ILE has never had a thread about Wim Wenders

Destroy: Until the End of the World, The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel, etc.

I do like this movie though. S. Coppola should remake it into a foreign film.

Great movie, though. An old favorite.

Have you seen any of his other films, because WoD is one of his LEAST boring! Boring is not necessarily bad. The incredibly slow pacing is one of the primary Wim Wenders traits.

Harry Dean Stanton is a God among character actors.

i actually havent seen any other Wenders movies--i only thought Wings was boring because no one would shut the fuck up throughout that entire movie and nothing they said was even close to interesting. it was very pretty though. i prob missed the point and will watch again at some point.

(I love slow movies--this wasnt slow to me, just chatty)

I remember the State of Things being interminably boring for like the first half and then suddenly becoming really great when they go to LA.

Which is the one where the characters go to a Chuck Berry concert?

the chuck berry concert is "alice in the cities." i find that part dopey. better is the little kid eating an ice cream, sitting next to a jukebox playing "on the road again."

It's been a long time since I saw it but as far as I remember most of the first part they're filming a movie and just sort of waiting around for more financing right? I seem to recall some interesting scenes from that part but I mostly enjoyed the ending because, living in LA, I thought that Wenders perfectly captured the feeling of Hollywood in a way that no Hollywood films could ever hope to touch.

the chuck berry concert is "alice in the cities." i find that part dopey.

That's what I liked about it! It was like suddenly someone said "hey, let's go to a Chuck Berry concert." So I guess it's those strange German/American cross-cultural collisions that I really enjoy in the early Wenders films.

Paris, Texas is quite fine until N Kinski's long monologue; she's just not up to it.

Wings of Desire: you gotta love any film where Falk and Nick Cave are the only ppl who speak English.

I've been looking for that little "Alice in the Cities" soundtrack theme for sooo long. So weird they didn't include it on 'Soundtracks' (although I remember hearing snippets of it in one of the songs on that album)

Errrrrrrrrr, "Alice In the Cities" was made 5 years after "Soundtracks"!

ah! figures...

Anyone seen the premiere of "Palemro Shooting"? Plot sounds quite familiar: phtographer hits the road and embarks on a journey of self-discovery

Tousle-haired moppet? Wuppertal monorail? Warped Canned Heat single?

Haha I actually once went to Wuppertal just to see that damn monorail

I've been looking for that little "Alice in the Cities" soundtrack theme for sooo long.

Similarly, I hunted for the music in "Fear Eats the Soul" for a long time only to find out it's probably just Library Music

Ok, so it seems "Alice in teh Cities" is finally out on DVD

Hmm, it seems like I'm the only one who cares but it turns out that all his early 70s movies are now out on DVD!

We Care A Lot!

I got Alice and the State of Things today. Kings of the Road is next on my list (not sure whether I'll ever have the courage to watch the whole of it again, but that's another issue)

Crierion's Wings of Desire next week, single and double discs.

zzzzzzzzzzz

*places amateurist's hand in warm water*

Oh come on I'll rep for sentiment further than anybody but Wings of Desire makes melted Easter Egg look like

r u confusing it w/Cage-Meg Ryan remake?

The original is marginally better but even so Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty is Wenders' last complete movie.

?!

complete?

http://img10.glitterfy.com/graphics/136/you_complete_me_hearts.gif

http://www.gasolinealleyantiques.com/celebrity/images/Rock/completecontrol.JPG

Criterion WoD roundup:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1225

zzzzzzzzzzz

― amateurist, Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:38 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*places amateurist's hand in warm water*

― Your Favorite Saturday Night Thing (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, October 28, 2009 11:21 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

lol

Library just got the Criterion The American Friend. It's really my first viewing, as the (double tape!) VHS copy I watched twenty-two years ago snapped mid-watch.

such a great-looking movie, among other things

just watched a wenders made-for-TV thing from 1974, because i figured, that's his best period, how bad can it be? it was intriguing -- not bad, not great, but intriguing. obviously done very quickly and cheaply, and stylistically quite conventional, but it had a lot of feeling. starred wenders's wife at the time, lisa kreuger (who is in all the features from the 1970s too). shot by michael balhaus (sp?) in his salad days.

am very tempted to watch the 6-hour version of 'until the end of the world,' which i've been sitting on for a few years. i know ahead of time it won't be great, but i'm still curious.

In between the start of this thread and its revival, I watched Paris, Texas. Here's what I wrote about it on another board;
I'd always heard that, "No, Paris, Texas is really good," so I put it in the Netflix queue and it came up and I watched it, and... Right, it looks gorgeous, Robby Muller really knows his shit, beautiful poetic landscapes of Texas and L.A., great composition, use of color, visually it gets an A, it's a knockout. But it's also 2 1/2 hours long, and maybe the first 45 minutes are intriguing because you have the whole mystery of Harry Dean Stanton wandering in out of the desert and where's he been for the last 4 years and all that; but then the second section, where he tries to bond with the kid, gets progressively less convincing as it goes (no fault of Harry Dean or the kid, they're both pretty good); the real deal-breaker, though, was the last act, with Nastassja Kinski (where have you gone, Nastassja?) and the Big Reveal about their broken brutal relationship and the great severance and so forth -- which maybe would have been believable enough, plotwise, if it weren't delivered in such self-important, despairing monologues.

It all rang wrong to me (Kinski's Southern accent not the least of the problems). It seemed like a parody of Euro-artiness. Which is how Wings of Desire struck me too. It doesn't surprise me that Wenders is Bono's idea of a great artist (or that Bono is Wenders' idea of a poet).

So anyway, is there still other Wenders that's the really good stuff that might yet change my mind? 'Cuz he's 0 for 2 with me right now, and at the moment I'm inclined to wait another 15 years before trying him again.

― gypsy mothra (gypsy mothra), Saturday, July 9, 2005 2:21 PM (twelve years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pretty much exactly how I feel after watching this again for the first time in 9 or 10 years. As soon as Dean Stockwell & Aurore Clément disappear the movies loses me completely. Such a promising setup with so much potent emotional imagery & grandeur & mystery, reduced to expository monologues that completely diffuse the power of that first 45 minutes. It's not cinematic at all.

Bruno Ganz roundup

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6202-bruno-ganz-i-know-now-what-no-angel-knows

Cool. Does In the White City make the cut?

So, is Salt of the Earth (2014) worth it for someone not that interested in Salgado.

watching paris, texas, for the first time in like 40 years

37 anyway

colours are nice but it's kind of the other side of the modern acting divide so no one seems not to be performing ever

of course this matters when the film turns into long prosy speeches on the phone thru a glass partition

visually it stays "cinematic" i think (w/evs lol, dumm word) but the energy at the end drains out through the writing

I was obsessed with Wings of Desire in my early to mid 20s. It seems like a good movie for a young man to obsess over. I spoke enough German at the time that a lot of the lines really had resonance for me. I haven't seen it in 30 years and would hesitate to watch it again. The soundtrack, though, still kicks ass.

As for the sequel, Faraway, So Close, the less said, the better.

angels are cool, more films shd feature them imo

Faraway, So Close is classic for the Lou Reed scene alone

"In Berlin, after the wall
It's very nice"

mark s and jimbeaux otm

Would watch a war film about angels vs devils in Paradise Lost

Waiting for someone to bring the Sandman Slim novels to the screen.

OK, maybe not.

Surprised no chatter about Perfect Days.

The trailer has certainly got me intrigued and it only gets better upon the dozenth view.

I was obsessed with _Wings of Desire_ in my early to mid 20s. It seems like a good movie for a young man to obsess over. I spoke enough German at the time that a lot of the lines really had resonance for me. I haven't seen it in 30 years and would hesitate to watch it again. The soundtrack, though, still kicks ass.

No way!

Saw Wenders’ other 2023 movie, the Anselm Kiefer documentary, last night. Totally worth admission price alone for towering scenes of Kiefer at work in his aircraft hangar/studio filled with art, decay, metal, metal decay to be burned or melted down into art. All of it compelling enough that the final scenes where time metaphorically collapses felt unnecessarily “do you see?!” It’s not a conventional documentary - read Wikipedia if that’s what you’re looking for.

I saw that at a small festival a few months ago, I thought it was a great use of 3D and overall really liked it although Wenders’ pretentiousness about the magical mysteries of art was occasionally irritating.

So has anyone seen Perfect Days? I am mildly intrigued

I've had the screener sitting at home. He's never been a priority for me. I do wanna watch the doc, though: I watched the Kaurismäki instead last Saturday.

I haven't seen it, but everyone I've talked to says Perfect Days is pretty good, if not on par with his best work. (At least for my tastes, I don't think he's made a great narrative film since the '80s, but his documentary work since then has typically been stronger.)

I enjoyed Anselm, it was good to see relatively non-conventional documentary. I wasn't familiar with Anselm Kiefer at all beforehand, but I'd like to visit the Eschaton Foundation now of course. The scale of things there looked immense.

Loved Perfect Days, more than the couple other Wenders I've seen (though should rewatch Paris, Texas).

You know the trope of the solitary hitman/samauri whose life is all routine and precision? This is like that, except the guy cleans public toilets instead of guns.