And The Losers Are…

This year’s Berlinale Golden Bear goes to the Rumanian film “Child’s Pose,” a heart-warming family drama about a domineering upper class Rumanian mother’s attempt to bribe freedom for her ungrateful creep of a loser son after he kills a child from a poor family in a traffic accident.

Berlinale

The Jury Grand Prize Silver Bear goes to the uplifting and inspirational Bosnian docudrama “An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker,” which re-creates the institutional abuse and neglect of a Roma family that has to collect scrap metal to survive (but at least now they’ve got the Silver Bear).

And the Gay/Lesbian Teddy went to several films (they were all that good this year, I guess), the most interesting sounding one being a flick called “Undress Me,” this being an allegory or metaphor for, uh, I dunno, something.

Actually, the only film I would have really been interested in seeing was the one that got the the Silver Bear for best script. It was an Iranian movie called “Pardé” (Closed Curtain). However the filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, could not take part in the intoxicating Berlin celebrations because he lives behind said closed curtain and has been prohibited by Iranian authorities from travelling, for some strange reason.

“It’s never been possible to stop a thinker and a poet.”

Film Critics And Other Smart People Disappointed

This year’s winner of the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlinale was actually a real dog, German film critics and other intellectual thinking folks and artist types everywhere are saying.

It’s not that the Italian film “Caesar Must Die” was bad in a cinematic sense or anything. It just didn’t meet the standards that modern film-makers and their kind aspire to, that’s all.

It was, in other words, too “humanist,” not at all a “strong, political film from young, engaged film-makers” (the film-makers who made this non-political film are old, engaged film-makers) and, worst of all, “it was a very conservative selection.” Pfui (yuck)!

Geez. If they had wanted to watch human, uplifting drama they would have gone to some other film festival. I don’t know which one that would be, of course, but it certainly wouldn’t/shouldn’t be the Berlinale.

“The jury shunned almost all the contemporary films that were admired or hotly debated at an otherwise pretty remarkable festival.”