Very Veronika

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JA from MNPP here. This weekend marks the 30th anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second-to-last film, the glorious Veronika Voss. The film is the final piece in his "BRD Trilogy" (BRD stands for "Bundesrepublik Deutschland," the official name of West Germany and of the united contemporary Germany"), which includes The Marriage of Maria Braun and Lola. It was released at the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. Anyone a fan? It's basically his methadone-drenched take on Sunset Boulevard, and one of the most beautiful of Fassbinder's films (which is saying a lot) - the blackest-black-and-whitest-white cinematography by frequent collaborator Xaver Schwarzenberger is a dazzling thing.

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The film's star Rosel Zech, seen up top dialing a phone and smoking like nobody's business - she spends a lot of the movie doing both, and she does them magnificently - just passed away last September, we briefly memorialized her at MNPP. Fassbinder himself died four months after this movie was released in 1982, and his final film, the swarthy homosexual-sailors Genet adaptation Querelle, was released that same September, a fittingly frenetic conclusion to a career that burned very brightly at both ends. I keep desperately waiting for the Fassbinder bio-pic of my dreams - I mean, we have Jeremy Renner to play him now! What else do we need?

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