House on fire, put it out, put it out!

This weekend I watched Ich bin die Andere, in which precious angel fallen to earth August Diehl plays an engineer who becomes enthralled by a woman after a chance encounter. And by chance encounter, I mean after their private parts high five.

So much of this movie left me utterly flummoxed. First of all, is the red dress/blonde hair look Carolin sports supposed to be ~sexy? Because it reminded me of this:



And I couldn't understand why Robert, August's character, found her so intriguing. Then there's the age thing. I just processed that as part of the story when the movie began, like, "Welp, he's attracted to an older woman." Then it became clear that they were trying to act like Carolin and Robert were around the same age. Nope. No.

This would have been ridiculous enough, if the audience weren't also expected to accept that Barbara Auer's character is old enough to have been Carolin's nanny. Barbara Auer is 4 years older than Katja Riemann, but she doesn't look markedly older, especially in this movie, where she actually looks younger.

On top of all this, the shocking twists were telegraphed well in advance, except for the ones that I think were supposed to be shocking, if they were comprehensible in the slightest.

August was pretty, though.

TL;DR: As I said on Tumblr, the fuck did I just watch?

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Um, I also watched The Runaways, which was basically a love letter to Cherie Currie from Joan Jett. It was gorgeous (Duh Aficionado: Floria Sigismondi knows her way around the visual medium) and I liked it a lot.

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From a teenager on tumblr: "Look at billboard charts from the early 90s; look up the songs; listen to them. Most of them have meaningful lyrics or are trying to relay a message. It wasn’t about the hottest beat, getting wasted, or talking shit about other rappers."

I knew their burgeoning interest in Nirvana would come to no good. I feel like Tom Haverford.