gholderbach

This film had the potential to be a decent film, but this potential is completely squandered. The film's strongest point are the characters. Diana and Steve are have fleshed out personalities and world views, and are fun to watch when they engage in mundane conversation. I also enjoyed how unabashedly cheesy some of the other characters were, such as the quirky sidekicks and the absurdly sinister villains. The characters alone would have been enough to earn the film a 6/10 rating, all the film needed to do was have a story that made sense and be competently made from a technical level but the film fails to clear either bar. The cinematography, editing and visual effects are very poor, and make every action scene completely incoherent. The story is riddled with numerous plot holes and inconsistencies, while they aren't obvious during the film are incredibly evident if any thought is given to the story. While I do appreciate the film's attempt at exploring the idea that a black/white morality world view is incompatible with the real world, the grand finale manages to completely contradict this thematic crutch, rendering the story meaningless. I review films based on how good it is rather than how much I liked it. While I liked most of the film, it just wasn't a good movie overall.

Dina was decent. The standout elements are the very restrictive cinematography, with everything shot on a tripod making the film resemble a slice-of-life drama award contender; and the incredibly entertaining characters, with everyone behaving in a nonchalant and quirky way, almost like characters in a Wes Anderson film. While this film has an abundance of charm, I didn't find it exceptional. One metric I use to judge a documentary's quality is determining whether I would still care if it were a work of complete fiction, and I don't see myself being as forgiving if that were the case. My main annoyance with this film is that the story begins to feel extremely repetitive after a while. We are constantly cycling through the process of Dina getting frustrated, her fiancé having trouble compensating, and the to making up before starting again. If not for how entertaining the people featured are, the film would have been a complete slog.

Beuys is clearly a film whose success is completely reliant on the skill of the editor, and the editing was very sloppy. The filmmakers could not figure out how they wanted to approach their subject and the resulting approach is all over the place. The film starts off with a non-linear narrative driven by topic before suddenly shifting to a chronological structure. The film initially follows Beuys' development as an artist before becoming a character study half way through. While the style of the editing and the use of archive was interesting, the lack of focus made it impossible to get invested in what I was watching. This film did an especially poor job of explaining why any of his art is important. We are continuously told that Beuys wanted to "expand the meaning of art", and the film certainly acts as though Beuys was a visionary for believing this, but without properly explaining what that means or what any of his art means, there isn't a lot to keep the audience from thinking that Beuys is just a pretentious man. It's not until at least an hour into the film that an interpretation for one of his works is given, but by that point, the film had exhausted all the good will I had to offer.