about his on-set meltdown every time I saw him on screen.5.0/10 most of that because of Worthington and the special effects which were solid.
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Chaka
Footballguy
More on Terminator Salvation
mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("
John Connor before the assault on Skynet: "Win or lose this war ends tonight"
John Connor flying off into the sunset (no seriously) after the successful assault on Skynet: "There is a storm on the horizon. A time of hardship and pain. This battle has been won, but the war against the machines races on."
Not a well written film at all.*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();
mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("
John Connor before the assault on Skynet: "Win or lose this war ends tonight"
John Connor flying off into the sunset (no seriously) after the successful assault on Skynet: "There is a storm on the horizon. A time of hardship and pain. This battle has been won, but the war against the machines races on."
Not a well written film at all.*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();
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hooter311
Footballguy
I found myself smirking with nearly every line he said. He was actually taking that crap serious? I was expecting a much more noteworthy film being constructed after the initial reports of that outburst.
UncleRico
Footballguy
I was coming in to post the opposite. I wanted it to be good, but it did nothing for me. I found it amusing for a little bit when he was going over the rules and the opening credits were great, but that's about it.
jdoggydogg
Footballguy
The Tudors
Finished season three, disc one. There are better dramas, for sure. But this is a very entertaining series. Basically a really well-made soap opera with naked breasts.
Finished season three, disc one. There are better dramas, for sure. But this is a very entertaining series. Basically a really well-made soap opera with naked breasts.
Mookie Blaylock
Footballguy
Memento: Should be Mehmento. I feel like the people that go ape#### about this film just want to be excited about a film that's different. And Guy Pierce isn't as great as many are saying. His one good character isn't as good as Mel's one good character and he's nowhere near the actor that Russell Crowe is (I saw the three Aussies compared somewhere on this site). Carrie Ann Moss is pretty hot and Joe P was his usual decent self.
2.5/5
2.5/5
joffer
Footballguy
that, or they properly recognize its awesomeness
hooter311
Footballguy
I thought the way they handled the "rules" was extremely clever.mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("
For example:
In Columbus's opening sequence they show him being attacked by a zombie hiding in the back seat. He refers to that as "Rule #31" like he has been living by this for some time. A little bit later he comes up with "Rule #32- Enjoy the Little Things". Which meant that he just came up with rule #31 at the moment he was first attacked. As the film progresses he does check the back seat of every vehicle he enters. Everything he does add to the list he does indeed live by from then on out, until of course the third act where he has to go and be a hero.
It was just a nice touch that I appreciated. Most films of this nature wouldn't take the time or effort to be subtle about it. They would have had a scene of dialogue explaining it and then rammed it down my throat 3 or 4 more times the rest of the film.
*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***");document.close();
Did you like the other films I referenced in comparison to it? It worked like a "Wes Anderson wannabe does a zombie movie" film for me.
hooter311
Footballguy
It wasn't so much that it was "different" that I liked it. It was an incredible piece of modern day noir with an untrustworthy main character, something I wish more films had. The way it was written and directed it was incredibly intricate story that had to be developed precisely for it to make any sense. I've tried to find holes in it multiple times on its release because I was so blown away by it, but couldn't.Telling a story scene for scene backwords and having it make sense is something incredibly hard to achieve. The fact that nobody has really tried to tackle the concept again since pretty much seals the deal of it being a masterpiece.
Chaka
Footballguy
Pearce was very good in LA Confidential too & Mel (anti-semitic scumbag though he is) has had far more than one good character (Riggs, Mad Max & William Wallace were all great characters and he has acted in many other excellent roles).
hooter311
Footballguy
Pearce was great in Ravenous as well.
saintfool
Dead sexy
huh. i'd be interested to see if this holds true. surely some fanboy somewhere has rearranged the film scene for scene in reverse to tell the story...
jdoggydogg
Footballguy
This.Memento is a fantastic movie.
General Malaise
Footballguy
Really? I got stuck seeing this with my son the other night at his school. I didn't care for it at all.STEVE!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mookie Blaylock
Footballguy
The characters were different, but Mel was the same. I loved, and I mean loved those characters, but he's really only got one speed. And yes, Pearce was good in LA Confidential, but he wasn't great. I mean how much depth was there really to that role? Good not great.ETA: IMO
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Mookie Blaylock
Footballguy
I'm going off of first and only viewing here. You may have some appreciation that has grown that I could never have only seeing this film once. I like what you've said though and I'll have to check it out again. And again. But the 'masterpiece' comment is exactly what I'm talking about...whatever. To each his own.
MCguidance
Footballguy
Didn't Seinfeld do this?
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
mytagid = Math.floor( Math.random() * 100 );document.write("I was referring to Bale's assault, but youre totally right with Worthington's character as well.
Also, did they even use that new ultrasound weapon in the end? I cant even remember, but just thinking as they start the attack why didnt they use it before attacking.
The storyline around Skynet really wasnt a storyline, because they explained nothing. I understand what Connor is saying at the end, but it wouldve been nice if they explained what that meant exactly*** SPOILER ALERT! Click this link to display the potential spoiler text in this box. ***
");document.close();
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Zombieland Liked this a lot, as I expected. Agree with a lot of Hooter's sentiments, although I didnt find it all that similar to Dusk Til Dawn or Evil Dead outside of it being awesome, but thats not a problem for me. The 4 leads basically play the type of character theyre best known for, and it works perfectly. Woody was great, Murray's cameo was hilarious. I still havent seen very many movies from 2009, but this was the best one Ive seen outside of Basterds, Avatar, and maybe Up!.......8.6/10
Kenny Powers
Footballguy
Ravenous is badass to the 10th degree. Love that movie. Robert Carlyle was also excellent in it. Not really one of those so bad its good movies, but it almost feels that way since its about cannibalism and comes off as humorous many times.I'll add Pearce's performance in The Proposition as well. Guy (NPI) isnt a great actor, but he's very good. Havent seen The Road yet, but Im sure hes good in that
