Take a break, pack a bag

 

Going somewhere.

Cine Me

 

 

Two Lives (Zwei Leben)

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1783422/

 

 

http://www.zweileben-film.de/

 

 

 

 

 

A Norwegian family unravels when a complex piece of German history surfaces in their midst in Two Lives (Zwei Leben), writer-director Georg Maas' well-acted and rather solemn drama that’s loosely based on the novel by Hannelore Hippe.

 

This year’s foreign-language Oscar submission from Germany casts Norwegian legend Liv Ullmann and German star Juliane Koehler (from 2002 foreign-language Oscar winner Nowhere in Africa) as a mother and daughter in Norway whose relationship and extended family are shaken to the core by revelations brought about by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though indirectly a film that deals with WWII and its extended aftermath — which, in a terrible twist, provided fertile soil for the Stasi secret police of newly created East Germany — this is not a Holocaust film but rather a human drama about past secrets and identity that should appeal to an older and quite mainstream audience. 

 

Beginning in the mid-1930s, the Nazi Lebensborn program to breed an Aryan “master race” produced thousands of children, many of them procreated by members of the German SS in casual encounters with blond, blue-eyed women deemed racially pure. Because Norwegians, with their Viking ancestors, were thought to be an especially hardy breed, they were considered ideal specimens. Once these women gave birth in occupied Norway, their children were often taken from them and reared in special orphanages in Germany. After World War II, the taint of Nazism caused the mothers and the Lebensborn children remaining in Norway to face harsh discrimination.

Starting in the 1960s, the Stasi, the East German secret police, recruited many of the grown-up progeny in East Germany as spies, sending them to Norway to be reunited with unsuspecting families. In some cases, the Stasi appropriated the identities of Lebensborn children and conferred them on East Germans trained in espionage before placing them with Norwegian families. Since many documents related to the program were destroyed, few records existed to attest to their identities as Lebensborn children.

 

“Two Lives” is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability. If she were played a different way, Katrine would be an unsympathetic, diabolical monster. But the film portrays her as a victim of history who is increasingly desperate at the prospect of losing a family to which she feels she belongs.

Cats do not have vertigos

 

 

Nós somos um instante no infinito
fragmento à deriva no Universo
O que somos não é para ser dito
o que sente não cabe num só verso

Enquanto olhares para mim eu sou eterna
estou viva enquanto ouvir a tua voz
Contigo não há frio nem inverno
e a música que ouvimos vem de nós

Cine me

 

 

 

Gone girl

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2267998/

 

 

http://www.gonegirlmovie.com/

 

 

Can someone vanish if, in the first place, they were never truly there? A missing-person thriller might not seem like a likely forum for this kind of metaphysical grappling, but David Fincher, the director of The Social Network, Fight Club and Zodiac, is not a filmmaker prone to swaddling his audience in the consolations of the likely.

Fincher’s 10th film, Gone Girl, is based closely on Gillian Flynn’s best-selling 2012 novel which used a page-turning plot line – the sudden disappearance of a smart, pretty, married woman called Amy Elliott-Dunne (Rosamund Pike) – to unpick the modern mania for presenting a perfected version of ourselves to others, even as the truth roils and bubbles underneath.

 

 "Gone Girl" is art and entertainment, a thriller and an issue, and an eerily assured audience picture. It is also a film that shifts emphasis and perspective so many times that you may feel as though you're watching five short movies strung together, each morphing into the next.

 

I'm not saying the film is genuinely clever throughout (though it is always fiendishly manipulative) or that every twist is defensible (a few are stupid). I'm saying that "Gone Girl" is what it is, that it knows what it is, and that it works. You know how well it's working when you hear how audiences laugh at it, and with it. Their laughter evolves as the film does. They laugh tentatively at first, then with an enthusiasm that gives way to a full-throated, "I endorse this madness!" gusto during the final half-hour, when the story spirals into DePalma-style expressionism and the picture becomes a maelstrom of blood, tears and other bodily fluids. There are allusions to the O.J. Simpson case, "Macbeth" and "Medea," and the ending is less an ending than a punchline that's all the more amusing for feeling so deflated.

That it's hard to tell whether Fincher has an opinion on anything he's showing us or is just sadistically bemused, like an evil child tormenting insects, somehow adds to the movie's dark vibrancy. This director is a misanthrope, no question. But misanthropes can be entertaining, and "Gone Girl" is that—not just in the scenes where women see through men and other women with furious contempt, but in throwaway moments, such as when an unseen man yells "Louder!" at the beleaguered Nick during a press conference, and when the film shows tourists gathered in front of Nick's bar, taking selfies.

 

This is a sick film, and often brilliant.



Rain on your parade

 

 

And I'll keep raining, raining, raining over you.

 

 

Why we love

 

 

Love is a complicated beast. And despite the ownership with which centuries of literature and art and music have claimed romance, there’s actually quite a bit of science of in it. Love, in fact, is as much a product of the heart as it is of the brain — a combination of neurochemistry and storytelling, the hormones and neurotransmitters that make us feel certain emotions, and the stories we choose to tell ourselves about those emotions.

A woman often thinks she regrets the lover, when she only regrets the love

 

 

François de la Rochefoucauld

Very early in my life, it was too late

 

 

And then he told her - he had told her that it was as before, that he still loved her, that he would never stop loving her, that he would love her until his death.

Gone with the wind

 

 

 

"Kiss me, once." - Rhett