IS “WINGS OF DESIRE” A BAD MOVIE?: A letter of dissent from Geistbear. He’s in bold, I’m in plain text, you know the drill… Okay so you didn’t like “Wings of Desire”, I don’t agree, simple difference of opinion, but then you say “Does the world really need another movie about preferring the evanescent and temporal to the eternal? Are we really beset by a passion for eternity that denigrates mere fleshly life?” I kinda more got that impression from Nick Cage/Meg Ryan remake of it that the original.

Haven’t seen remake, so I think my perceptions of the Wenders flick were relatively uncolored by expectations of what I thought it was “supposed to” be about.

Besides, it so speaks of the Wall and German mindset about Berlin at the time in a lot of ways that were a lot more concrete at the time. 12 years after the Wall is gone, if you don’t know the history and social environment maybe it comes off as “incredibly pretentious art flick”. But I think it really reflects the Germans and their lives at the end of the Cold War.

Yeah, I’m sure I missed any German cultural references, and perhaps that explains at least some of my dislike of the movie.

…As for Murnau, you didn’t like that film [“The Last Laugh”], but he deserves a lot of credit: He basically invented the horror film as a style.

Oh, yeah, in general I’ll give mad props to Murnau, and in fact that’s why I was so disappointed in “The Last Laugh.”