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The play Taking Sides deals with the case of the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. It is Berlin 1946, and Furtwängler’s case is being examined by an American denazification tribunal. The title of the play underlines Harwood’s intention to leave it to the audience which side to take.
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Chaos impinges on Harold's carefully ordered life while cleaning his teeth with the customary number of brushstrokes; a voice pre-empts his thoughts and drops a hint about his imminent demise. Initially Harold tries to ignore it, finding pleasant distraction in the shape of Ana, a tax-evading baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal). But the narration persists so Harold seeks counsel from a literature professor (a slightly batty Dustin Hoffman) to figure out the end of his story. Comedy is incidental to Ferrell's heartfelt portrayal of a man who desperately wants to live but doesn't know how. Refusing to try one of Ana's cookies is a typical blunder that stirs laughs and sympathy. But Thompson's dishevelled novelist strikes a deeper chord as she struggles with killing off her main character. Her dilemma becomes more compelling when she realises that Harold is real. Meanwhile the romance between Harold and Ana fails to ignite and robs the story of urgency. Instead of finishing with a bang it peters out, but this existential yarn is still fresh and funny enough to justify taking two hours out of your life.
Time keeps on slipping in this polite supernatural thriller, which features Sandra Bullock as a housewife so beset by premonitions of death that she can barely tell what day it is. Ambitiously structured, Premonition hops back and forth over the course of a single week like a suburban Memento, as Bullock struggles to keep her husband and her sanity. Unfortunately, director Mennen Yapo can't prevent his initially intriguing puzzle from lurching sideways into brain-drubbing nonsense. The content advice that comes with Premonition's 12A rating says it all, really: this is a moderately distressing film on multiple levels. Bullock is moderately distressed, for instance, to discover that her husband (Julian McMahon) has been killed in a car crash. When she wakes up to discover that the accident hasn't happened yet, she exhibits what can only described as moderate distress. She's similarly distressed to discover that her cute daughter has suffered a horrible accident that she 's unable to remember, and soon after, when the men in white coats arrive to take her away, moderate distress is no longer sufficient and she's forced to resort to mild alarm. Meanwhile, as Wednesday morphs into Tuesday, flips over to Friday and moseys back to Monday, the audience suffers moderate confusion and mild annoyance at Bullock's failure to address her condition in any meaningful way. We're more than halfway through before she resorts to creating a temporal wallchart full of potentially incriminating red scribbles like "Jim dies!!!!" and "I am committed!!" In spite of these considerable disadvantages, Bullock is charismatic enough to keep you watching and even guessing until the last reel. At which point the story falls headlong into a vat of sentimental, quasi-religious gloop, causing even the most patient viewer to resort to infrequent but very strong language.
Apatow is best known for his rollicking sex farce The 40 Year Old Virgin, but Knocked Up is pitched at a considerably lower key. While the subject matter is bawdy and the language extremely saucy, most of the laughs (and there are lots of them) spring from conversations rather than gross-out set pieces. Rogen's likeable slacker and his no-hoper pals can discuss the finer points of celebrity nudity until your eyes are watering, while on the other side of the partnership, Alison's sister (Leslie Mann) and her husband (Paul Rudd) provide a spot-on portrait of an arid marriage. Like its central character's life, Knocked Up has a messy story, but one imbued with such sweetness that it's impossible not to love. It's a romance with the cutest of twists - imagine if Romeo and Juliet had nine months to fall in love before Julie Jr arrived - told with the laconic charm of a good stand-up routine and laced with moments of genuine insight. It's an adult comedy - not smutty (well OK, it is kinda smutty) but a comedy for and about adults. Most importantly, it's so funny that you'll be snorting popcorn out of your nose before the end.
Set in the village of Fengjie, since submerged in water to make way for the dam, Jia's slow-paced, class-conscious effort dramatizes the life of villagers who have been forced from their homes, had their traditional way of life destroyed, and sent to live in cities against their will, often having to resort to begging and garbage collecting, or even prostitution to stay alive. The film, along with its companion documentary Dong, tells overlapping stories of the emotional trauma of local people caught in the dislocation at Fengjie while a new village is being built. In the first sequence, Han Sanming, a middle-aged coal miner from Jia's home Shanxi province, arrives on a ferry to look for his ex-wife, Missy after sixteen years of estrangement. All he has to rely on is an address given to him many years ago, completely unaware of the demolition and flooding in the area. Avoiding local swindlers, he tracks down Missy's uncle who tells him that his former wife is now in Yichang with his teenage daughter. Staying on to work in the demolition projects, Han engages in conversations with other workers who complain of the low wages they are receiving (60 to 70 Yuan a day) and want to return to Shanxi province with Han where they can earn 200 Yuan a day working in the dangerous coal mines. In the second story, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), a nurse arrives from Shanxi as well and is also searching for a missing person, her husband Guo Bin, who left the family two years ago. She is aided in her search by archaeologist Wang Dongming but it is uncertain what course of action Shen has in mind when she reunites with her husband. The film, however, is not about the story line but about the landscape and the atmosphere, playfully charged by the CG appearance of a UFO and a spaceship that takes off in the middle of the rubble. In Still Life, Jia demonstrates to the world how one of China's most gorgeous areas, one that brings in 1.3 million tourists a year, has become a scene of squalor. Jia says: "We all know there is major change going on in China and I wanted to get more people to know what's happening. I will continue to make films along these lines and explore the problems of the weaker social classes." If Jia's future projects contain the unmatched cinematography, compelling story, and characters whose lives touch us as Still Life, we have much to look forward to.
Moore then looks at universal free health care systems in Canada, France, Britain, and Cuba, debunking all the fears (lower quality of care, poorer compensation for doctors, big-government bureaucracy) that have been used to dissuade Americans from establishing such a system here. The roots of those health care systems are explored, and our failure to establish free health here care is traced to a) President Richard Nixon's deceptive support of the then-emerging HMOs pursuing huge profits and b) subsequent pressures for Congress to sacrifice sound health care in favor of corporate profit. A group of Americans who became ill from volunteering at 911 Ground Zero, but were refused health coverage for their illnesses, are ferried by Moore to Cuba, where they receive the top-rate, free care one would hope they'd get here at home. In his interviews, historical reportage, and typical sarcastic wit, Moore soundly condemns American health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the politicians who have been paid millions to do their bidding. He makes the case that there is something wrong with Americans that we cannot learn from the successes of other countries in providing better quality-of-health than we enjoy in the USA.
Shoot 'Em Up opens with Owen's drifter Mr Smith sitting at a bus stop munching on a carrot (!), then spirals into carnage as a team of assassins try to off a pregnant woman. Smith becomes a reluctant hero, delivering the baby while blasting disposable bad guys, his spent shell cases bounce off the pregnant gal's belly. It's utterly ridiculous but also astonishing in its sheer visual verve - and it sets the tone for a supercharged exploitation movie that the director pitched to studios as "John Woo's wet dream". Still, not even Woo could have fantasised a sex scene during a shoot out... Literally left holding the baby, Owen finds himself on the run, sharing childcare with a lactating prostitute (Monica Bellucci) and trying to stay one step ahead of Paul Giamatti's hilariously conniving villain. Cheesy one-liners of '80s vintage and cheap-looking effects simply underline what you've already guessed: this is a throwaway Friday night movie with its tongue and a .45 automatic wedged firmly in its cheek. By the time Davis stages a risible skydiving gunfight in mid-air, it's obvious that Shoot 'Em Up has shot its load.
Casablanca Friedensstr. 23 01097 Dresden Kino Quasimodo Adlergasse 14 01067 Dresden Kino Bärenzwinger Brühlsche Terrasse 1 01067 Dresden Kino in der Fabrik Tharandter Str. 33
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More than 200 artists present their work in more than 106 open studios.
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Saturday: rain and snow in the morning, change to all rain in the afternoon. 3°. chance of precip: 60%
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