Olympia Part 2: Festival of Beauty (March 14th and 15th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[OLYMPIA PART 2: FESTIVAL OF BEAUTY screens Thursday March 14th at 6:45 pm and Friday March 15th at 7:15 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

At this point, let me take the opportunity to mention what while our Olympics-level star athletes litter the headlines in disgrace, accused of performance-enhancing drugs, or of slaying their blonde-supermodel girlfriends, no movie critic ever sat in the dock accused of killing his blonde-supermodel girlfriend...Well, okay, none of us movie critics ever get to have blonde-supermodel girlfriends in the first place. That's in the damned job description. Most of us assume it's a joke when we sign the contract. Anyway, point is, most of those lovely female victims of psychotic jock rage would still be alive today, if only they'd been attracted to movie critics instead. They'd be bored, perhaps. Socially ostracized, certainly. But at least still alive.

OLYMPIA PART 2 is the second half of Leni Riefenstahl's epochal record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, produced under Nazi authority. Amazing Untrue Fun Fact: the original title was OLYMPIA PART 2: FESTIVAL OF BEAUTY: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE, but that tested poorly with Goering, Mengele and the High Command (the Tom Cruise guy from VALKYRIE, meanwhile, was undecided ).

Olympia Part 1: Festival of the Nations (March 14th and 15th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[ OLYMPIA PART 1: FESTIVAL OF THE NATIONS screens Thursday March 14th at 6:45 pm and Friday March 15th at 7:15 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

This week the Vienna Philharmonic has been owning up to having, oh, just a few unsavory connections during the Third Reich years some three-quarters of a century ago. I like that; it amuses me to see overturned the wishful myth that our “artists” and creative classes are always in the heroic forefront of positive social change and protest against tyranny. Yes, certainly some of the rabble are, but the ones who are especially reliant on money and technology to stay on top – filmmakers most of all – will readily toady up to whatever fascist or communist dictatorship is in power to gain the largesse.

The Tin Drum (November 13th at the Capitol Theatre)

[THE TIN DRUM screens Tuesday November 13th at 7 pm at the Capitol Theatre in association with The Cleveland Cinematheque.)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Maybe if I had studied German instead of French in high school or something, then my life would have taken a very different turn, and right now my lovely bride Heidi Klum and myself would be toasting long left-behind Cleveland, with our neighbor Lebron James at the Victoria's Secret After-Party in Miami. It's a nice thought. But no, I went with French. At least I finally read The Three Musketeers in the original (took a number of years), which got me insider moxie on any one of the numerous movie adaptations. But, probably because I did not take German, I also lost out, most likely, on reading the Gunter Grass novel The Tin Drum, which I am given to understand is Most Important. Okay, whatever. I finally got through the Twilight trilogy and so the literary part of the brain is still a bit numb.

What I am getting at here, in circumbendibus fashion, is that with my general avoidance of Teutonic culture I also put off seeing world-cinema classic THE TIN DRUM until just now, with a Director's Cut re-release of Volker Schlondorf's 1979 multiple award-winner (Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, among others). Whether it does justice to the Grass novel I cannot fully say, but as sheer cinema it is an incredible achievement, a Goya-esque pageant of the horrors and absurdities of 20th-century German culture, especially the little thing called Nazism.

Mahler on the Couch (September 21st and 23rd at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[MAHLER ON THE COUCH screens Friday September 21st at 7:30 pm and Sunday September 23rd at 4 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr. 

Remember Tom Lehrer? He was the Harvard math professor who had a brief, brilliant career as a piano-playing musical satirist, quite edgy for his time, pressing a few immortal albums before retiring from the gag biz. He gave a fine excuse, that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, no joke Lehrer or anyone else could conceive could surpass what was going on in reality. Kind of like what I felt about the 2000 elections. Anyway, one of the tunes in the Tom Lehrer songbook was "Alma," a naughty little ditty about the wife of the great composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911); she seemed to have serial marriages/affairs with geniuses, one after the other, in different fields. If Alma lived in Hollywood today...bet she'd be celibate (rimshot).