Reader Spotlight: Patrick in Germany

We're getting to know the Film Experience community one-by-one. This is going to take us forever! (That's a good thing. Thank you so much for being part of such a big vibrant fanbase.) Today we're talking to Patrick who lives in Germany and writes for DieAcademy.de, a German site devoted to our favorite awards show.

Hi, Patrick. How long have you been reading The Film Experience?

Maybe 6 years? I like this site so much since it's always interesting topics and wonderful to read.

I know you're really into the Oscars but how about the Lolas, Germany's own movie awards. Which German stars do you recommend our international readers get to know?

The Lolas are not as big of a deal as they should be, but I love some German actors who are still too unknown abroad but doing great work all the time, like: Sibel Kikelli (two time Lola winner for Gegen die Wand & Die Fremde), Susanne Lothar (a three time Lola nominee who died last year) and maybe the best young German actor of our generation August Diehl (who you've seen in Inglourious Basterds and Salt but he's been nominated for the Lola three times and won for "23"). It would be a great pleasure to read a post about any of them.

Two current German greats: August Diehl & Sibel Kekilli

Hey, surely you've noticed my love for Sibel Kekilli. So great every time (though it was weird to see her do that romantic comedy What a Man)

Yes I noticed that. I think she was the best of the cast in What a Man, too but not a good movie. But Head-On. What a performance!

Agreed. Name your three favorite movies in the following genres. Horror, Comedy, Drama, Musical and SciFi. Go...

Horror: The Exorzist, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs (if I put it into this genre)
Comedy: Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Pillow Talk
Drama: The Godfather (1 & 2), American Beauty, All about Eve (if I could choose 5: Sunset Boulevard and The Hours)
Musical: West Side Story, Chicago, Moulin Rouge!
Sci-Fi: Alien & Aliens, Blade Runner, Terminator (1 & 2).

Do you care about a significant other's taste in movies?

The Answer ist YES! It sounds a bit overdone, but I have a problem with guys, who don't like Kate Winslet in general or have mainstream taste of movies and don't feel complex emotions. The movie that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain. This movie is not about a gay couple, its about love and why two people can't be together because of external and internal circumstances. Heartbreaking! But I think some hearts are too cold to feel that and that is not what I am looking for. (I hope most readers will know what I mean?)

Patrick with his great love Kate Winslet

I understand you are kind of a lot obsessed with Kate Winslet. What other actors/actresses really grab you?

Julianne Moore. She's still so underappreciated it makes me burst me into tears. I also love Bette Davis, Thelma Ritter, Sean Penn, most of the work of Nicole Kidman and Michelle Williams, the 70s and 80s Work of Meryl Streep (but getting tired of her work after the brilliant Angels of America), Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling and many more.

Take an Oscar away. Regift it.

Only one? I love the Oscars, but wanna change so much, especially the Oscars for Kim Basinger & Catherine Zeta-Jones (both to Julianne Moore). The biggest fault from the last decade was the Oscar for Tom Hooper's Direction of The King´s Speech. TKS was good, but the direction was TV-Movie-Material I think and The Social Network is by miles superior! If Colin Firth had pick up Best Actor Oscar the Year before for his brilliant performance in A Single Man maybe he wouldn't have won Frontrunner Status and The Kings Speech wouldn't win Best Picture and Director??? When Kathryn Bigelow announced Hooper as the "winner" it was the only time I completely lost interest in the other awards for the evening; it STILL hurts!

Previous Reader Spotlights
And our imaginary Honorary Reader Oscars go to...
lovely ladies: Mysjkin, Lynn Lee, Ester, Leehee, Jamie and Dominique 
(and yes we need to hear from more of the girls) 
dashing gents: Christian, Lucio, Joey Moser, Zé Vozone, Tony T, Andy Hoglund, Ferdi, K.M. Soehnlein, Sergio, Borja, John, Chris, Peter, Ziyad, Andrew, Yonatan, Keir, Kyle, Vinci, Victor, Bill, Hayden, Murtada, Cory, Walter, Paolo, and BBats

First & Last: Exiled

first & last puzzles
the first and last image from a motion picture 

Can you guess the movie?

The Manor Opens Hot Docs '13

Amir here, with my first dispatch from Hot Docs, North America’s biggest documentary film festival.

My friends had parents who were dentists or ran stores. My parents own a strip club.”

So says Shawney Cohen, the director of The Manor, the Canadian film that opens the festival tonight. Advertised with images of the invitingly neon-lit entrance of a strip club and scantily-clad dancers, The Manor seems to have been chosen as the opening night film based on an old adage we know all too well: sex sells. It’s a risky move by the festival’s programmers because anyone going in to buy sex will surely leave the theatre disappointed. Those of us going in not based on the marketing material but on the promise of a great opener had nothing to worry about. The Manor is an intimate family portrait that explores universal themes of familial bonding through a sharp and wryly humorous lens.

Shawney was six years old when his Jewish parents – Roger, a European immigrant, and Brenda, a Torontonian – bought The Manor, a strip club in suburban Ontario with a hotel attached to it. The purchase of the club proved to be a turning point in the life of the Cohen family that, for better or worse, has remained tied to the locale for nearly three decades; and indeed, this tenacious relationship between the Cohens and The Manor forms the core of the film.

Very little of what happens on the stages of the club is captured by Cohen’s camera. The Manor isn’t even passively sexy; it’s actively unsexy. Cohen’s attention is directed at what the audience doesn’t want to see. He’s directed his focus on the all-encompassing impact that the strip club has made on the lives of everyone connected to it. From the concierge of the adjacent hotel – a former stripper at the club – whose overdose throws everyone for a loop to the arrest of one the mainstays at the club – an adopted son figure to Roger Cohen – everyone’s life seems irreversibly affected by their presence at The Manor.

The titular club hence becomes the film’s pivot; its importance not the product of the type of service it provides or the low-key glamour of its performers, but the consequence of the centrality it has for the Cohen family. Shawney, having lived his whole life trying to blend in with others and find normalcy in an unusual situation, sees no reason to glamorize or sensationalize a story that has become the only reality he knows. An hour and a half later, the curiously mismatched family members and their deceptive occupation grows into an intimate reality for the audience too.

Cohen doesn’t sex up his family’s story with sensual strip club lighting and alcohol. The club isn’t a guise under which a family film takes shape. As the story unravels, the impression becomes increasingly stronger that the only thing that forms the familial bond between the Cohens is the club. It is what hooks the family to the environment and often times to each other. Shawney takes a lot of mileage from the contrasting personalities of his family members to prove this point. His mother suffers from an eating disorder that has left her so thin and so weak that her hip shatters after a minor fall; his father suffers from a different eating disorder that has left him so obese he needs surgery to lose weight. His brother enjoys running the show at the club and dating the working girls from time to time; Shawney has felt the urge to leave his whole life. But even at times when they seem to share nothing in common, when marriages are about to crumble and relationships about to be broken, the club, its ownership and its problems bring everyone together.

All of this sounds incredibly personal, and it is; but that level of specificity allows Cohen to tell a universal story through his singular perspective. He questions the identities of his family members with intense scrutiny and asks them to reconsider themselves and their relationships at their most testing moments; and with a unique, dry sense of humor and a keen eye for finding the tender side of any situation, he invites us to do just as much.

Best Shot: "A Star is Born"

I have a confession to make. I only selected A Star is Born (1954) for this week's edition of 'Best Shot' as an excuse to talk about one of the all-time greatest movie scenes. I'm talking All Time All Time. The scene is the shot and the shot is the scene and the scene justifies the whole movie's title... although it might be more accurately titled A Star is Reborn. I can't let it stop me that several people have already chosen it as their Preferred Shot though this will have the unfortunate effect of making a quite extraordinary whole movie look a little front-heavy since The Scene comes very early in the film.

Take it honey. Take it from the top...

And so she does, glancing over sheet music, humming the melodic line, and easing herself into her spotlight as the mood sweeps over her. She then unleashes one of the great Garland performances, which keeps shifting incandescendantly between three separate modes: tossed off AM rehearsal goof with the boys, fully detailed showmanship of a PERFORMANCE to come, and internal musical reverie. Judy Garland is giving three spectacular performances at once all of them bleeding into each other organically in this one continuous shot. It wouldn't be half as moving or incredible if George Cukor had broken it up into little bits.

But who needs to jazz up a scene with different camera angles when "The World's Greatest Entertainer" is giving you so many character angles already?

The night is bitter. The stars have lost their glitter.
The winds grow colder. Suddenly you're older.
And all because of the man that got away.

No more his eager call, the writing's on the wall.
The dreams you dreamed have all gone astray.
The man that won you, has run off and undone you.
That great beginning has seen a final inning.
Don't know what happened. It's all a crazy game! 

Coupled with the very smart screenplay, which aptly describes this very performance immediately afterwards as filled with "little jabs of pleasure" and George Cukor's astute understanding of what to do with Cinemascope (the mise-en-scène throughout the movie is A+), it's a performance for the ages. Garland's emotionally intricate performance (her best ever as she's just as good in the "book" scenes) is, if you stop to really consider what's happening in the frame, explicitly choreographed in every way possible to provide this bracing cocktail of performance, rehearsal, improv, and narrative while also hitting so many marks which work with very smart choices in Art Direction and Cinematography. Consider, for instance, that the dominant color in this scene is red which was also used to character Norman Maine's drunken madness in the film's opening scene but here the red is suddenly warm and cozy rather than garish and unnerving.

That this shot/scene feels so genuine, spontaneous, and possible rather than like a set piece engineered to mechanical perfection is one of the great miracles of Hollywood Showmanship. The crazy part is this: the movie's just begun! Big glitzy awesome musical numbers for Garland are still ahead of us and Vicki Lester hasn't even been "Born" yet but no matter; Judy Garland came roaring back to life right here.

Quite unfortunately just as this killer scene hooks you into the film for the long haul -- and it is a long haul as running times go though the movie is gripping -- it stops looking like a movie and starts looking suspiciously like film stills. I didn't even know it was National Preservation Week when I selected this film for this date in the series. Let's call it a happy accident and thank film preservations everywhere for their efforts. A Star is Born was notoriously butchered during release when the studio suddenly decided they wanted a tighter running time and started chopping scenes. So the movie that Oscar voters screened and voted for (six noiminations but absurdly shut out of Picture & Director) was not the version that many Americans saw in late 1954 and early 1955 as it made its way around the country. The version that's most readily available now is this Frankenstein version which tries to stitch in the missing scenes where they would have appeared in the film.

Esther Blodgett becomes Vicki Lester, contract player. They don't want to see her face!

On one level it's thrilling that these shards of old scenes are there since the movie itself is so wise and "deliciously sarcastic" (thanks, Vince) about The Hollywood Machine in all of its devouring glory. But I think the reason that A Star is Born is so enduring -- and I swear it improves on each viewing it's so sophisticated -- is that it combines this biting wit with genuine empathy for the Willing Human Casualties of that machine.

On the other level, these half-scenes distract me from the pleasure of the picture and I'd almost rather watch the compromised version that survived. A Star is Born tries to make peace with its own compromises in the Maine marriage, very movingly. On this particular viewing I was quite struck by two bookend shots from Esther's Vicki makeover. 

If I can't have the whole "Man That Got Away" shot, I'll take this second one as my best shot

In this first shot, Norman is forcing Esther to wash off the horrible studio mandated makeup but she objects already convinced that she has an "awful face" and "no chin". Norman only objects to the first comment and Esther finally laughs aloud at his aggressive but supportive commands. In the second shot, Norman is still controlling her but he's unearthed her natural beauty and "extra something" that stars have and has forced her to see her it. Maine's occassionally violent always controlling Svengali instincts are maddening but the complexity and tragedy of the marital drama in A Star is Born is that "Esther Blodgett" has always needed his heavy hand to finally realize her inner "Vicki Lester" and she may be truly lost without him. By the movie's end she's abandoned both women in favor of "Mrs. Norman Maine."

NEXT: DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) on May 1st

Nine Stars Waiting For Their Big Break...
She Blogged By Night on Norman Maine... "like a child with a blow torch"
We Recycle Movies "How A Star is Born Changed My Life" 
Film Actually gets uncomfortably privy to Norman Maine's headspace
Cinesnatch Vicki Lester Steals a Moment
Antagony & Ecstacy on the Judy Garland Meta Narrative (and more)
Amiresque shares four vivid memories of this picture
Dancin' Dan a master class in how to shoot a musical sequence 
Alison Tooey sees a good sense of distance between the characters
The Film's The Thing looks at ALL THREE film versions. Overachiever!
...or see all the choices Sequentially 

You're Gonna Link Me When I'm Gone

Erik Lundegaard "find the future movie star". This was really fun and hard... I briefly thought I saw James Cagney but that wasn't it... (here's the answer if you can't figure it out)
Los Angeles Times Lincoln Center honored the one and only Barbra Streisand this week. I was not invited though I sought an invitation which I have to admit depressed me. In related news: HAPPY BIRTHDAY BARBRA!
i09 the new After Earth trailer proves M Night Shyamalan doesn't know how evolution works
Salon YouTube's eighth birthday brings classic time-wasters 
Gawker Ben Affleck to spend only $1.50 a day for five days in honor of movie blogge... oh I'm sorry, as part of the "Live Below the Line" challenge meant to draw attention to Global Poverty. 

Speaking of Affleck...

i09 Marvel got the rights to Daredevil back from Fox. Will they use them. And how soon? I really wish they'd consider a TV series for at least one of their characters. Lawyers belong on TV. Surely they got the industry mandate on that?
Slash ...and speaking of Marvel Studios. Lee Pace, whom we love here at TFE, is in final talks to play the villain in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. I don't know that series but this is terrible news since his perfect perfect mug will undoubtedly be buried in some weird unrecognizably villainous makeup. Stop making beautiful people ugly, Hollywood! Ugly actors need jobs too.

and more non-Marvel links
In Contention Dallas Buyers Club goes to Focus. Will it be their prime Oscar contender for 2013? 
Towleroad Downton Abbey: The Musical 
Welcome to Twin Peaks amazingly creepy mashup of Twin Peaks and The Shining
Empire Chloe Moretz, uncontent to haunt me in every Hollywood picture is considering working with one of my favorite European auteurs Olivier Assayas for a film called Sils Maria. I have to admit the plot sounds super interesting (especially since the Irma Vep auteur is behind it) with Moretz possibly playing an actress currently playing one of another actresses (Binoche) defining roles.  
Cinema Blend Entertainment giant and sort of retired director Mike Nichols returning with One Last Thing Before I Go. Ugh. why didn't he just say yes to August: Osage County then?!? 

and look!

Anna Kendrick made a music video. The song will be familiar if you saw Pitch Perfect. There's a funny reaction to this on Videogum.

and Tweet of the Day goes to Dwayne Johnson "the Rock" who sent his fans this pic from his hospital bed after hernia surgery.

Ha! (The Superman t-shirt is perfect since he's already practically a cartoon superhero)