I don't know what possessed us, maybe it was the prospect of either a giant animated beanstalk or another installment of Bruce Willis and Die Hard, but we did a German language double feature, both dealing with Germans not looking good.
Lore came first...5 kids take off in the wake of the end of the Reich. Their parents have been hauled off, being Nazis of some importance and the kids are on their own, trying to make their way to relatives far from home. The oldest girl, a teen, finds herself responsible for her young teen sister, two twin boys and a baby. The story is a sort of odyssey across a ruined German landscape, The Walking Dead without Walkers, the remaining living are almost as bad. Excellent acting, nice cinematography, and an interesting story.
Then there was Barbara, set in East Germany in 1980, an object lesson for Tea Partiers who don't know that there are worse places than the USA. The main character, a doctor, arrives in a small rural clinic, meets a nice guy doctor and sets up practice. Life gets complicated, however, when a teen girl shows up at the clinic, having escaped from a labor camp. The female doctor befriends a male doctor, but is increasingly aware that everybody is being watched, if not all the time, at least some of the time. The local Stasi guy is quite obvious since he's the guy gets to drive a Mercedes and calls in the jack-booted thugs now and again when it's needed. Just who is a watcher? Is it the grouchy busybody lady down the street? Or, the nice doctor, who has occasional quiet chats with the Stasi guy? You're sure that your phone is tapped all the time, and your apartment gets tossed now and again, but what else? The effective thing about this sort of oppression is that you never know WHO is watching or when. How does this end? Is Barbara hauled off by the authorities? Is the nice guy doctor a snitch? Nothing is quite what it seems however and the movie takes quite a different plot turn. Like Barbara, this movie is quite good also.
Both of these movies were excellent in minimalist ways, basic acting, script, cinematography but no FX at all...nothing. I was not sure about a German double feature, but it did rescue me from the freakin' beanstalk. I was also surprised to see a nearly packed theater, not just the usual hipsters from the art college a couple blocks away, but a spectrum, even a few teen daters. I guess not everybody was watching Bruce try to not die hard again.
