CS Film Club II

Last Round:

Balloon (2018)
Hollywood has a pretty long tradition of remaking foreign films but recently there’s been something of a trend of foreign filmmakers making “remakes” of Hollywood films, or perhaps more accurately making more authentic adaptations of local stories that had previously been made by Hollywood during an era where they were the only ones with the funds to make such projects. The recent German All Quiet on the Western Front is a good example of this, as is Society of the Snow but one movie that was perhaps ahead of the trend was the 2018 German film Balloon, which was the second film adaptation of the Strelzyk and Wetzel families’ escape from East Germany via homemade hot air balloon in 1979. That story had previously been brought to film by none other than Disney in the 1982 film Night Crossing. I haven’t seen that film but I can see why Disney would be interested in the film: it presents an “inspiring” story of escaping from evil communists and posits this escape as something of a project for the whole family. This recent German version is presumably more culturally accurate but I wouldn’t call this a particularly hard hitting or artistic adaptation itself: I can definitely still kind of see the DNA of an uplifting Disney movie under its surface… but maybe that just kind of what this story invites. The movie does rather notably not put too much effort into explaining why these people are unhappy in East Germany beyond the fact that it seems like quite the police state, I can definitely see an American movie in 1982 feeling more of a responsibility there. The more recent movie this reminds me of is actually Argo, which is another “escape from a hostile country” movie that probably amps up the suspense in the finale a bit more than what happened in real life. This one isn’t about a clever agent helping them though; it’s just them acting on their own accord to make it over the border and the process of seeing them do that is interesting to be sure.
*** out of Five

This Round:

I hadn’t seen Valley of the Dolls before now but I had seen its pseudo-sequel/spoof Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. I don’t think the two movies really have that much to do with each other but while watching the original movie I could kind of see why Russ Meyer would have been inspired to make it. I can just see him watching the movie and thinking “this has all the makings of an exploitation movie but they never actually show anybody’s tits… what’s up with that?” Of course what’s up with that is that this was actually a huge studio movie that has a lot of money put behind it despite its source material being this lurid book that was viewed as being trash and normally wouldn’t dream of having an adaptation this expensive if not for the fact that it sold a gazillion copies. In that sense this was the 50 Shades of Gray of its time, but that comparison maybe sells it a bit short as the basic filmmaking here isn’t half bad. The main performances here are decent and there’s certainly a charge to seeing Sharon Tate on screen, but some of the side characters aren’t great and its depiction of addiction does not seem terribly authentic. The bigger problem here is just a bland problem with story structure, it’s about three not very related stories that don’t really blend together that great. I wouldn’t call this movie “good” but I’m glad I saw it just the same, it’s an interesting relic of a strange cultural phenomenon that’s worth knowing about.
**1/2 out of Five