Watch this trailer for Uli Edel‘s The Baader Meinhof Complex and tell me it doesn’t look like an exciting, tough, complex “ride” movie, and not just some dense political drama. Based on the book by Stefan Aust, it’s about the infamous German terrorist group behind all kinds of bombings, killings, robberies and kidnappings in the late ’60s and ’70s.

Martina Gedeck in Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex

The word on the film has been iffy ever since Constantin Films and its German p.r. agency, Just Publicity, tried to threaten German and other European critics with heavy fines if they reviewed or even spoke about The Baader Meinhof Complex prior to an embargo date of 9.17.08 (for the film’s 9.25 German and Austrian openings).
And yet I’ve been told by a buyer-distributor whom I know and trust that Edel’s film is better than pretty good.
And the top-notch all-German cast, he says, is totally killer — Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz, Simon Licht, Jan Josef Liefers, Alexandra Maria Lara, etc. And yet The Baader Meinhoff Complex didn’t show at the Toronto Film Festival, and the Telluride Film Festival’s Tom Luddy wasn’t even shown it for possible consideration.
And although It’s opening in Europe this fall, starting in Germany and Austria ten days from now, Baader Meinhof has no U.S. distributor and the people at Summit Entertainment, who are said to be handling int’l (and, for the time being, domestic) sales for Constantin Films, which produced the film, haven’t returned calls all day. I spoke to Summit’s corporate spokesperson Paul Pflug, but that didn’t go too far because he’s not in the loop.

The trusted buyer, a “name” guy who saw Baader Meinhof last spring before Cannes, said “it’s amazing….a really good movie with crazy details that I didn’t know about. A huge expensive action movie with a great cast [so good that] you want to hire all of them. But because it’s in German and because of the tough lefty politics of it…and maybe because Americans won’t understand the context or because they may be turned off by the politics and the exotic ’60s climate, the buyers are skittish.
The Baader-Meinhof gang “had public support and manipulated the German government from their jail cells…they were vicious. There’s a great scene when they go to train with the early-on Middle Eastern terrorists, except the Baader Meinhof gang is very much into the ’60s commune ideals and so there’s a culture and values clash.”
All I know is that I would have made a point to see this film at Toronto, and it wasn’t even there. I would love to see it right now and write about it and maybe nudge the buzz along, but the Summit people won’t pick up the phone. Constantin’s Bernd Eichinger is said to be concerned and perplexed that he can’t sell The Baader Meinhof Complex to a U.S. distributor, but nobody stateside seems to be doing very much about it. Or at least, not so you’d notice.
Are they (Constatin plus whomever would like to distribute) planning a Sundance opening and an early ’09 opening? One can only guess.

Update: A letter from Richard Huffman, webmaster of a first-rate Baader-Meinhof site, came after I published earlier today.
“I wanted to follow up with you on your story about the Baader-Meinhof movie,” he began.I “n addition to being a major Jeff Wells fan, I happen to have the odd distinction of being one of the world’s leading experts on the group (you can visit my site at www.baader-meinhof.com). I am personally interested in seeing this film because West German terrorists targeted my dad when he was serving at the head of the US Army’s Berlin Bomb Disposal unit while the Baader-Meinhof Gang was active.
“Anyway, I can tell you that the story of this group is stunning and as cinematic as one could possibly imagine. One of Germany’s leading journalists decides to leave her kids and and life to become a terrorist. A group dedicated to violent revolution that actually had the support of up to 20 percent of the German youth, and which brought about a horrible bombing campaign that maimed and killed dozens of Americans and Germans.
“As someone who has studied this era in amazing detail; watching clips from this movie sends absolute chills down my spine. it’s like looking through a time machine.
“If you go to my homepage you’ll see a brief clip from a history channel documentary that myself and Baader-Meinhof Komplex author Stefan Aust appear in from last year about the group.”

20 years, six months and 15 days ago, Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice opened. Great ending, more than a few great scenes, classic absurdist film. And with primitive special effects! Tim Burton was hip and happening and relatively fresh meat. Michael Keaton had been down but was now back up again in the cool role of his lifetime. And Alec Baldwin was thin and puppydog cute.

17 year-old Winona Ryder was just breaking through. Geena Davis was enjoying her last career surge (Earth Girls Are Easy and The Accidental Tourist were soon to follow). And it seemed as if Michael Dukakis might be the guy to beat George H.W. Bush.

This 23/6 “speed campaigning” piece isn’t bad either — “all your negative ads in 5 seconds.”

And by the way, the lack of interest in (i.e., response to) this John McCain voicemail message is mind-blowing. It’s one of the funnniest bits I’ve heard in weeks.

Amazon is accepting advance orders for the DVD of David Zucker‘s An American Carol (Vivendi, 10.3), which will hit the shelves on January 6, 2009. 83 minutes long, by the way, and presented in a Scope aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1.

For the sheer pleasure and relaxation of it, I paid $14 bills last night to see Burn After Reading at the Arclight. The 7:20 pm show, with a lot of wallah-wallah and hub-bub-bub-bah-bub following the showing of the new W trailer. (Which isn’t online yet.)
And an hour or so later, right in the middle of the first delicious J.K. Simmons scene, a two year-old girl sitting in her dad’s lap two seats to my left began talking and whining and squirming around. Kept it up, no ignoring it. 20 seconds later I leaned over and said, “Do you mind? Please?” The dad, a guy in his late 30s or early 40s, gave me a look that kinda said, “Hey, okay. But she’s my daughter and she’s got stuff on her mind!” But the little girl didn’t say another word after I spoke up.
Most kids will obey a voice of fair but firm authority. The problem is the parents. What kind of parent brings his/her two year-old to a talky misanthropic Coen Bros. movie that’s full of jaded anger and intimations of sexuality and in which people get killed on-screen? And what kind of parent doesn’t take his/her kid out to the lobby when the kid starts acting up?
There’s a brief scene in Burn After Reading in which Frances McDormand and one of her blind dates — a doltish, inexpressive guy in his late 40s — are eating dinner at a restaurant, and he’s not talking with her or looking at her or acting in any way like a gent. He’s just eating his food and staring intently at it, as if he’s reading or counting money. This is how coarse and insensitive types eat, the Coens are reminding us. Boy, do I know it.
When I go out to dinner and see guys staring intently at their food while ignoring women sitting across from them, I become seriously perturbed. Because this is how animals eat. Horses, cats, wolves, cows, goats. Whereas a gentleman looks up at his dinner partner frequently — constantly — during dinner. Before, during and after bites of food. He makes eye contact; he offers thoughts, remarks, pithy observations; he expresses interest in what his dinner partner has to say even if she’s boring.

A major character in a significant 1990s film twice quotes — i.e., says out loud — the following John Milton line from Paradise Lost: “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to the light.” And the film is…?

Wall Street is allegedly melting as we speak. Barack Obama has called it “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.” And yet an MSNBC analyst said this morning that one Wall Street analyst feels that this morning’s 200-point Dow drop is a kind of “victory,” considering what might have happened.
As this morning’s N.Y. Times story reports, “Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank, is in liquidation; Merrill Lynch, the premier brokerage, has been subsumed into rival Bank of America. One of the world’s largest insurance companies, American International Group, is in a dash to shore up confidence after its stock price dropped 50 percent just after the open.”
“Senior Treasury officials, Wall Street banking bosses and the Federal Reserve are pulling out all stops to avert a collapse of the global banking system,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported last night.”
“A measure of this desperation is the announcement from the Fed issued a short time ago that it will allow Wall Street banks to swap their unsaleable ‘mortgage backed securities’ for Treasury bonds.
“As it was the Fed’s appeasement of Wall Street and the reckless speculation and product-pumping of the Street’s investment banks which landed markets in this predicament in the first place, the recriminations will be endless.”
N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that “to understand the problem, you need to know that the old world of banking, in which institutions housed in big marble buildings accepted deposits and lent the money out to long-term clients, has largely vanished, replaced by what is widely called the ‘shadow banking system.’
“Depository banks, the guys in the marble buildings, now play only a minor role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers; most of the business of finance is carried out through complex deals arranged by ‘nondepository’ institutions, institutions like the late lamented Bear Stearns — and Lehman.
“The new system was supposed to do a better job of spreading and reducing risk. But in the aftermath of the housing bust and the resulting mortgage crisis, it seems apparent that risk wasn’t so much reduced as hidden: all too many investors had no idea how exposed they were.”
Obama’s analysis: “The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store. Eight years of policies…have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans.”
McCain’s analysis: The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
MSNBC’s “First Read” guys wrote this morning that “one can clearly see that Obama would be an interventionist on the economy — much more so than McCain. This is going to be a tricky issue for McCain, since most folks want government involved when there is a crisis; they don’t want government involved when things are going well. McCain’s going up with a new TV ad on the economy, acknowledging the crisis. But this is one that may be harder for him to distance from than other issues.”

HD trailer for John Patrick Shanley‘s Doubt (Miramax, 12.12), with Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in the lead roles. The culture has been making pederast Catholic priest jokes for so long that generating curiosity about who the bad guy is in this film, what he’s probably done and what will (most likely) happen in the end seems like a challenge. So it will all come down to the the craft of it, including, of course, the potential for at least two great performances.

One question: why in the name of God (and that expression obviously has a literal meaning in this context) would old-crow nuns in any parish or sector of the country wear those laughable Pilgrim-women bonnets? The 19th Century anachronism effect is bizarre. They look like Norweigan immigrant women escaping from “Giants of the Earth.”