Films I Watched This Week — Mar 10–16, 2025
The Long Farewell (1971)
Kira Muratova, now considered a Ukrainian filmmaker, was ahead of her time, creating films with often dreamlike and experimental aesthetics. A kind of psychological breakup movie, The Long Farewell traces the growing rift that develops between an emotionally impulsive single mother and her increasingly resentful teenage son, who upends her world when he announces that he wishes to live with his faraway father. At the time, the Soviet authorities suppressed The Long Farewell, but fortunately, her film is now available for all of us to see along with her companion piece Brief Encounters.
Wings of Desire (1987)
The angels in Wings of Desire are not only guardian angels who were put on our planet to watch over human inhabitants, but also observers who have seen the mistakes and atrocities that we have committed since the beginning of mankind. These angels move invisibly throughout the city of Berlin, watching, listening, and comparing notes with each other. Young children are able to see them because of their purity and innocence, and the angels usually watch in high places like on tall buildings and over towering statues. The angels do not directly change the events of the humans they observe and in one instance while an angel is trying to comfort a man contemplating suicide, the man decides to jump and succeeds. Much of Wings of Desire brings a mood of calm earthly meditation as we, the audience, observe the people and the world they inhabit just as the angels do. The story is simple yet profound as we follow two angels comfort and listen to the thoughts of several humans, including a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him, an old Holocaust victim struggling with the horrors of his past, parents worried about their angry and distant son, a mother being rushed to a hospital while going into labor, a hooker who hopes to earn enough money to leave and go south, and several different passengers on planes, trams and various people in the streets; while all the angels tuning into each one feels and sounds strangely similar to the turning of a dial on a radio program. The angels in the film are witnesses and documentarians who observe the ways of people, their lives and the stories within their lives, which is similar to the medium of the “cinema”. When cinema watchers sit in a movie theater, we become the observers who are taken into the personal lives of several characters and we bear witness to their sorrow, pain, fear, anguish and happiness. We take the roles of the angels; observing the observers. The real heart of the story in Wings of Desire doesn’t begin to unfold until over an hour into the film when the unthinkable happens and suddenly one of the angels decides that he wants to become human because he has fallen in love with a human being. He wants to experience human pleasures, a warm touch and a gentle kiss from a human who he has been observing for years and now his passion for her has taken hold. Wings of Desire is gorgeously shot in a rich, sepia-toned black-and-white, which represents the viewpoint experienced by the angels. When once the angel chooses to become mortal his color shifts into technicolor, symbolizing his newfound ability to experience the world as a human does. Director Wim Wenders Wings of Desire is poetry on celluloid, a celebration on love, life, death, isolation and communication, all the while exquisitely evoking the fragile moments of what it is to be human.
Wings of Desire (1987) is on MY TOP 300 FILMS OF ALL TIME LIST
Out of the Blue (1980)
Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue became a lost indie masterpiece about a teenage girl named Cebe living with her heroin addicted mother waiting for the return of her father from a prison sentence who years earlier killed several of Cebe's classmates in a drunk driving accident. After he returns home, the family attempts to resume their lives as it once once was, but what once was wasn't particularly good to begin with. And they soon collapse into fueled drug and alcohol chaos. Linda Manz, as the rebellious tomboy, carries the entire movie with a riveting performance, giving the character of Cebe a maturity that makes her seem far older than her age. Cebes lives in a home with no positive parental figures as she constantly runs away, either with friends or to be on her own. Internalizing in loss, isolation, and grief, Cebe's daily escapes involve punk rock and hating on disco while being enamored with the mystique of James Dean and Elvis. Her mother trades her body for men who will provide her for drugs, protection, and emotional stability. There's a moment late in the film where the father being drunk suggests a potential rape between Cebe and his father's best friend, with her mother refusing to step in and stop it. "Out of the Blue suffered from a troubled production but ultimately found a home among the fringes among the indie circuit. Throughout the years, it has fostered a small but devoted cult home reputation. It provides a provocative raw film experience that captures a bleak coming of age into a nihilistic world that has already defeated you. Out of the Blue is complex, uncomfortable, and challenging, which is meant to confront the mythos of blue-collared living and social constructions. It embraces a punk rock aesthetic and reclaims it as a way to unify as supposed to the dysfunctional family unit, which actually tears communities apart."
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