Yesterday (see below) I was in such a fowl mood and my day was so irritating that a Romney bumper sticker constituted the shockingly low high point of my day. Well, today is looking up. It seems that those lovely people at the Criterion Collection are releasing Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz on DVD today. Berlin Alexanderplatz represents a 15 1/2 hour long hole in my goal of seeing every second every committed to film by my ubermensch R.W. I am fairly obsessed with Fassbinder and readily admit it. Shockingly, I don't think I have really gushed about him much here. I'm going to save that for another time but, in brief, my favorite Fassbinder films (thus far) are Katzelmacher, Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven, Fox and His Friends, and (of course) Ali: Fear Eat Soul (people call this film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but the German, "angst essen seele auf", actually translates as "fear eat soul" and is how Ali delivers the line in his poor German). If you have never seen a Fassbinder film, Ali is the holy grail and I recommend you see it. As a tribute to Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows, it is far superior to Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven, and that was a good film but no Ali. Prepare to have your heart taken out and bludgeoned into tiny pieces and then put in a blender and then thrown in your face. But prepare for this feeling to sneak up on you so slowly that at moments you may be quite bored and exasperated with the film's typical self-conscious artificiality. And as with any Fassbinder film, marvel at the fact that he made this pure masterpiece in the span of about five days and was coked, pilled-up, and drunk out of his mind for the duration of the production.
Ok now I am doing what I said I wasn't going to do which is gush. I could write about Fassbinder all day and then all night and then all day again. That's how much I love him. Suffice to say, Fassbinder fans have been waiting a long time for this day. Berlin Alexanderplatz, here I come.
No comments:
Post a Comment