Monsieur Lazhar

A great teacher is capable of showing us that we have to do some of our own learning. The world is bigger than our classroom. “Monsieur Lazhar” is a sweet film about a teacher and students who all have a lot to say, a lot to learn and the truth that we don’t have to be tortured by keeping things to ourselves.

The thing about Bachir Lazhar (the comedian Fellag) is that he’s just a good teacher, not a great one. That alone sets this French Canadian film, one that was nominated for 2011’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, apart from its counterparts. He arranges his students in straight rows after they were already arranged in a communal semi-circle, and he asks them to dictate Balzac, two teaching traits of old fashioned convention that his kids and colleagues both resist.

But these 7th graders need convention in their lives. You see, Lazhar comes to them from Algeria after one student, Simon (Emilien Neron), finds his teacher Martine hanging dead from a rafter inside their classroom. The principal paints the walls and shuffles around the desks, but these kids have baggage now and can’t forget so easily.

The policy of the school seems to be to adhere to the status quo. Talk about your emotions behind closed doors with a school psychologist, act strong and mature, move on, and learn as though nothing has changed. Only Lazhar seems to think these students who are wise beyond their age should still have the opportunity to be kids.

“Monsieur Lazhar” tells a familiar story by turning some of the conventions of the teacher/student coming-of-age drama on its head. This isn’t “Dead Poets Society.” He’s not some liberal, new age teacher. He doesn’t make big scenes or jokes, and he treats his students like children, not adults set on profundity.

Fellag gives Lazhar a pleasant, passive and non-threatening demeanor, one that’s congenial but letting on little of his culture or his past. We learn that he’s actually an Algerian refugee on trial. Like his students, he has baggage he can’t admit or share.

It’s a nuanced dichotomy contained within an interesting and beautiful metaphor. Lazhar gets scolded for slapping a student on the back of the head for disobedience, but he’s told to stay hands off at all times. It reminds me of a great line from a favorite U2 song of mine. “You’ve got to talk without speaking, cry without weeping, scream without raising your voice.” This is a film about learning to overcome those barriers.

3 ½ stars

We Have a Pope

Maybe it’s my cliché mind tinkering away, but I would bet “We Have a Pope” would be a lot funnier and even more insightful if the Cardinal in question was actually Woody Allen. This satire however starts with an interesting premise that somehow finds a way to be very thin and flimsy.

Nanni Moretti’s film starts with the death of the current Pope and the election of a new one. As you may know, the Cardinals are secluded until they can make a decision. There’s you’re movie right there. Take us inside a room that we’ll never enter and stay put. What does happen however is that the out-of-the-blue candidate Melville (Michel Piccoli) is selected, but moments before he is intended to give a blessing to the world, he gets cold feet.

Now this is understandable. To be chosen by God and given stature, power and a new identity would be overwhelming for anyone, least of all someone brought up in church to be humble. And for Melville, there’s got to be a hint of peer pressure there too. He seeks help from a psychologist (Moretti) and yet is unable to find real clarity because the nature of his new identity and the church’s seclusion policies renders him isolated. He finds his only option is to run off and rediscover himself on his own.

But “We Have a Pope” is more interested in a broad satire of the church. It seems content in showing these harmless old men merely being cute, talking about their cell phones, playing cards and holding a volleyball tournament. It provides them with nothing interesting or even spiritual to say, and their montages of frivolity are handled in dainty, stately ways that only provide miniature grace notes of comedy.

In restricting the focus to just Melville and including the Cardinals as comic relief, the movie is about how this one character deals with pressure. But it’s about nothing more broadly, not religion and not even humanity.

The film’s crushing, sanctimonious ending is ultimately confusing if not ambiguous. Not only are we left with no pope, we’re left with no understanding of how tough, or in this case how silly, it is to be one.

2 stars

Off the Red Carpet: Weeks of 10/24 – 11/7

I took a week off last week, despite there being at least one piece of gigantic movie news, perhaps not Oscar relevant, but enough to make nerds on Twitter (myself included) flip out for better or worse.

But with the election now firmly behind us, I can focus on a race with just one president running (“Lincoln”).

President Obama defeats Mitt Romney in Presidential Election

Hey! Guess what? Now funding for “Sesame Street” and PBS won’t be cut and young kids will still like the movies and art for future generations!

Disney buys Lucasfilm for $4 billion, plans to make “Star Wars Episode VII”

“Star Wars” is now coming back in 2015, and I couldn’t be more disappointed. Even if “Star Wars” has become something of a joke since the prequels and having the “Star Wars” name on your product in fact makes it worse, the “Star Wars” series, with George Lucas’s muddy fingers and all, had become bad but never boring.

For Disney, who also owns Marvel, to plan to release “Star Wars VII” in the same year as “The Avengers 2,” is to make it into another tentpole blockbuster and popcorn movie that will be instantly forgotten as soon as people walk out of the theater.

Rumors are now spilling in that Matthew Vaughn (“Kick-Ass,” “X-Men: First Class”) is in talks to direct, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fischer are all interested in reprising their roles, and George Lucas is supposed to still be a “consultant,” whatever that means. These are telltale signs that this is not going to be an interesting film that takes the franchise in a new direction but one that is sheer fanboy baiting. (via Collider)

21 films eligible for Best Animated Feature

The number of animated movies considered eligible each year for the Best Animated Feature Oscar dictates the number of nominees the category will have, three or five, and five will definitely be the winning number this year based on 21 films meeting the Academy’s requirements. This says to me that Disney could very well have three potential nominees this year with “Brave,” “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Frankenweenie.” Expect buzz for “Rise of the Guardians” and one of the Gkids (“The Secret of Kells,” “Chico and Rita”) distributed entries. (Full list via In Contention)

Box office numbers bode well for “Wreck-It Ralph,” “Flight,” “Argo”

In a big surprise, Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” trounced the weekly competition by raking in nearly $50 million on its opening weekend, double that of Robert Zemeckis’s “Flight,” a number that’s really nothing to scoff at. “Argo” also performed well in its third week by making $10 million, proving that this is a movie generating money by word of mouth that has the legs to go all the way to a Best Picture prize. Doing less well was “Cloud Atlas,” which in two weeks has only brought in $18 million of its over $100 million budget. (via Box Office Mojo)

“Hitchcock” premieres at AFI Film Fest

Film buffs are eagerly awaiting the movie “Hitchcock,” for obvious reasons, and early reviews of the movie say that although Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren provide their characters with range and depth, first time feature director Sacha Gervasi’s film is a lightweight entry that feels clunky at times and goes against the grain of what people actually know about Hitch. They also now have HBO’s “The Girl” to compare it against, which likewise received poor reviews by painting Hitchcock as little more than a peeping tom.

European Film Awards and British Independent Film Awards announce nominees

“Amour,” “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “The Intouchables,” and “The Imposter” are all among the nominees in two of Europe’s smaller award races, the European Film Awards and the British Independent Film Awards. The former nominated films that won’t get an American distribution this year and the latter nominated films that got American distribution last year. See the full lists here and here. (via In Contention)

Week 4 Predictions Chart

This week I’m adding in some preliminary Screenplay predictions since the rest of the field is unchanged in my mind.

Continue reading “Off the Red Carpet: Weeks of 10/24 – 11/7”

Video games in movies need a reboot

There’s a nerdy loner sitting in the dark explaining how he’s “really into computers.” We watch him manhandle a control, pressing a million buttons at once in no specific way, and the sound effects we hear are random bleeps and bloops before some deep, ominous voice says “Game Over.”

This is how Hollywood sees the average video gamer.

Video games as they are depicted in the movies are horribly dated representations based on clichés from the ‘80s that in no way resemble the way modern video games look and feel. In the 30 years since games started becoming a subject of movies, most games have evolved to a point where they could and should be called art. The media however still views them as a joke.

Suffice it to say, a movie like Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” will not convince many adults that games are for people other than kids. It’s a movie that attracted a lot of attention in the gaming community by essentially being “Toy Story” for video games and for being jam-packed with Easter Egg references to cult favorites. But it’s a sugar coated story about being yourself that has more scenes of animated movie chaos than simulated levels that would provide depth and understanding about games. Continue reading “Video games in movies need a reboot”

Wreck-It Ralph

The plight of Wreck-It Ralph was best said by Jessica Rabbit. “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”

“Wreck-It Ralph” is a movie with a killer premise about an 8-bit arcade game villain who wants to be the good guy for once. It’s a cute film with a lot of heart that kids will gobble up, but it doesn’t represent video games in the way I would’ve hoped.

Very much like “Toy Story,” when the arcade closes, all the characters leave their in-game roles and live out lives of their own. They can even leave their own game and interact with others in a central train station hub, better known to us humans as a power strip.

Poor Ralph (John C. Reiley) has been the bad guy in his “Donkey Kong” inspired game for 30 years, and in all that time the townspeople have heaped praise on the game’s hero, Fix-It Felix (Jack McBrayer), and made him live in a garbage dump. In the film’s most clever scene, Ralph seeks help at an AA meeting for video game villains, and Bowser, Blinkie, Zangeef, Dr. Eggman and a stray zombie get him to realize that being a bad guy doesn’t mean you’re a “bad guy.”

But in an effort to win some pride, Ralph leaves his game and first joins a violent and realistic First Person Shooter and then a “Mario Kart” racer, where he helps a glitchy character named Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) win her own in-game acceptance.

“Wreck-It Ralph” is at its best when it’s riffing on games. The references function mostly as Easter Eggs for a nerdy audience brought up on Playstation, but the fun nuances are everywhere in the film’s first half hour, from a PSA featuring Sonic the Hedgehog to a race on the infamous Rainbow Road. Even the animation reflects the way certain game characters move or how background elements can be pixelated and under-developed.

For a movie that’s been given so much care, it’s a shame to see it turn into a vehicle for potty humor and lame puns about candy. The film’s big chases and action sequences feel less like actual levels in a game and more like bland movie set pieces. There’s a gag that involves Laffy Taffys and Fix-It Felix hitting himself in the face with a hammer that feels very low-brow.

And yet “Wreck-It Ralph” is sugary sweet. The characters are perky and optimistic, and Ralph is never anything but loveable. He just gets a bad rap.

I read on Twitter that this was the year that Disney made a Pixar movie and Pixar made a Disney movie (“Brave”), but “Wreck-It Ralph” is not quite “Toy Story.” It needs to level up if it wants to beat that.

3 stars

Rapid Response: La Grande Illusion

Jean Renoir reminds me of the Robert Altman of the ’30s. His films have rich casts, authentic dialogue and concern society, class and order in different communities and settings. In “La Grande Illusion,” or the mistranslated English title “Grand Illusion” (it should be “The Great Illusion”), Renoir finds culture in of all places a World War I POW camp in Germany. Released just as tensions were getting high in Europe again, Renoir called it the last war of gentlemen.

As the movie starts, the Germans have shot down the French planes of Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay). “If they’re officers, invite them for lunch,” the Germans say. They sit and small talk, and for a moment you forget that their meal together came as the result of violence, death and being prisoners.

Perhaps also like “M.A.S.H.,” “La Grande Illusion” is a loose comedy, operating on pleasant banter, clever conversation and observations, peculiar situations and above all social customs.

Part of the movie’s feel has to do with the fact that there almost always seem to be about a half dozen people on screen at once. Renoir uses economical, understated cinematography to survey the room and surprise us when one character deserves our attention. It’s the little details we pick up that paint a picture of how bad this war is, like when one guy confesses that being a vegetarian and being in the war didn’t stop his wife from cheating on him, or when one soldier puts on women’s clothes and a wig and all the soldiers in the room stop dead in their tracks for a moment because they haven’t seen a woman in so long.

Both Marechal and Boeldieu lead escape attempts in the two POW camps they’re trapped in for seemingly no reason at all other than because it is necessary. If they do leave these fairly comfy confines, they’ll only have to go back to fight in what feels like an endless war, but prison camps are there to be broken out of. To not even try would be like betraying a social order.

What’s beautiful about the film is how utterly noble it is. The film has aged well over time because Renoir seems to predict in the film that royalty and class systems as they knew them in the time of the first World War will be obsolete from the world. The movie mentions that cancer and gout aren’t working class diseases yet, but they will be, and we realize how deep the societal structures once were. We see the enemy camp leader, Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), showing genuine mercy as Boeldieu attempts to escape. We see Marechal learning his social skills outside of prison walls in a short sequence near the end that provides the film its heart. And for a film about war, it is free of virtually any violence, vicious acts or major tragedies, and yet it has great power.

Cloud Atlas

“Cloud Atlas” opens with an old man muttering under his breath, talking about the juju o’ the bayou, or at least that’s what it sounds like. It’s a super close-up after looking down from the stars, so it feels a little profound, a little silly, a little captivating. Then you realize it’s Tom Hanks with really good makeup, and you realize very quickly this movie is bananas.

“Cloud Atlas” is a wild mess of a movie. It tells six stories over countless centuries, sharing actors and thematic structure, but only just barely narrative. So at times the whole thing is pegged to be philosophical and thought provoking, and then Jim Broadbent learns to drive an SUV and runs over Hugo Weaving wearing drag as they escape from a nursing home.

Whether or not it’s actually about anything is beside the point. It has the same transcendent, sci-fi possibilities and mumbo-jumbo that “The Matrix” did, which was also directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski (the siblings have paired up with “Run Lola Run” director Tom Tykwer), but at the end of the day it’s a fun journey through time with just as much visual imagination.

Describing how the plot functions is an effort in futility, but the movie itself actually does it best. “Each thing is understood moment to moment, but at any moment it could be headed in a different direction.” This may just be the movie accounting for its own jumbled narrative, but that is how “Cloud Atlas” feels. It flits in time, but none of it is particularly dreamlike or even surreal. Each of the six stories, if you broke them apart as they are, are presented linearly.

The only confusing part is the excessive crosscutting that the Wachowskis and Tykwer employ. They may jump from a barbarian attack scene in the dystopian future to the performance of a sonata in 1932 to a sex scene in the 22nd Century to a sight gag or punch line in modern day London. The brilliant thing is that they’re often edited as though they are one scene, completely different in terms of even the mood we’re supposed to feel, but fluid in their pacing and action. At one point when Halle Berry crashes her car off a bridge and plummets into the water, the movie leaves her hanging for nearly 20 minutes before we see her making her escape. To have it happen when it does, a theme of rescue seems to permeate throughout all the other story threads.

“Cloud Atlas” is all about its themes rather than concrete ideas. We start with each character sharing in an unlikely encounter. We see them experience feelings of escape, rescue and discovery, and before long they’ve all suffered loss and hardship, if not action. Voice over narrations, the image of a comet shaped birthmark and miniature Easter eggs connecting the stories suggest that our lives are not our own, that our spirits carry through generations, but because the stories never truly intersect, do they mean anything beyond wispy ideas?

I don’t think it matters much, because the movie’s lushness sweeps us up in its visuals and ideas. We see futuristic cityscapes, treacherous mountain ranges, majestic long shots on the high sea and colorful rooms that materialize with possibilities right before our eyes.

On a technical level alone, “Cloud Atlas” is a remarkable achievement. The running time is nearly three hours, but because the stories are so out of sequence we’re not checking our watch awaiting the next one to start. We’re mystified by the makeup that makes Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant at times unrecognizable. We’re moved by the complex and exuberant performances of Jim Broadbent and Doona Bae, a South Korean actress who fully owns a rare lead part for Asians in a big budget movie.

Something that was more art house would also be more metaphorical in its ideas and imagery. The Wachowskis and Tykwer however put all their brainstorming right into the mouths of their characters. So moment to moment we get a line that resonates on an intellectual level, another that comes from a crazed Mad Hatter and seems laughable and another that is intentionally laughable. These ideas would be a slog if it jammed them down our throats, but perhaps like the way the filmmakers think the world operates, these possibilities are released like spirits floating in the movie’s universe.

I imagine I’ll see “Cloud Atlas” again very shortly, not because it’s a dense movie that needs to be unraveled, but because it’s a magical movie that makes it fun to be insightful.

3 ½ stars

Rapid Response: Life is Beautiful

If one of Woody Allen’s characters were required to give a speech explaining why a room of Italians were the dominant race, he’d be sarcastic, make a fool of himself and be embarrassed in the process. Ask Roberto Benigni’s Guido in “Life is Beautiful,” he’ll make a fool of himself too, but he’ll jump on the table and boldly say how beautiful his belly button is before climbing out the window.

To me, “Life is Beautiful” works because of the film’s opening love story. Benigni presents Guido as a loveable and goofy clown in scenes that Chaplin or Groucho would’ve adored. The beginning is a dopey, screwball comedy fairy tale where the hero has the boisterously loud and fast talking Italian voice but none of the angry shouting. At times he employs broad slapstick when he crashes into the lovely principessa Dora on a bike or steals a poor schmuck’s hat. At others it’s hammy wordplay, like when Guido gets a rich Italian diplomat to order an already prepared salmon, salad and white wine by telling him the only other available options are the very, very fried mushrooms. And at times he puts sheer magic into his movie, convincing Dora he can be granted miracles by the Virgin Mary.

But anyone who has heard of this movie will know it becomes something very different. Years after Guido marries Dora and has a son, they’re hauled off to a concentration camp during the war. Guido convinces his son that their whole stay is part of a game to win a real tank, explaining that if he hides and stays quiet in front of the mean guards, he’ll earn enough points to win one.

Benigni is treading very dangerous ground in trying to be optimistic and funny in the face of the worst human tragedy of all time. If the film were any less sincere about its intentions, I’d likely hate it, but Benigni commits to never letting his act in front of his kid feel fake or phony. He’s a Marx Brother in duress, always one step ahead of a bad situation.

“Life is Beautiful” was greeted by the American public in a wave of good cheer in 1998. The film was nominated for Best Picture and won two Oscars for Benigni for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film. Already Benigni had been known as the “funniest man in Italy,” but some of his early American appearances, both on Letterman and in Jim Jarmusch films, confounded at best. By the time this film came out, Benigni was adored. “Life is Beautiful” made a hefty $57 million at the box office, and his acceptance speech at the Oscars has become a thing of legend. People called out “Roberto” as Sophia Loren prepared to read the winner, and when it was so he stood on the chair in front of him and began bowing to and kissing everyone in sight.

It was greeted so favorably that it blocked out the small, but very vocal dissenters who have been able to make their voices heard much more clearly as the film has aged. Their opinion that the conceit of the movie itself is sickening is a valid point. The Holocaust isn’t exactly the butt of the joke in “Life is Beautiful,” but in staying optimistic it white washes just how horrible things were. Should we really be given hope or solace for our lost loved ones based on this one family’s fairy tale survival?

I don’t necessarily feel the same way about the film, but it is definitely something worth understanding.

Seven Psychopaths

“Seven Psychopaths” proves you should never judge a movie by its title. Playwright turned movie director Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges”) starts with the title and knowingly ropes you in to a movie you both did and didn’t expect it to be.

It’s a movie about movies, it’s about writers with writer’s block, it’s about how psychopathic we must be to enjoy a movie about psychopaths, and it’s one of the more twistedly clever movies of the year.

Colin Farrell as Marty is not one of the movie’s seven psychopaths, but he must be crazy to think he can get any work done on a screenplay when he’s an alcoholic writer and Irishman. All he has so far is the title, “Seven Psychopaths,” which is good enough for everyone, because a title like that should write itself. But he doesn’t know who the psychopaths are, and he doesn’t want them to be violent or the movie to be a mindless bloodbath. One of them, he thinks, could be a Buddhist.

But this isn’t good enough for Billy (Sam Rockwell), a crook who kidnaps dogs and returns them for reward money along with his partner Hans (Christopher Walken). Billy suggests one of the psychopaths could be based on a local serial killer called the Jack of Diamonds, who goes around killing members of crime syndicates. All the plots inevitably intertwine when Billy kidnaps crime boss Charlie’s (Woody Harrelson) shih tzu puppy and he comes looking for them.

The twist of “Seven Psychopaths” however is that this is the set up. The title itself is a ploy. Suddenly on the run, Marty wonders that if this were the story of his movie, what if the second half was just three guys sitting in the desert and talking? The movie calls attention to itself in the biggest way possible. It’s writing the movie as it goes, recognizing the over-stylized shootout isn’t as fun or as funny as it seems, showing the seams of its plot and acknowledging that even a sincere attempt at life lessons can be phony.

It’s not quite “Pulp Fiction” because it has its own set of rules instead of none at all. It’s not quite “Snatch” because it’s smarter than that and only uses the movie’s ideas as a template for parody. And it’s not quite “Adaptation” because at the end of the day this is still a screwball, blood-drenched mob comedy.

“Seven Psychopaths” is its own movie. It’s got layers, as it says. It’s a movie inside itself that doesn’t play out in ways you would expect, but then does on a technicality.

At its core, the film works because McDonagh’s dialogue isn’t funny just because it’s self-aware, and it doesn’t waste the talent on screen just to make a point about movies like this. Woody Harrelson is probably best, using obscenely large guns and other props like a wheelchair to always teeter on comedic and menacing and make his own legacy as an iconic and memorable movie villain.

And McDonagh isn’t just a stylistic copycat. He backs away from most of the pop culture references and focuses carefully on the proper aesthetic of the action comedy dream sequence and how he can tweak it. Take note of the maudlin score and storybook monologue during a montage telling the story of Zacharia (Tom Waits), another serial killer specializing in killing serial killers who acted with a Bonnie Parker partner in crime and fell in love.

The question is whether or not “Seven Psychopaths” earns its stripes. The movie is so self-aware that it even calls itself out on its own trap. These characters can’t necessarily be liked, the movie really can only end one way and the insights really can only be skin deep. If “Seven Psychopaths” is a movie within a movie, it seems to say how you couldn’t possibly enjoy a movie like this as you’re watching it.

3 stars

Wings of Desire (1987)

“I now know what no angel knows: a sense of amazement.”

The blissful reverie of a movie that is Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire” reveals that sense of amazement, wonder and internal gazing that all humans need to live life fully. It’s a movie full of its muchness, its ideas and its people, but it often feels as confusing, mysterious and lyrical as life itself.

It tells the story of an angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) who has looked over Berlin for eternity but desires to “take the plunge” into human existence. “I’ve stood outside the world long enough,” he says. He desires the ability to live in the present, not in eternity, to know the feeling of a weight on his shoulders and be able to smell, taste and touch things for himself. He’s inspired by the sight of a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), twirling in midair as an angel on Earth.

His desires are not presented literally. They’re filtered through the thoughts and emotions of the people both he and his partner Cassiel (Otto Sander) observe. “How is it that this me wasn’t here before I was me, and that there won’t be a me after this me is gone?” It’s as if these spirits don’t know the meaning of their existence either. Their purpose is to “look, gather, testify and preserve.” Through their black and white eyes, even the mundane of the human world have a poetic, spiritual beauty.

One man wonders why his son has no other interests than music, realizing that buying him a guitar didn’t do enough to please him. Another elderly man struggles to climb up stairs in a library and later wanders the streets reflecting on his time in the war. A teenager’s mind races with thoughts that he needs to leave this life but knows not why as he leaps off a building to his death.

Wenders directs this all with intimate grace and beauty. The camerawork by legendary cinematographer Henri Alekan (Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”) grants us an immediate, spiritual perspective, gliding elegantly through such small places as a library in tracking shots and in arching crane shots that seem to give us a glimpse of the world as a whole. The humans cannot see Damiel and Cassiel, but occasionally Wenders has them look toward the camera and force us to acknowledge our own presence, to ask our own questions as they ask theirs. Their lilting, whispered voices inside their head may not even mean anything specific to us, but as we’re inside their mind for that brief moment we know just how much it means to them.

Shooting in black and white from the angel’s perspective and in color from the human perspective, “Wings of Desire” owes some credit to “A Matter of Life and Death,” an Old Hollywood romantic comedy that shows heaven in black and white, Earth in color and also knows the joys of living and feeling. In this way, both films are deeply spiritual, and “Wings of Desire” very sanctimonious, but they are hardly “religious.” Characters do not pray, they do not mention God or Christianity. They do not even ask the precise purpose of life but wonder what it is to really live. It’s even more interested in what it reflects of West Germany at the time, a city divided and isolated by the Cold War and left with their own questions and ideas.

But the part I like best in “Wings of Desire” is when it stops being the German art house film for a moment. Damiel wakes up in an empty lot in color and notices three kids staring at him. They assume he’s drunk as they run and giggle away. He gets up and his first sight is a magnificent graffiti mural on a long horseshoe wall. The scene is perfect, but Damiel asks something of the artist that makes it real; he asks what they call each color, and once yellow, blue and green are all named, they never looked so vibrant.

It’s also memorable for Peter Falk playing himself during an on-location shoot in Berlin. He has a scene where he tries on different hats that really doesn’t fit the movie’s flow, but it’s funny and genuine and gets us inside his head without giving him an internal monologue. We realize that he’s aware of the angels’ presence although he cannot see them, and he explains the joys of simply rubbing your hands together when its cold. His line to the newly awakened Damiel is again not as poetic as the rest of the film, but it feels right. “You have to find out yourself. That’s the fun of it.”

Suddenly this arty, metaphorical movie has become something else: a direct, colorful, accessible movie in the German New Wave. It takes us to a brooding, underground post-punk show and puts us in a new kind of trance. Its ending perhaps jams too much philosophy into one lovelorn conversation, but it casts us in the moment that is both now and never.

Wim Wenders directed “Wings of Desire” after the film that won him the Palme D’Or at Cannes, “Paris, Texas,” a loose remake of “The Searchers” with Harry Dean Stanton. Wenders did however win Best Director at the 1987 Cannes and made a sequel to this film called “Faraway, So Close!” He’s been nominated for two Oscars, but both for documentaries. He’s an ambitious, profound director. His films are timeless and spiritual, but they operate in the here and now.