I’m taking a look at the top 25 films of the decade, and I’m taking into consideration IMDB ratings, academy awards, and all that jazz, but in the end the most important opinion is my own. I was going to start writing a screenplay today but I got a massive  caffeine withdrawal headache and I lost all spark of creativity. I decided for 25 cuz in my favorite page everything is top 25, so I had to follow my own guidelines. I decided to avoid any Best picture winners, so The Departed is out (although it should probably be in) but I think that Oscar Best Picture already had their time at the spotlight. Tomorrow I will post the top 12, and then I will post my favorite films not on the list (Superbad, Grizzly Man, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall are on that list).

Stranger than fiction

25. Stranger than fiction – Talk about post-modernism and existentialism. This movie explores destiny and our impacts on others in a way rarely seen in movies: through the voice of the author. Will Ferell also gives his first performance differing from his usual annoying persona. The most interesting part of the film is the end, when siding with the protagonist might not be a good decision for the supporting characters – or us.

24. Notes on a Scandal - A study of pedophilia and love, but more importantly, a study about loneliness. Judi Dench is outstanding, and she should have won the best actress Oscar, and so is Cate Blanchett. This movie tweaks with our expectations and character solidarities (we don’t know who we should like and the more we learn, the less we like), and that probably was the reason why this movie is already forgotten. The point is that we are not supposed to side with A or B, we are supposed to judge them and then try and comprehend them as humans, searching for companionship, something not a lot of movies dare to do. I recommend it to everyone as an experience.

23. Hotel Rwanda – The story is fascinating, and more importantly, it brought to mainstream cinema a genocide that still a lot of people don’t know about, or simply take for granted. Don Cheadle is amazing, and the pace of the film also makes you grasp the edge of your seat.

Priests and love - a big no no

22. El crimen del padre Amaro (father Amaro’s crime) – A mexican film about a priest falling in love with a young woman and having an affair. Yet you can’t cheat God cuz he will get pissed and fuck up your life. Or will he? The film explores, from a very critical point, of view the role of priests in the catholic church and how old doctrines have no meaning in today’s world. Catholics pissed = me happy.

21. The Downfall - Hitler is not portrayed as a caricature, but as a man. And the film does something that many have not dared to try before: to make you feel pity for what has become synonym of evil. The ultimate anti-war film because it shows us that the evil comes from within.

20. Milk/Oldboy – A tie? Between a movie about gay right activism and another about incest and revenge? Say what again? There may appear to be no themes tying these both films, but they both deserve to be on this list, and I can’t decide which is better. One has Sean Penn in his best role yet, fighting for gay rights in the midst of Prop 8, the other has a man fighting for revenge against a man he thinks he has never hurt, he is isolated and lonely, in a world he can’t comprehend. Both films explore love from daring angles, and while Oldboy’s might be weird, it is still human at its core, the same effect that Van Sant tried to do when showing Franco and Penn. Both great films, completely different, but right in the spot they deserve. Both strong leads fight for change, and while one uses politics the other uses force. Which works better?

Brotherhood of war

19. Taegukgi: Brotherhood of war – A war film that explores both the horrors of war and the reasons for fighting for one side of the other. It’s exploration of brain wash in the army resonates everywhere, and its touching, tragic and worst of all forlorn. In a time when people in North Korea and South Korea want peace between the two states, this movie hit a home run and touched everyone’s hearts along the way.

18. Princesas (Princesses): The least known film on this list is also one of the most humane explorations of street life. The story follows two prostitutes in Spain as they deal with family, their job, and love in a city where stigma doesn’t even begin to describe their status. Sexuality is not explored because it is not important – it’s keeping the dream of a better life alive. Will make you cry and be hopeful of a better tomorrow.

17. Borat: Hilarious. Obscene. Crude. Yet satirizes people in a way that has never been done before. Sasha Baron Cohen portrays people as racist, xenophobic and homophobic in an extremely comical manner. In comparison to Bruno, it has more of a plot and it came out of nowhere to shake the world. Proof that there is no such thing as bad publicity (proof #2: Antichrist… although publicity made people watch it, which should not have happened because the film sucked)

Sexy time

16. The barbarian Invasions – A french Canadian film that is both touching and beautifully shot. The dialogue is quick and witty, the movie never loses its pace, but more importantly it makes us realize how family and death can change a person into something he (or she) never imagined – and neither did we. The story sounds familiar, but it’s not. Arcand presents his character’s actions under scrutinizing light so we judge them, and in the process comprehend and like them.  Also judges the whole socialized medical system in Canada – making a bigger impact in Sicko in their respective countries. And you thought Michael Moore knew how to criticize people, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Also recommend Jesus of Montreal.

Al gore and his world

15. An inconvenient truth – A documentary that impacted people and reached millions. After this film people started actually worrying about global warming, and began turning off their lights and driving hybrid cars. Publicity for “green” products became an asset, and Al Gore won more respect than when he was running for president. Smart, sophisticated, and it shows the impact that a film can have on people. Many films like it followed (the 11th hour), but this was the predecessor and the best. It even won Gore a Nobel prize. A well deserved one in contrast to the last one given…. cough cough.

14. Inglorious Basterds – Tarantino kills Hitler, makes us fall in love with movies again, and doubt history books. Simply put: this movie is Awesome. If you’ve seen it, you know why. If you haven’t, you’re missing out.

13. Almost famous – I almost forgot about this movie because it came out in the year 2000. Nostalgic yet not, this movie makes us appreciate our own time and makes us realize how rock and roll came to be through the eyes of a young journalist falling for a peace and love pseudo hippie called Kate Hudson in her best role (which is sad, not a good thing). Perfect tone and pace, the performances make this movie worthwhile and a ride to remember. Viva rock and roll.

Come back tomorrow for the full list

Hurray, The Butter is Gone

I wrote this for my company’s blog, Social Media World, but they haven’t posted it yet. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks Dada has something to do with the Internet?

Hitler can get really mad. This shouldn’t come as much a surprise, considering the well-recorded history of World War II and the Holocaust. From his attempts at genocide to trying to take over Europe (not to mention some of North Africa), the man must have had some serious, deep-seeded anger. So it’s no wonder that when he gets banned form X Box Live, when his favorite band split up, when his favorite soccer team lost, he’d have an outpouring of rage. You would think he’d get angry too when he found out that he’d been made fun of for his many fits, that they had spread like wildfire across the Internet, archived for ever on YouTube. And you’d be right. Since early 2007, nearly 2,000 clips have stacked up on YouTube of Hitler—as played by Bruno Ganz in the 2004 film The Downfall—yelling about something or other. The German-language film—the first to include Hitler as a central character—features cleverly (and sometimes not so cleverly) altered English subtitles that re-imagine Hitler’s rant as a reaction to any variety of bits of contemporary news and culture.

Video mash-ups like this have these have been popping up on YouTube since the website launched in 2005, with parodies of Brokeback Mountain being another popular meme. But when it comes to Hitler, satire and collage, the history reaches much further than the short if not highly influential life of social media, the Internet and even the first computer (baring the abacus), back to the dying days of Weimar Germany.

Languishing after the ruin of the first World War, the years of Weimar Republic are remember as a chaotic and debauched time for Germany—its cities full of cabarets (the film Cabaret is set in Germany, during this time period) and prostitutes (identifiable and coded through a complex system of colored boots, so you knew exactly what you were getting into), the economy in turmoil due to hyperinflation. The general chaos was captured in the driving art movement in Germany in the years between the World Wars, German Expressionism. But once Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began their ascent into power, culminating in 1933 with the beginning of the Third Reich, it was the Berlin branch of the Dada art movement that captured the zeitgeist of fear and resistance of the opposition in late-Weimar Germany.

Started in Zurich in 1916 by Tristan Zara and a group of expats who read unintelligible sound poems and gave other absurdist performances at the Café Voltaire, Dada is an art movement that in the beginning embraced the idea of illogic. With its founding members all affected in one form or another by World War I, they banded together through their suspicion of language and logic, those so-called trustworthy foundations of society that had watch lead to the utter destruction of the Great War.

Dada went through many incarnations between Zurich in the Teens and Berlin in the late ’20s and early ‘30s. Lead by John Heartfield, Berlin Dada was infinitely more image-based and often took the form of collage. But Dada in Berlin continued to follow the anti-war stance of Zurich, with Heartfield and the other Dadaist creating ironic and often darkly humorous collages criticizing Hitler and the Nazi regime. Both the technological developments in printing and the prevalence of Nazi imagery and propaganda made collage a natural and highly effective medium for the Berlin Dadaist to work in.

Just as YouTube users have taken advantage of contemporary technology to put new words into Hitler’s mouth, Heartfield used the technology of his age to similarly co-opt and re-contextualize the Nazis to equally ironic ends. One of Heartfield’s most famous images, titled Hurray, The Butter is Gone, shows a German family sitting at a dinner table chewing on various gigantic pieces of metal—weights, bicycle parts, a Swastika-bearing ax—with a quote from Hermann Göring responding to food shortages in Germany running below the image: “Iron has always made a nation strong, butter and lard have only made the people fat.”

If only Heartfield and the Dadaist had the glut of videos and images—all those Leni Riefenstahl YouTube clips—that social media provides us access to today . . . Then again, they did quite a good job on their own and Internet users, knowingly or not, continue to keep the Dadaist tradition of making fun of Hitler alive.

A friend of mine who is obsess with the evil of Disney World (I don’t understand it!) show me one of this videos today, the one about Hitler going to Epcot, and told me there were many many more but he didn’t bother because the Epcot one was the best…….even though he’s never seen the others? Fool. (Yes Joe, I just called you a Fool).

The one about going to Disney is way funnier than the Epcot one.

I don’t know who the person(s) who created the videos is/are but he/she/them is/are genius!  Oh and the best part is that all the videos used the same scene from “Downfall” (Der Untergang) a German-Austrian film about the last days of Hitler while in his bunker.

I’m posting here the Epcot and the Going To Disney videos for you to be the judge and get over to 7heRedx’s channel to check all the other ones, there’s tons of them.

So far this documentary has received rave reviews and audiences gave it a standing ovation after it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival.

A must see!

On Realpop, I read about the latest “The Downfall” meme: Take the scene from The Downfall in which Hitler/Bruno Ganz learns that Steiner couldn’t gather enough forces to attack and add new subtitles to it, changing The Downfall of Hitler to The Downfall of HDVD or The Downfall of the Cowboys. While Ganz’ acting features the theatrical type of speech that is known from Hitler speeches – and which is on a phonetic level sufficiently close to Chaplin’s idiom as Hynkel in The Great Dictator – it is certainly good material for being subtitled. Too bad though that the trick won’t work if you know German: It’ impossible to shut out and not understand the words of your mother tongue:-(

Excelente adaptação do filme Der Untergang, que mostra desta vez a queda de outro império… A queda do HD-DVD perante o Blu-Ray. Os tempos passam, as lutas continuam, os vencedores persistem…

De allernieuwste trend om een concurrent uit te kakken: een creatieve ondertiteling voor de uitbarsting van Hitler “Der Untergang”. Achtereenvolgens: HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray…

… iets met Microsoft en gehackte spelconsoles…

… en een conflict in Second Life (via), blijkbaar geproduceerd door mensen die aan een open source versie van Second Life werken (bron)…

… en dan nog iets met auto’s en een autogame (denk ik!).

Een beetje zoals de rage van de hilarische videoclips een tijdje geleden :

Dat allemaal omdat voor die Amerikanen Duits zowat als Chinees moet klinken… (of Hindi of Urdu , maar daar heb ik niets te lachen, wegens zelf er ook niks van snappen ).

Adolf Hitler, in his last few days, before the Fall of Berlin, thanked, amongst others, a nurse who was caring for the wounded. The nurse, according to the diaries of Traudl Junge, broke down and asked the Fuhrer to “preserve our belief in the final victory.”

I saw Der Untergang (The Downfall) tonight. There is more to this movie than just this one moment, yet, this one moment stood out for me.

In the worst of the times when all that you see around you is hopelessness, making such a statement to a leader who has given up, in any case, makes for an interesting philosophical situation.

What is interesting is that this character asks for a ‘preservation of belief’. This phrase, however, provokes that lazy lump in the left corner of your mind.

What the nurse is actually crying out loud for is to reinforce her hope of victory. While most folks are making their way out of Berlin, escaping the inevitable, she has chosen to stay back and help the wounded. Soldiers, amongst them. What makes her stay back, you can’t help but wonder, but are sure to make a correct guess.

Is it her crumbling “belief”, which she asks her leader to preserve, or is it “hope” that victory, in spite of the reality that spills unabated blood on her hands, will be theirs?

This isn’t a question of belief. Because, belief, you see is an inherent acceptance of the concept. Belief becomes one with your constitution. It seems to me that the nurse got the cousins mixed up. Belief and conviction are cousins Hope isn’t in the same family. Hope’s cousin is desire. A mere wish. Yet the constitution of hope is such, it sometimes wields more strength than belief can.

Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness. ~ The Architect, in The Matrix Reloaded.

Delusion it is.

Hope, is fraught with fear, tentativeness and suspicion, the act itself an empty prayer invoking obscure powers to change terrifying reality. Belief, on the other hand, while having no inherent power to change reality either, affects reality in a way that it becomes susceptible to change. Conviction shines through, almost blinding reality in a way that it has to take a few steps back, allowing a small window for you to bend the rules of reality.

I have often seen the weak, moth-eaten fabric of hope tearing slowly at the sides and the middle as it makes its case for a hopeless cause. You can sense the tentativeness of a foot in either boat, balancing a slur of a walk. In a war-like situation, when the stakes are high, hope isn’t enough to help reinforce the strength required to tackle all that can bring you down. Belief is.

In The Downfall, the dialogue is very well placed (and I hope the translation does justice, being relevant and uses the correct English equivalent).

Which does bring me to another of my top-rated movies of all time – The Shawshank Redemption. Andy Dufresne says, “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” While it will remain my top-rated movie of all times, I think Andy was talking of belief. If it was hope; a desire, a wish, he wouldn’t have “worked” on his escape. He couldn’t have talked of a hayfield in in Buxton about a rock that doesn’t belong there. The one time when he was really hopeful, however, and this is the distinction, was when Tommy Williams talks of the convict that could possibly help Andy clear himself. That is hope – an empty prayer invoking obscure powers to change terrifying reality.

Sometimes, I feel it is just easy to say, I hope, than to say, I believe. That, perhaps is the reason there is so much hope in this world.

hitler is having something of a revival these days. german bunker movie “der untergang” (the downfall) indulges hitler’s underdeveloped human side during the last gasps of the Reich. swiss actor bruno ganz shrieks and foams in a nonetheless understated portrayal of the dictator. the performance is marred only by an astonishingly audible swiss accent — somewhat sobering to watch hitler harp on in swiss accented german, but after a few minutes, suspension of disbelief sets in.

perhaps more unsettling than a wayward accent, this particular depiction of the 3d reich elite is, intentionally or not, studded with what looks like germany’s nouveau cinema hunks. wellbuilt, tall actors who stride about the bunker in fetching uniforms and sharp haircuts and make for dubious, but perhaps elucidating eye candy, confounding modern audiences with the peculiar allure the handsomly outfitted aryan type once exuded on millions of germans.