Determined to make up for my rather feeble start to the Berlinale, I made it to five films on Sunday – and in a shock twist that defied the law of both averages and film festivals, I liked all of them to some extent, and two of them rather more than that. How appropriate that I get to put my poison pen away on Valentine’s Day of all days.
I’ll get to writing about “The Guard” (a scuzzily hilarious Irish cop comedy from John Michael McDonagh, brother of Martin) and Competition entry “Sleeping Sickness” (by some measure the best thing I’ve seen, or am likely to see, here) in a later roundup. The other three, however, demand to be grouped in a single post, just as Berlin programmers were making a point by scheduling them back-to-back: all of them were specialist niche films in 3D, marking the moment at which the technology formally stepped outside the multiplex and into the arthouse.
When Werner Herzog announced his intention to make his latest documentary in 3D, the howls of anguish from stern cinephiles could only have increased in volume if he’d added that it was actually going to be a Miley Cyrus concert movie. When his compatriot and contemporary Wim Wenders revealed similar plans for his non-narrative tribute to the late choreographer Pina Bausch, there were fewer protests, if only because after his last few features, nobody’s been paying much attention to anything Wenders does these days.