A Monkey Movie Review

Remember when they used to make good movies that were a bit long but you didn't mind because the film was so engrossing that you would have watched it for another hour or two if you had to? Remember when they made movies with damn fine actors who hooked you in the second they came on screen? Have you seen a film like that come out of Hollywood lately? No?


Well, I did see one like that last night but it came out of Holland of all places.
Black Book is a larger than life movie that is one of the best films I've seen in years. It tells the story of a Jewish woman who is trapped in Holland at the end of World War Two. I'm not going to delve into the plot because if I did it would spoil the movie for some of you. I'll just say that this film has more twists and turns than a mountain road. Paul Verhoeven, director of RoboCop, Total Recall, and many other pieces of Hollywood fluff, has gone back to his days of making good films outside of Hollywood and in his native language of Dutch.


The leads, Carice Van Houten and Sebastian Koch, are brilliant, especially Ms. Van Houten. She plays her character with verve and gusto and she she does all her own singing in the film as well. She looks great in and out of all the 1940's period costumes they put on her. Koch, who some of you may remember from his turn as the playwright in The Lives of Others, manages to play one of the most sympathetic Nazi's ever. Other outstanding performance were turned in by Halina Reijn, Thom Hoffman, and Waldemar Kobus.


I can't say enough good things about this movie and it's surprising because I thought I had had my fill of WW2 films. It just goes to show you that if you have a good story and you tell it well then the material never gets old. Of course it doesn't hurt if you have Paul Verhoeven directing and you cast Carice Van Houten in the lead. I highly recommend this movie.

Almost the same (A Dr. Monkey movie review with spoilers)

Imagine if you will a long slender yet strong twig. Let's call this twig the international political spectrum and let's place at the far left end of this twig the political and economic system we know as Communism. Now at the far right of the twig let's place the political and economic system we know as fascism (or as it is also known corporatism, as in corporations controlling everything, as in the free market gone wild due to people like Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and all the pro business politicians of all the western democracies). Now imagine that that twig with both of those diametrically opposing political systems on the ends begins to bend. It bends but it does not break, it bends so much in fact that the two ends that were once so far apart and are now almost touching. In fact, the only thing separating those ends now is a millimeter or two of empty space. Notice that those two political and economic systems can start out so differently, but in the end when run by venal corrupt people they end up being so very much alike. Of course the men, and yes it usually is men, who run things in both systems say, "Look how much better you have it than those people under the other system. You're free! They're not! Huzzah, huzzah!" I wish I could take credit for that analogy but I can't, it was first put forth by Ernst Nolte the great German historian and philosopher in his book Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Fascism In Its Epoch) which was translated into English in 1965 as The Three Faces Of Fascism. (Woo hoo, I just got to use my history degree right there! Dr. Thomas Peake, my European social and intellectual history professor, would be so proud of me!)

As I watched this brilliant film the other nightI thought of Mr. Nolte's analogy over and over again.

The Lives Of Others takes place in a country that we used to call East Germany. East Germany was the most zealously Soviet of all the former Soviet satellite states. They took spying on one another to an almost unheard of degree, in fact the spying and informing on one another was so deep and pervasive that the man who starred in this film, the late Ulrich Muhe, was a victim of the East German Stasi, the Stasi was the state secret police, their version of the FBI/CIA, and the person who spied on him was one of his ex wives.

The film is about a ramrod strict Stasi member, Muhe, who is assigned to keep tabs on a playwright, played by Sebastian Koch. He suspects Koch of being too clean, he's so clean that he must be hiding something, and too much of a supporter of the Communist state. While spying on him he meets Koch's girlfriend, played by the luminous Martina Gedeck, who also starred in the great German film Mostly Martha which was remade by Michael Douglas's child bride. Muhe falls for both of them. He falls in love with the idea of both them and with the idea of them being free of the grinding Communist system. Muhe risks his career and his very life to help this couple stay out of trouble with the Stasi.

It becomes even harder for him when Gedeck becomes involved with a petty top level bureaucrat who uses her for sex and who wants her for himself only. When she runs afoul of the bureaucrat he orders Muhe's superior to destroy her and her lover Koch. Gedeck is arrested and she becomes an informer, at one point she turns in her lover Kock to save herself from prison. Muhe however, unbeknownst to anyone, saves Koch but Gedeck is wracked with guilt over what she has become and she steps in front of a truck to atone for her sins against her lover Koch.

The film follows Muhe and Koch as they both endure the fall of the Berlin wall and they subsequent reunification of the Germanys.

It's a well made brilliant piece of film making with out of this world portrayals of some of the tortured citizens of East Germany. The three leads were magnificent and it was a crime that Ms. Gedeck was not nominated in this country for an Academy Award for her performance in this movie.

As I watched this movie I could not but help see the parallels between the East German government of that time and of our present day government. The spying on their own citizens was rampant then in East Germany, it's rampant now here. They used fear and intimidation then to keep the populace in line, the Bush junta uses it here now. They claimed that their citizens were free and happy, Bush claims we're all free and happy. In East Germany they tightly controlled the media and used it to spread their propaganda, Bush and his corporate buddies do the same thing here in the USA today.

Here a couple more frightening similarities:

They built a wall to keep their people in and the truth out.

Bush built a wall around the White House to keep himself in and the truth out.

Former East German Communist party boss Eric Honecker sneered at people who wanted freedom and he kept right on oppressing people despite the world wide outcry against him.

Dick Cheney does the same thing today.

Don't get the wrong idea about this film though, it's not as depressing as I made it sound. It's actually very good and ultimately it has an uplifting ending. I hope one day to say the same thing about our current situation.

And now because I'm a guy who loves pretty women, here are some gratuitous photos of Martina Gedeck: