Decline and Fall
Today's entry, about Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, begins over at Good For You. When it was ready to post, I sat down to watch a movie. That's not something that I ordinarily do doing daylight, but here's what happened. On Saturday, my dear Kathleen went to the Video Room, to pick up a movie. She found one, and then she found another, and when Kathleen is about to rent two movies, she remembers that the VR has a deal that lets you borrow a fourth movie for free if you rent three. This sounds great, but especially on a holiday weekend we don't watch that many movies in three days.
The rental expired last night, but we forgot to call for pickup, meaning that in addition to wasting money we were going to be charged even more. We had watched two of the four videos, Spellbound (not the Hitchcock but the one about the spelling bee) and My Brilliant Career, which, we realized the other day, neither of us had ever seen. Kathleen also hadn't seen Miss Firecracker, but I wasn't in the mood. And In July turned out to be Im Juli, a German film made by Fatih Akin. I thought that, as long as we were paying today's rental, I might as well give it a try. Because I still haven't seen Run, Lola, Run, I hadn't seen Moritz Bleibtreu before. Herr Bleibtrau has been in front of cameras since he was six, and it just may take an actor with as much experience to play the hapless and recessive Daniel Bannier, a teacher-in-training who has always run from adventure. But he runs into Juli, a vagabond beauty (Christiane Paul) and, the next thing you know, he's on his way to Istanbul - which is why Kathleen rented the movie - and to self-discovery. Im Juli has moments of magic realism, and is unembarrassed about unlikely coincidences, but the story has such an optimistic pull that we somehow know that Daniel is always going to survive the latest disaster. I recommend it to anyone whose eyes aren't tired (the subtitles are in a garish yellow) and who's up for a gamine romp.
