Brechtian embodiments present in this Fassibinder picture. Vows and promises take flight when you escape the fog of incarceration, the allure of iniquity pulls you into that black hole of misdeeds. This is an epic, an urban epic, maybe an anti-epic of sorts too. It denies the evenness and equilibrium of tone. Alfred Döblin's novel is very adaptable. Everyone wants a piece. I'm six hours into this and I see why everyone wants a piece.
A familiar strain of suffering haunts the wetlands and creeks of BI. The progenitors of a boy die, and he is saddled with the albatross of family — the duty of care. As with most stories about death and the institution of family itself, TBWG is chiefly preoccupied with the detritus of grief and the alienation it engenders. But it pursues this with an appeal to our better angels so relentless it becomes almost comical to the neuroscience of empathy…
Heads should roll — the executioner should vaunt from the scaffold —but kings and monarchs rarely beheaded their jesters because they enlivened the divine moroseness of the court and obfuscated the tussles of the crown with jokes. Ryan Reynolds is a corporate jester, Shawn Levy is a vulgar ventriloquist and we all entangled in the common crimes of these con men with no gun to our head and no constitution to provide us reprieve. In the assembly product that is…
There's a meet cute scene in here that attempts to draw you into its dialogical intelligence and accidental wit, not unlike the plays of Oscar Wilde or David Mamet. It's neither impassive nor fraught with benign direction — one may very well be inclined to call it decent direction. It merely attempts. There's nothing wrong with trying, never mind the dictum of Master Yoda. But personally I think call of my life highlights, inadvertently, the farrago of impedimenta besieging the…
