Great DVD double bill last night: Girls Will Be Girls and Hundstage (Dog Days in English). The former is to All About Eve as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet. I admit I’ve always had a soft spot for duelling drag queens, but this movie pushes into some hyperstrange areas of the hollywoodian psyche. Three guys playing three girls in search of fame and stardom à la Schwabs counter discoveries. It proved a good antedote to all those reality TV show commercials. Dog Days is one of the strangest films I’ve seen in a long while. It’s an Austrian road movie on the road to nowhere. Six stories in search of closure. A whole bunch of pudgy sweating dialect-speaking Jedermänner have mechanical sex and unfulfilling arguments in a di Chirico sun-drenched Viennese suburb that looks like some middle European’s nightmare vision of America: strip-malls, empty parking garages, and stagnant ponds of dangerous chemical laced water. The only time standard High German is spoken is during a brief weather broadcast on a car radio. Even the Greek dysfunctional divorced couple (still living together in their single family house) speak thick Lower Austrian dialect. Not since Prospero’s Books have I seen so much unerotic nudity. I highly recommend both films.
While searching for an online text of Hamlet, I came across this fun site: Hamlet the Text Adventure.
Posted by jim at May 16, 2004 05:49 PM | TrackBackThanks for that recommendation! I've been thinking about what to watch lately, and Hundstage sounds pretty interesting.
Posted by: Rob on May 17, 2004 07:28 AMI look forward to your critical reaction.
Posted by: jim on May 17, 2004 07:42 AMI tried to kill Horatio, but the adventure game wouldn't let me.
Posted by: Kerim Friedman on May 17, 2004 08:10 AMBack when I worked in QA at Brøderbund, I tried to convince them to do a sequel of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? called Where in the Hell is Dante Alighieri? Didn't fly. Sigh.
Posted by: jim on May 17, 2004 08:57 AMRecently the new Yorker published a piece by Malcolm Gladwell on Victor Gruen, inventor of the shopping mall. He was a Viennese Jew and a socialist who came to the US as a refugee and had many utopian ideas about the mall as a catalyst for creating community and bringing the best of urban culture to the suburbs. He was smart enough to realize later in life how wrong he had been and returned in disgust to Austria -- only to find that American mall culture had gotten there, too.
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle on May 20, 2004 02:52 PMAnd I'm racking my brain for the name of the 70's Bavarian cult filmmaker whose work I was exposed to in my Munich year a couple of decades back. I thought of him as a stranger and more depressing Jim Jarmusch; when watching one of his movies I could never decide whether I wanted to laugh or shoot myself. The local press compared him with another Munich dadaist of a sort, silent film innovator Karl Valentin.
Addendum: Got it! Thank god for Google, IMDB and blind luck. The director is Herbert Achternbusch. I wonder what I'd think of his work today?
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle on May 20, 2004 03:18 PMPR-- The Gruen article looks interesting. Thanks. By chance a Viennese friend brought me a book of Karl Valentin's writings which I've been meaning to read. Achternbusch definitely sounds like somebody whose films I've like to see. Thanks, again.
Posted by: jim on May 24, 2004 07:14 AM