Those who didn’t see Uli Edel‘s The Baader Meinhof Complex during its brief, almost non-existent U.S. theatrical run need to rent or buy the DVD/Bluray on 3.30 (i.e., next Tuesday).
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It doesn’t deliver what you’d call a “pleasant” sit, but it’s about as intense and feisty as a political film like this could or should get, and every so often it plays like a good gangster/bank-robber film.
I wrote the following after catching it about 20 months ago:
“What can you say about a tough-minded, hard-nosed political drama that tells the truth, doesn’t mince words or pull punches, rekindles the viral excitement of a bygone era, offers several gripping performances and leaves you with a taste of ashes in your soul?
“This is the reality of The Baader Meinhof Complex — Uli Edel’s 149-minute drama about the famed German radical leftist group. It’s a strong but bleak account of the impassioned but self-destructive insanity that took hold among radical lefties in the late ’60s and ’70s, and which manifested with a particular ferocity and flamboyance among the Baader-Meinhoffers.
“Edel’s chops are fine, the story is the story, what happened is what happened, but my God…what do you do with a history of this sort? And where in this saga is a semblance of a common cultural current? It’s not as if a willingness to kill or be killed for one’s political beliefs is something that comes up these days on Sunday mornings at Starbucks after you’ve had your morning run.
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“Maybe more of us should think and act in terms of life-or-death commitments. Maybe we’d be better off if more of us had the cojones to stand up and fight evil in a way that gives no quarter. But the film mainly sinks in as a revisiting of a time in which a small but dead-serious sector of the left-liberal community temporarily lost its bearings and in some cases jumped off a cliff in order to stop what they saw as a form of absolute establishment evil.”
Say it one last time: this sucker should have been called The Baader Meinhof Gang. You always need to think in popcorn terms when deciding on a title, and popcorn munchers don’t know from complexes. This is basically a high-voltage shoot ’em up about a political-minded Barrow gang that ends in death, jail and suicide.”
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