Anti-administration album tracks seized

"Songs by Death Cab's guitarist seized at border"

Reminds me of the scenes in "The Lives of Others" when a playwright tries to smuggle an article across the border about the high suicide rate in the workers' paradise. Homeland Security is the Stasi and we are East Germany.

Long live Dystopia

I meant to get back sooner than this to the list of the Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time as chosen by the folks at Snarkerati. The fact that I own (or at least have seen) more than half of these flicks probably says much about me. Like most good science fiction, a dystopian movie succeeds because it says something about the "real" world in which we live - speculating on where our current trends may take us if we don't watch out.

The interesting thing is almost all of these movies show the struggle of one individual against the grain of a society where conformity is very important - usually because the conformity is enforced by a brutal government. (Wait - is "brutal government" one of those phrases from the Department of Redundancy Department?) (And isn't it interesting how many dystopias portray a world where the individual is unimportant? Of course that's the opposite of utopia!)

Sometimes the individual wins a victory, large or small, and sometimes the film does not have a very happy ending - but it's the struggle that counts, the moment when the individual breaks loose and says, to quote from a great dystopian work that is not a movie, "I am not a number - I am a free man!"

For the record - somewhere in my piles of DVDs and VHSs I believe I will find 14 of these flicks for sure (#1 Metropolis (1927), #3 Brazil, #5 Blade Runner, #9 Minority Report, #14 Twelve Monkeys, #15 Serenity [YAYYYYY!], #22 Planet of the Apes (1968), #23 V for Vendetta, #25 Gattaca, #26 Fahrenheit 451, #27 On the Beach, #29 Total Recall, #31 War of the Worlds (1953), #44 Strange Days) and maybe more ... I have seen and (in most cases) loved a majority of them, and I have loaded up the Netflix queue with the missing films. The ones you may be most surprised I've never seen would be the Mad Max movies - everyone has seen those by now, wouldn't you think?

I'm going to sound like the proverbial broken record - this list really, really ought to include The Lives of Others, the incredible 2006 German film I've written about here and here. Maybe because it's set in the reality of the past, in 1984 East Germany, it didn't qualify under Snarkerati's definition of a dystopian film. But if you enjoy the movies on this list, you gotta, gotta see The Lives of Others.

INSTANT UPDATE: I just noticed the update where they mention their definition of dystopia: "An imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror." (my emphasis) That does exclude The Lives of Others. Just thought of one glaring omission (at least in my humble opinion): Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original 1956 film with Kevin McCarthy, natch. That would go into my top 10 dystopian movies, I think - maybe the top 5!

Das Leben den Anderen

I just wanted to remind you what I said about "The Lives of Others," now that this terrific film is available on DVD.

Netflix delivered it this afternoon. I can't wait to see it again.

A great, great film

William F. Buckley writes a column this week about how an old friend called and told him to drop everything, seek out a movie called The Lives of Others, and go see it. That's literally what Buckley did, and he effused so thoroughly that I did the same thing. And now I'm telling you to do it.

Das Leben Den Anderen is set in East Germany, 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin wall, and no doubt director-screenwriter Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck chose that Orwellian year deliberately. It is a society so totalitarian that people are afraid to tell jokes about the country's leader, Erich Honecker, for fear their lives will be ruined or worse. The story begins as Captain Wiesler of the secret police known as the Stasi is giving a lecture to students in State Security school about how to conduct a 48-hour interrogation that will yield information just about every time.

Wiesler, brilliantly portrayed by Ulrich Mühe, is drawn into the surveillance of playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his actress lover Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), leading the team that bugs their apartment and setting up shop in the building's attic with electronic equipment that looks outdated even for 23 years ago but does the trick. Slowly he learns there's a reason why Dreyman was selected for monitoring, and it's not just that he's not a perfect little socialist.

What follows is a compelling, suspenseful and ultimately satisfying character study about small but powerful victories under an oppressive regime. The 82-year-old Buckley wrote, "I turned to my companion and said, 'I think that is the best movie I ever saw.'” I have seen a lot of movies and "best" is a big word, but this film will spring to mind from now on when I think about the best movies I've seen.

We stayed through the closing credits, even though our German is shaky to non-existent, in part because we didn't want to let go of the story or the lush, beautiful score by Stéphane Moucha and Gabriel Yared, and Sweetie turned to me and said something she's never said right after a movie: "That was great!"

Das Leben den Anderen has wracked up a boatload of awards including the European Film Academy's Best Picture award and this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Mühe has won four Best Actor awards for this performance.

Don't wait for the DVD if you don't have to. Run to any theater showing The Lives of Others and drink in this brilliant film.