Imagine a film that combines My Side of the Mountain and Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. Sound like fun? Then you should see Die Wand, Julian Polsler’s faithful 2012 cinematic adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s book of the same name. Perhaps in the past, you’ve thought, “I like Wim Wenders’ films, but they don’t have enough explicit philosophical dialog!” In that case, Die Wand is the film for you!

In English, “Die Wand” means “The Wall,” and that is the name that it has been released under here in the United States, despite the obvious problem that it might be mistaken for Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd—The Wall. It tells the story of an unnamed woman who goes to a hunting lodge with some friends. The friends go to town and don’t return. She soon finds that an invisible wall has appeared that prevents her from going to town. This is not such a bad thing, however, because it appears that everyone outside the wall has died.

Thus we follow the woman (that is literally her name: die frau) for the next two years as she comes to terms with and deals with her situation. She is caught inside with a pregnant cow, a cat, and a dog who she doesn’t like all that much at first. We watch her plant potatoes, cut hay for the cow, hunt deer, and much else. But mostly, we hear (in voice-over) her discuss the nature of existence. At one point early on, she says, “Perhaps it would have been wiser to go to the village with Hugo and Louise.” What she means is that if she had gone with her friends, she would be dead and would not have to make the many decisions she is now forced to make—like whether to kill herself or not.

There are many ways to interpret this film. I suspect the simplest is the best: it is an allegory of life. It is not that everyone outside the wall is dead, it is just that she cannot connect with them. As a result of this, she becomes as dependent upon her dog as he is on her. Dogs, because they are, in the grand scheme of things, stupid, love us on a level that we can never get from humans. And it works the other way around. Human relationships are too complicated because humans are too complicated. There is nothing complicated about a dog.

Despite what I’ve said, the film is engaging from beginning to end. I don’t think that the incessant voice-over was really necessary. I think the existential themes in the film come across loud and clear. That’s largely due to an exceptional performance by Martina Gedeck, who is the whole film. And most of what she gets to do is walk around and stare out of windows. Yet it never seems staged and never gets boring. From the beginning, the viewer cares about the woman.

Die Wand is also exceptionally beautiful. Each shot is framed with great care. And the film is edited very deliberately with relatively long shots. It is designed to be soaked in—to be enjoyed as a process. That said, I suspect most people won’t like the film. They want a film that is going somewhere. Die Wand is not going anywhere. It ends pretty much where it starts: she will continue on until she doesn’t. Just like all of us.

Afterword

There is one strange technical thing in the film that is worth noting. It is in German with subtitles whenever anyone speaks—which is almost never. The voice-over, which seems to have been done by the same actor, is in English. I’m glad for this. I’m not a fan of subtitles. But it is odd, and I wonder that they didn’t just dub the little dialog that was in the film. It would have been easy with modern technology. (Yes Virginia, dubbing really can be done well.)

In my recent discussion with my conspiracy theory believing friend, the subject of The Lone Gunmen came up. It was a short-lived television series spin-off of The X-Files. I had never heard of it, but that is hardly surprising, since I have never seen an episode of The X-Files. I don’t intend to be mean, but both shows fall into that category of “things I would have loved when I was 12.” They are, after all, just updates of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but without all the charm that Darren McGavin added to everything he was in.

I was asked to watch the pilot of The Lone Gunmen because it has a 9/11 truther tie in. Even though it was released some six months before 9/11, it was about a secret government plot to remotely take control of a commercial airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center. Cue the dramatic music: du-du-duuunnn! The reason they want to do this is to create a new enemy because the Cold War is over and they want those juicy military contracts to keep flowing. They were kind of late to this given that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

There is a problem with this theory. Those government contacts never stopped flowing. It wasn’t necessary for the military-industrial complex to stage a terrorist attack. All they had to do was more of what they had been doing: lobbying Congress and sending those campaign contributions. Again: the conspiracies are out there, they are just in plain sight and legal. The Supreme Court calls them “democracy”!

But that’s not the fault of the television show. That’s a damned fine premise for a story. And the creation of the whole show is good. It’s about three guys who publish a conspiracy newspaper. There’s the well dressed leader (that seems to be the extent of his characterization), the old radical who keeps things real, and the brilliant young hacker who is excitable. There is also a totally hot female hacker named Yves Adele Harlow (anagram of “Lee Harvey Oswal”) who seems to spend all her time at an indoor shooting range because it turns her hotness factor up to eleven. It’s all pretty standard and with the conspiracy element, it could have been a very fun show.

And maybe it is a fun show. I’ve only watched the first episode. They made 12 more before they pulled the plug. But that first episode is some of the worst television writing I have ever seen. Let’s start with the plot. It is chalk full of the most tired cliches. The leader of the gunmen’s father dies. The father’s best friend talks to them. Oh by God! You mean he was involved?! Who would have thought?! And then they are trying to figure out why he was killed. And then the father is not really dead. And then he shows up and just tells the gunmen why they tried to kill him. It’s all a muddled mess.

The beginning of it also doesn’t make any sense. The gunmen try to steal a new computer chip that has spying capability designed into it. This is clearly a nod to the Clipper chip. Again, they were a little late to this one: it was a big deal in the computer community in 1993, and was dead by 1996. But the gunmen mess up and Yves Adele Harlow steals it away from them, setting them up to be caught. Okay: a big deal computer chip has been stolen and the gunmen are caught, but without the chip. But apparently no charges are filed; they are searched and released. I guess the writers don’t expect us to take the show seriously. But if that’s what they wanted, they shouldn’t have blown the lid off the 9/11 conspiracy! (Note: sarcasm.)

The plot problems might have been okay. They were terrible, but it’s just a television show. What kills the show is the dialog. Really. “The readership doesn’t matter, man, it’s the impact on the black ops that counts!” And it has witty lines like, “Next time, leave the crack pipe at home.” Or this classic example of “stylistic” dialog, “My point being you’re wasting your life, man. A hacker of your caliber ought to be floating in a Silicon Valley hot tub, sipping champers, and counting his IPO cashola.” It is impossible to convey how bad the dialog is. And it is unrelenting. There is pretty much no dialog that is not bad. If you are a connoisseur of such things, watch the whole episode; it will be a hoot:

The episode was written by four The X-Files veterans, who also created The Lone Gunmen: Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz. I suppose we could say that the episode is so bad because everyone has a bad day now and then. Or we could say that this episode is the result of group thinking. But I think it is more likely the case that none of them are all that good. The fifth season of Breaking Bad convinced me that Vince Gilligan didn’t know what he was doing. He just fumbled into something that worked. But even at its worst, I don’t recall Breaking Bad being in the same creative universe as The Lone Gunmen. This show is unwatchable.

Last night, after watching The Painting, I searched Netflix for “Terry Pratchett,” probably because it was Richard Coyle’s birthday and he had starred in Going Postal. There were no Pratchett related films, but Netflix offered me, Terry Fator: Live from Las Vegas. If you don’t know him, Fator is a ventriloquist who won Amerca’s Got Talent. I knew him from the documentary Dumbstruck. And since watching it, Google offers me ads for his Las Vegas show all the time.

As usual, Netflix’s rating system was dead on. It’s “best guess” rating for me was 3 stars, while the average rating was 3.8 stars. At first, I thought this was odd. Fator is a ventriloquist, after all. I love ventriloquists and puppets. But reflecting on it a moment, I had to admit that I wasn’t that impressed with Fator. He is a passable ventriloquist and not much of a puppeteer. What he is, however, is an exceptional singer and impersonator. So it wasn’t too surprising that Netflix thought I would be lukewarm on it.

What I wasn’t prepared for was just how uncomfortable Fator is on stage. This isn’t unusual for a ventriloquist. But given that he doesn’t even try to do puppetry, much of the show is frustratingly static: man standing with puppet. The show actually gets substantially better when Fator does a song himself, even though he’s still far from relaxed.

A bigger problem for me is that the show is not well written. The bits are tired with very little wit—most of them are variations on old jokes. And it is painfully clear that they are just meant to kill time in between songs. I suppose that would be fine if I enjoyed the songs more. But most of the time, the songs just seem weird to me. Why is the guy singing while holding a puppet? But sometimes it does work, as in his final number, a duet of “What a Wonderful World” with his turtle doing a rather weak Kermit the Frog voice and Fator doing a passable Louis Armstrong. At least there is interaction in the routine.

Ultimately, Terry Fator provides an act rather similar to Jeff Dunham. There’s no doubt that Fator is distinctly better than Dunham. But both acts appeal to lowbrow tastes. Dunham is marginally more funny, but Fator has the musical numbers and is technically far better. And as a show in Las Vegas, that’s fine. On video, it just sits there (like Fator and his puppets) and is marginally interesting but hardly entertaining. I think this clip shows Fator at his best and worst:

Afterword

I know it is a matter of taste, but I continue to come back to the far less popular Dan Horn. Horn is by far the best puppeteer I’ve ever seen working as a ventriloquist. He’s also one of the better ventriloquists and his material is strong. But ultimately, when I watch him, I think I’m watching two people up on stage. The weirdness I feel while watching Fator’s awkward performance simply isn’t there with Horn. That’s not to put down Fator. And I can see why Fator’s act fits in rather well in Las Vegas in a way that Horn’s would not. But the two performers show the vicissitudes of fame. Here is just a taste of Dan Horn:

Last night, I watched the 2013 animated feature The Croods. It’s an amusing and fun but ultimately forgettable film about a family of cavemen and their journey from fear to curiosity. Or something. It is kind of hard to say because the film only plays around with a plot.

The story focuses on Grug, the father, and Eep, his discontented teenage daughter. Grug believes in the old ways, which are basically that doing things as you always have is the best way not to get killed. This is summed up very well at the beginning of the film when Grug tells the family a story, “Tonight we’ll hear the story of Krispy Bear. A long time ago, this little bear was alive. She was alive because she listened to her father and lived her life in routine and darkness and terror. So she was happy! But Krispy had one terrible problem: she was filled with curiosity. And one day, while she was in a tree, the curious little bear wanted to climb to the top. And no sooner than she climbed to the top, she saw something new… And died!”

At the end of this story, the son, Thunk, says, “I will never do anything new or different!” But the family is forced to do something new because it seems that they are living on a volcano that is quickly becoming active. Or at least that’s what I assume is happening; it is never really explained. Along the way, they hook up with Guy, a creative young man who knows the secrets of fire and puppets. Plus, he has a pet sloth named Belt, who might as well be a puppet. So he’s the smart and creative hero of the film. He contrasts with the rather dim but good-hearted Grug.

The whole clan make their way to safety and learns valuable life lessons along the way. Fair enough. But the film shows all the advanced thinking on gender roles as an episode of Leave it to Beaver. This is not helped by a stream of mother-in-law jokes, even if they are funny. But most of all, the main character is supposedly Eep, the girl who wants more out of life than simply not dying. However, after Guy shows up, she spends most of her time mooning over him. This is often adorable, but not exactly what I would want my children (that I don’t have) watching.

The biggest problem I had with The Croods was getting over its absolutely ridiculous portrayal cavemen as stupid and fearful. Humans have long been alpha predators. There are few creatures who we need fear, and only a couple who see us as prey. At one point, the family catches a ride on a mammoth, but it never occurs to them that they might kill and eat it. But then, none of animals make much sense either. The animals are all very creatively rendered, but aren’t anything the earth has ever seen. As a result, I spent much of the film wondering if we weren’t on another planet or something.

I fought through all of these concerns, though. Ultimately, however, I think the filmmakers would have been better off restricting themselves to something a little more grounded in reality. What they ended up with was a universe of creatures that were too fanciful. They didn’t create a unified whole the way that Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland did. The problem is likely related to the fact that the cave area terrain is realistic. Later in the film when they are in the jungle, the whole thing looks rather like Wonderland, and as a result, works.

Ultimately the film is a romp and as such, it is rather fun. But it doesn’t rise to the level films like ParaNorman and Frankenweenie. And that’s a shame because the animation itself is really good. I was very impressed with the water and wind and fire effects. And the faces conveyed far more emotion than is normal in animated films. What’s missing is a compelling character focused plot. Instead, the film just meanders from sequence to sequence. Almost randomly, Grug and Guy have a meeting of minds and work together. Guy seems to to become attracted to Eep at a certain point in the film, not because he sees anything in her but because the writers got tired of pushing the “Eep coming on too hard” jokes. And given that there is nothing constraining the universe of the film, the whole “road trip” aspect of the film is nothing but an intellectual exercise. We don’t know where we are going and the road to get there runs from Mad Max to Alice in Wonderland to Lord of the Rings.

But I enjoyed it. How could I not? It’s a very pro-puppet movie. And it’s all very sweet and has a number of very funny bits in it. And I liked all the characters, especially Grug, who is voiced perfectly by Nicolas Cage. But I wanted more. And with a budget of $135 million, the least they could have done is work a little harder on the script. That’s over twice the cost of ParaNorman and three times the cost of Frankenweenie. But there are worse things, like most live action Hollywood films. And I can’t complain too loudly about any film that tries to celebrate intelligence and open-mindedness.

I watched Braveheart again today. I saw it when it was out, roughly two decades ago and I rather liked it. So as is usual for me, I read everything I could find about the history of William Wallace and Edward I. Of course, I found the film was about as far on the fiction side of “historical fiction” as a movie could get. But I left it at that and didn’t think a great deal more about it. But seeing it today really brought all of this into perspective.

The main thing that jumped out at me was how much the film turned both Wallace and Edward into caricatures of themselves. Both were smart and even learned men. Wallace spent the last several years of his life on what turned out to be a hopeless diplomatic effort to get France and Rome to intervene in the Scottish conflict. And Edward, cruel as he was to the Scottish nobility (And the English nobility for that matter!) was hugely important in reforming common law. He also set up the first permanent English Parliament. So these were warriors, but not evil by the mores of their time.

The worst part of the movie is at the end. Wallace has been captured and if only he will admit to treason, they will kill him quickly. He will not. So they are going to torture him to death. So the queen comes to him and gives him some opium to be able to deal with the pain. But he refuses it. And then the executioner cuts off his genitals and even then, Wallace yells a defiant, “Freedom!” Really, the whole thing is just too much.

What really happened is that Edward wanted to send a message. Wallace had been thoroughly vilified in England. Like many other military leaders at many other times, Wallace used his disadvantage as a smaller force to his advantage by using what we would now call guerrilla tactics. From the English perspective, this was not cricket! I’m sure they saw it very much the way we see the use of improvised explosive devices and suicide bombs. So it isn’t surprising that Edward acted as he did to the applause of his people.

Of course, we know that people don’t respond to torture as is presented in Braveheart. For one thing, the English cut open his gut, pulled out his intestines, and set them on fire. I don’t think you yell “freedom” when that happens; if you yell anything, it is not words but screams of pain — Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and all. But the torture scene is not there because of Wallace. It doesn’t really matter. Wallace is important because of what he did before, not because of his execution. The torture is there because Mel Gibson is a very troubled man who clearly gets some kind of sexual thrill from torture. (That puts The Passion of the Christ into a new perspective, don’t it?!)

As it is, the film ends rather strangely. After Wallace is killed, the film jumps ahead a decade to when Robert the Bruce beats the weaker King Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn. So the Scots get their independent monarchy again. That would be a fine way to end the film if Bruce had been the main character. The way the script reads, it is more like a revenge tragedy where Wallace gets back at England for killing his wife. But Gibson wants to provide some kind of thematic layer on the film about the importance of the Scottish people having their very own royalty to oppress them. I suspect that this discontinuity was imposed upon screenwriter Randall Wallace. Gibson has been known to push his own unfortunate fetishes on other writers.

I don’t have a problem with movies that take large liberties with history. But if one is going to show a story about such people, it makes most sense to at least be true to who they were. Edward comes off as a psychopath who cares only for power. Wallace comes off as a man only interested revenge who only wraps himself in Scottish independence in pursuit of that revenge. And in the end, it is all about Gibson’s own obsessions with pain endurance.