Tag: 2006 films

Reel 57: Wedding Blues

To quote from a certain Very Impressive Clergyman, “Mawage is wot bwings us togeder today.”

Weddings are kind of weird. You get a lot of friends and family together, and it’s a multi-day thing leading up to a relatively small amount of time for the ceremony and subsequent reception. (It reminds me of the Super Bowl in that respect.) And as we learn during this stop in our Twenty Films Around the World series, there’s a certain commonality to them. It doesn’t matter what the specific ritual is regarding the wedding itself. Lots of people come. Some are related, some aren’t. People get stressed. Tempers flare. Emotions run high and truths are revealed. And often, the wedding/reception leads to a couple of people becoming couples themselves.

And we see all of these things and more in today’s episode. First on the projector is 2001’s Monsoon Wedding, a comedy directed by Mira Nair. It’s a little bit Hollywood, a little bit Bollywood, and does a wonderful job of bringing multiple cultures together in one place. And there are a couple of subplots which start in one place but end in a very different one.

From there we jump to another Indian neighborhood, but only briefly, as the story for After the Wedding makes a jump to Denmark. Suzanne Bier’s 2006 film takes its main character to Copenhagen for what’s ostensibly a business deal, but it turns out that there’s a lot more than meets the eye. And, as I said earlier, truths are revealed.

COMING ATTRACTIONS:

Our journey Around the World in Twenty Films continues with visits to Japan and Spain. First up is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, from 1960. Then it’s 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a slightly misleading translation of the original title. Go watch them! Then come back here!

Reel 55: Another Brick in the Berlin Wall

Or, “Sean Gives Me Hell For Writing Another T00-Clever Title.”

Our tour Around the World in Twenty Films lands us in Germany this time around, and we begin with  The Lives of Others, a 2006 drama which is set in Communist East Germany in (go figure) 1984. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck wrote and makes his directorial debut with this film. Sebastian Koch plays an East German playwright who winds up under government scrutiny not because of his political views, but because his girlfriend doesn’t want to date the Minister of Culture. There are lots of twist and turns in this film, and a couple of surprises besides, but while the ending has a little bit of a bleak feel, there’s also a lot of hope attached to it.

From there we move on to The Baader-Meinhof Complex, from 2008. This film, directed by Uli Edel, takes us on a ten-year journey as we follow the true-story activities of a terrorist group that had the political world of West Germany tied up in knots. As the group goes from simply causing damage to intentionally killing people, the pressure ratchets up to break the back of this group. Do they succeed? Go watch the film, or read a book. (You know there’s an expectation that you’ve seen the film before listening to the episode, right?) (Not that it matters, who are we to tell you what to do?) (Either way, we won’t tell.)

Our deep-dive into this film will settle a few mysteries except for the title. So be prepared to live with that.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: 

In Episode 56 we begin studying films from different countries rather than looking at same-nation pairs. We start with Exotica, a 1994 Canadian film written and directed by Atom Egoyan, and then we check out The Edge of Paradise, a German-Turkish film from 2007 with a non-linear storyline. Don’t worry; you’ll be able to follow it just fine.