kdkelly_33
Lifetime Total
1+
IMDb Member
14 years
Reviews
Das Leben ist zu lang (2010)
A smartly realized film within a film (within a film?)
Alfi Seliger is having an existential crisis.
His family hates him, he's worried about cancer, he's shunned by his peers, his psychiatrist suggests that he kill himself and -- last but not least -- he's not sure if anything's real. Alfi, an on-the-rocks 50-something film director, has become convinced that he's living in somebody else's movie, that of Dani Levy, who actually is the director of this film -- and Alfi, his alter-ego -- in the brain-teasing "Life Is Too Long."
Part screwball comedy, part paranoid thriller, Levy's "Life Is Too Long" concerns Alfi's quest to film a movie about the death of humor, framing the story around the Mohammed caricature controversy. As Alfi says at one point while receiving an award, to hilariously droll effect, "Comedies aren't only made to make people happy." But this German film within a film (and, in one particularly absurd scene, a film within a film within a film) also stands as an homage to Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" and Federico Fellini's "8½."
Markus Hering lights up the screen as Alfi, a bumbling, Mr. Magoo-type man-child sporting Gene Wilder hair, so at odds with himself, he can't distinguish the line between reality and the film he has been working on for years.
"Life Is Too Long" has many laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy scenes, depending on your sense of humor, including a Michael Jackson death joke, a shocking gag in the league of Oedipus marrying Jocasta in the Greek myth, and -- my favorite -- one which finds Alfi's daughter photographing his colonoscopy with her cellphone.
Depending on your perspective when the credits roll, "Life Is Too Long" is either a film with a happy ending or a film that never ends.
His family hates him, he's worried about cancer, he's shunned by his peers, his psychiatrist suggests that he kill himself and -- last but not least -- he's not sure if anything's real. Alfi, an on-the-rocks 50-something film director, has become convinced that he's living in somebody else's movie, that of Dani Levy, who actually is the director of this film -- and Alfi, his alter-ego -- in the brain-teasing "Life Is Too Long."
Part screwball comedy, part paranoid thriller, Levy's "Life Is Too Long" concerns Alfi's quest to film a movie about the death of humor, framing the story around the Mohammed caricature controversy. As Alfi says at one point while receiving an award, to hilariously droll effect, "Comedies aren't only made to make people happy." But this German film within a film (and, in one particularly absurd scene, a film within a film within a film) also stands as an homage to Woody Allen's "Stardust Memories" and Federico Fellini's "8½."
Markus Hering lights up the screen as Alfi, a bumbling, Mr. Magoo-type man-child sporting Gene Wilder hair, so at odds with himself, he can't distinguish the line between reality and the film he has been working on for years.
"Life Is Too Long" has many laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy scenes, depending on your sense of humor, including a Michael Jackson death joke, a shocking gag in the league of Oedipus marrying Jocasta in the Greek myth, and -- my favorite -- one which finds Alfi's daughter photographing his colonoscopy with her cellphone.
Depending on your perspective when the credits roll, "Life Is Too Long" is either a film with a happy ending or a film that never ends.
Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011)
The world according to Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fischer did for chess what Ben Franklin did for kites.
One helped shape our nation's birth; the other provided America with its second victory against the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- and led to a chessboard in every young boy's toy box.
When Fischer arrived late to a hall in Reykjavic, Iceland, in the summer of 1972, to challenge reigning world chess champ Soviet Boris Spassky, Americans and Russians alike sat transfixed in front of their television sets -- or in clusters outside department stores -- just as they had three years earlier when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. When he was declared the winner, taking the world title with him, Fischer instantly became the most celebrated man in America. But he had no use for publicity. His only interest was chess, or as he referred to the game, "my alter ego."
After hitting the talk-show circuit -- during which, in a rare candid moment, he expressed to "The Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson, "I woke up the day after the thing was over and I felt different, like something had been taken out of me" -- Fischer locked himself away from the world around him, retreating back to the safety of "the game of kings."
Chess had consumed him since the age of 7, filling a void left by a Jewish mother who was never around and a Jewish father who had left home when Fischer was 2. Long considered eccentric, after the Spassky match, he began to show signs of deeper psychological problems. When called to defend his title in 1975, he failed to materialize, too afraid he might lose, and was stripped of the title. Later, branded a fugitive in the U.S. for breaking U.N. sanctions, Fischer became known for making bizarre anti-American and anti-Semitic rants to the press, including an infamous tirade after the 9/11 attacks, in which he could be heard chuckling.
The game of chess has led many brilliant thinkers to lose their grip on reality, writer David Shenk argues in "Bobby Fischer Against the World," the first proper documentary on the troubled genius.
"You are putting yourself in a world that is infinite, it's abstract, you are in essence reshaping your mind," he says. "A good chess player is paranoid on the board, but then if you take that paranoia to real life, it doesn't play so well. You end up seeing your real world according to the confines of chess."
The documentary, directed by Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner Liz Garbus, centers on the Fischer-Spassky match, weaving together archival footage, never-before-seen letters and interviews with former friends and colleagues, including chess champions Garry Kasparov and Susan Polgar, to create a haunting portrait of the rise and fall of an American icon.
One helped shape our nation's birth; the other provided America with its second victory against the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- and led to a chessboard in every young boy's toy box.
When Fischer arrived late to a hall in Reykjavic, Iceland, in the summer of 1972, to challenge reigning world chess champ Soviet Boris Spassky, Americans and Russians alike sat transfixed in front of their television sets -- or in clusters outside department stores -- just as they had three years earlier when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. When he was declared the winner, taking the world title with him, Fischer instantly became the most celebrated man in America. But he had no use for publicity. His only interest was chess, or as he referred to the game, "my alter ego."
After hitting the talk-show circuit -- during which, in a rare candid moment, he expressed to "The Tonight Show" host Johnny Carson, "I woke up the day after the thing was over and I felt different, like something had been taken out of me" -- Fischer locked himself away from the world around him, retreating back to the safety of "the game of kings."
Chess had consumed him since the age of 7, filling a void left by a Jewish mother who was never around and a Jewish father who had left home when Fischer was 2. Long considered eccentric, after the Spassky match, he began to show signs of deeper psychological problems. When called to defend his title in 1975, he failed to materialize, too afraid he might lose, and was stripped of the title. Later, branded a fugitive in the U.S. for breaking U.N. sanctions, Fischer became known for making bizarre anti-American and anti-Semitic rants to the press, including an infamous tirade after the 9/11 attacks, in which he could be heard chuckling.
The game of chess has led many brilliant thinkers to lose their grip on reality, writer David Shenk argues in "Bobby Fischer Against the World," the first proper documentary on the troubled genius.
"You are putting yourself in a world that is infinite, it's abstract, you are in essence reshaping your mind," he says. "A good chess player is paranoid on the board, but then if you take that paranoia to real life, it doesn't play so well. You end up seeing your real world according to the confines of chess."
The documentary, directed by Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner Liz Garbus, centers on the Fischer-Spassky match, weaving together archival footage, never-before-seen letters and interviews with former friends and colleagues, including chess champions Garry Kasparov and Susan Polgar, to create a haunting portrait of the rise and fall of an American icon.