pvtsew

I love Herzog. I love travel movies, and I love documentaries. Anybody who is into "abandoned porn" would love this. The abandoned city seemed like a dream for a zombie film maker back in the day. Now computers could probably do it, but to see a whole city deserted like that, especially with the volcanic smoke in the background, truly was apocalyptic.

The conversations with the people left behind were a little hard to follow, but still interesting. If a guy has nowhere to go, why should he leave? It's his home and, in the end, the volcano didn't interrupt after all. Vindication if there ever was.

Check it out. It's only 30 minutes anyway.

I'm gonna start off with a little bit of a tangent. The scene where Lilian (Lilian Cossmann) to the gas station and meets the second attendant Kurt (Oskar Karlweis) is quite something. Kurt starts singing about how she's just a woman and needs a man with her. There's all these references to women and driving. On the one hand, he's trying to find an excuse to let him ride with her. On the other hand, it reminds me of this Schwachsinn in Saudi Arabia that denies women the right to drive. Now, Europe is being flooded with Muslim immigrants who apparently can't run their own country to go to a country that was more progressive than much of the Arab world is today about 80 years ago.

And that's what so much of this early German really is - a relic. This is a rather silly, light-hearted comedy perfect for TMC with no moral or ethic implications and little connection to the reality of the day. Yet it is still studied because it was a very financially successful, early talkie.

The dance scenes are fairly entertaining. Whenever the three men are together, it's funny and the lyrics are quite clever. However, such films seem typical of that escapism. It's no shocker that, in a world where people make such fluffy, good-for-nothing films, street battles and concentration camps would be the norm.

So how do I reconcile the progressive situation of Weimar Germany with its predilection to mass murder? Well both the Muslim world and Nazi Germany engaged in it, but at least women could drive in one of them. It's the little things.

I liked the first half or so. They use German voices to read letters, and using these letters they paint a very intimate portrait of Himmler and his family. It honestly got so intimate that I had to remind myself that it's an Israeli production. Towards the end though, their use of era footage, which seemed like stock footage, was very graphic.

This footage turned away from a psychological examination to just gore. I think the idea of a psychological examination of a mass murderer is a very good idea, but the footage was too distracting and seemed more like a History Channel documentary. If they had labeled where some of the footage was from, perhaps it would have been OK.