FIRST MAN
Watchable. Hardly exciting. A big part comprises of everyday family life and job training. Even when you see the other pilots' deaths it's more of a curiosity that Neil Armstrong got his chances on the back of dead men. There's a fleeting moment of emotion when Neil has to tell his sons he might never be back and of gravitas (pun intended) on the Moon. Nice classical music. Light humour, e.g. about flight controllers who turned all blue and could finally get some oxygen after he succeeded in putting the spacecraft down. But mostly it's dull, just the daily grind of engineering a space flight. Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong looks perfectly resilient to the stress of being an astronaut. The 60s are obviously recreated through costumes and scenography.
WARSAW JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL
PUYA - IM KREIS DER ZEIT (PUYA: IN THE CIRCLE OF TIME)
Watchable. A caged tiger, a suicidal patient, an ailing man reflect the protagonist's entrapment and subdepression. The plot combines three different waves of refugees to present an age-old problem. The director wanted to show the victims of war can be of all nations. Very personal and touching but not intimate enough, shown through wide plans rather. No beginning and no ending.
THE OSLO DIARIES
Recommended. It clarifies the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a layman. But it also showcases how a purely political fight ruined the peace process. The fact remains there are only two options: peace or perpetual war. Since the collapse of the peace process 16 000 people have lost their lives on both sides.
GRZESIUK. FERAJNA WCIAZ GRA
Watchable. A pleasant film with contemporary covers of Grzesiuk's songs and with commentaries by himself (from radio recordings in the 1960s), by people who knew him and by young fans who never had the chance to meet him. Still they have noticed his joie de vivre maintained in spite of having spent 5 years in a concentration camp and suffering from tuberculosis afterwards. At first the lyrics struck me as glorifying violence and theft but once you get to understand how tongue-in-cheek they are you start appreciating the tunes. As for the documentary, I'd rather see less of his fans and would love to hear quotes from his books, especially that, as we hear, he wrote exactly the same way he talked.
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