In the view of Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang, Hossein Amini‘s The Two Faces of January, based on a 1964 novel by Patricia Highsmith and screening at the Berlinale, is a letdown. “Something is lost in the translation,” leading to “little more than a competent disappointment, and a strangely old-fashioned one at that,” she writes. “The problems are script-deep, because as a director, Amini shows himself capable if uninspired, but here as screenwriter, he’d appear to be back on the same kind of form that led to the reverent but rather mechanical literary adaptations Jude and The Four Feathers.”

Right around the time I shot this iPhone video during yesterday afternoon’s Berlin-to-Prague train trip, Glenn Kenny was calling me “worthless” on Twitter for not dropping everything in order to see Alain Resnais‘ Life of Riley (a.k.a., Aimer, boire et chanter) at the Berlinale. Serious respect to a venerated master, but Resnais’s greatest period of vitality lasted for 20 years, or between Hiroshima, Mon Amour (’59) and Mon Oncle d’Amerique (’80). It’s great that he’s still creating at age 91 but I’ll see Life of Riley when I get around to it.

I’m getting some dental work done in Prague this week. I’m taking a 12:45 pm train there tomorrow and staying for five or six days. I don’t have dental insurance, rates are much cheaper in Prague than in the U.S., and I’ve been assured by Expats.cz editor Jason Pirodsky that the guy I’m going to does excellent work so it made sense all around as I was going to be in Berlin anyway and it’s not that costly to get to Prague and stay there, etc.

Taken this morning from the Audi Lounge next to the Berlinale Palast, about an hour before the noon Nymphomaniac screening. An Audi Lounge assistant gave me the wifi password but the connectivity wad down…naturally!

The poster for Michael Herbig’s Buddy, which opened here two months ago, reminds that puerile, lightweight formula comedies are popular the world over.

I was on my feet with my coat on as the press screening of Lars von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume 1 ended around 2:35 pm. I nudged and side-stepped my way out of the dark theatre and then scurried to the Hyatt press conference salon across the street in hopes of getting a seat. But the place was already packed to the rafters. Half of the seated journalists there probably hadn’t attended the screening. I’ll say it again — this is not the Berlinale but the Darwinale — a frenzied festival of ferrets and foxes with overcoats and blase expressions, panting and scrambling for tickets and access with God knows many thousands of smartphones fighting for “air” and all but eradicating each other (I couldn’t even get email after the screening). It’s a pigfuck, this festival. It makes Toronto feel like Telluride.

At this afternoon’s Nymphomaniac press conference, costars Shia LaBeouf (about ten minutes before he walked out) and Stacy Martin

LaBeouf attending tonight’s premiere.

Sunday’s Berlinale schedule involves three films, one press conference and 14 hours. First is a noon press screening of Lars Von Trier‘s Nymphomaniac, Volume One (the skankier 145-minute version). I don’t trust Berlinale organizers to handle the large crowd (not after suffering through that mob scene prior to Wes Anderson‘s film last Thursday) so I’ll be there at 11 am if not before. The comes a Nymphomaniac press conference at 2:45 pm. I’m planning to write between 4 pm and 7 pm (as I’m definitely not interested Pascal Chaumeil‘s A Long Way Down at 6:30 pm) before catching Hossein Amini‘s The Two Faces of January, an adaptation of a 1964 Patricia Highsmith novel, at 8 pm. The final screening will be Benjamin Naishtat‘s History of Fear at 10:30 pm. (It’s now 11:40 pm on Saturday.)

Here I am at the 2014 Berlinale, all robust and credentialed and ready to go on a Saturday (i.e., the third day of the festival), and I’m not seeing a single film on the public or press schedule that (a) I want to attend or (b) that I’m able to attend due to not having a ticket. If you want to catch a public screening you have to request a ticket the day before, and that means an early wake-up and showing up at Berlinale press headquarters between 8 am and 9 am and getting in line and hoping for the best. If you go there much after 9 am the tickets start to dry up. In other words if you’re a credentialed press person you need to participate in a daily Darwinian struggle to see the films you want to see. I would love to see all the goodies and perhaps a surprise or two but why all the grief? Cannes and Sundance are far more hospitable environments. I’m not sure I’ll want to attend the Berlinale again. Too few screening opportunities, too much work, too many lines. I’m moving out of the Grand Wyndham today and into my Airbnb apartment in Charlottenburg, but my screening options are pretty much zilch.

I caught a 3:30 pm screening today of Yann Demange‘s ’71, a Belfast-set action melodrama set during “the troubles” of that titular annum. It’s a gripping, fast-paced thriller about a young and inexperienced British soldier named Gary (Jack O’Connell) who gets separated from his unit during a violent confrontation with an angry Catholic mob, and before you know it he’s more or less James Mason in Odd Man Out — a marked man behind enemy lines, weak and bleeding and trying like hell not to get plugged by IRA assassins, and forced to depend on the unlikely kindness of strangers.

But Gary’s odyssey isn’t just about hiding out and dodging capture with the help of this and that Good Samaritan (including a spirited young boy and a kindly Catholic doctor and his wife who risk brutal reprisals from the IRA by saving his life). There’s also a double-agent/undercover game going on that pushes tensions to the brink.

The emphasis here is on menace and fear and thrills and adrenaline. It’s not trying for the dreamy, melancholy fatalism of Carol Reed’s 1947 classic. There’s no pulsing undercurrent except for similarities and associations with other films about the “troubles.” But ’71 delivers exceptional verisimilitude and throttling realism. In some ways reminiscent of Paul Greengrass‘s Bloody Sunday, this is a jolt-cola movie.

Obviously you could call ’71 an anti-war drama but what honest film about violent conflict could possibly be pro-war? Obviously a film that shows humane acts being punished and innocent people getting blown up or shot down is delivering a form of tragedy and inviting contemplation about the brutality of armed conflict in a civilian area.

I don’t know Demange but he definitely knows how to handle this kind of material. Gregory Burke‘s pared-down screenplay deserves a tip of the hat. And cheers to every one of O’Connell’s costars — Sean Harris, Paul Anderson, Sam Reid, Sam Hazeldine, Charlie Murphy and Richard Dormer are the stand-outs.

I wish I wasn’t fighting jet-lag fatigue all through ’71 — I’d like to see it again tomorrow but it’s too hot of a ticket. Perhaps in Cannes.

I couldn’t be in a better mood. I napped for about 90 minutes on the British Airways flight from Heathrow. I ran into David Poland (whose luggage was AWOL) and Thelma Adams at Berlin’s Tegel Airport. A nice easy drive into the city. Now I’m all checked in and unpacked at Berlin’s Wyndham Grand Hotel. A pair of Fox Searchlight publicists met me in the lobby and gave me my Berlinale press pass. The room is small (not quite as roomy as a Motel 6 suite in Billings) but nice. The high-def TV works really well, the hotel concierge has lent me two power adaptors (the one I bought at Heathrow doesn’t work for a three-prong) and the hotel wifi is double-lightning fast…to die for! Now I’m off for a 90-minute walk. A Fox Searchlight press reception is happening at 7:45 pm.

I’ll be doing the Berlinale for five days (Wednesday through Monday morning), mostly to cover the premiere of Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel but also to hit the festival on my own dime. All Virgin America flights have decent (if costly) wifi so I’ll be in good shape for my 10:30 am JFK-bound flight out of LAX. It arrives at 7 pm Eastern, or roughly two hours before the 9:30 pm British Airways flight to London. American Airlines is offering trans-Atlantic wifi these days but British Airways, alas, doesn’t so I’m looking at seven hours of ennui, isolation and darkness. The flight arrives at London/Heathrow at 9:30 am Wednesday (1:30 am Pacific). The two-hour flight to Berlin leaves around noon and arrives at 3:30 pm (6:30 am Pacific).

Starting this afternoon and for the subsequent five days I’ll be based at the Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.30 thru 2.9). But I’ll only be covering about 40% of Roger Durling‘s Oscar-angled shindig due to an overlap with the Berlin Film Festival, which I’ll be attending for the first time, largely due to an invitation from Fox Searchlight to cover the world premiere of Wes Anderson‘s Grand Budapest Hotel (which opens stateside on 3.7). The price is that I’ll be missing most of the good Santa Barbara tributes — Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Bruce Dern, the Before trilogy guys (Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy). But I’ll catch Mission Blue, the SBIFF’s opening night film, and the David O. Russell and Cate Blanchett tributes and the Producers and Womens’ panels on Saturday.