For her second film, Katelynn completed her “life after death” theme. She started out with Vanilla Sky and completed it with the 2015 David Wnendt-directed German film “Er ist wieder da”, or Look Who’s Back (even if Google Translate tells me the literal translation is the more Poltergeistesque “He’s Baaaaaaack!”).
Of course, with Katelynn also being a vet student, she found the perfect short – one of the ubiquitous “Downfall” parodies – this one involving vet school:
And, of course, it’s even MORE appropriate because our feature film includes a short (and absolutely HILARIOUS) parody of Downfall itself. I almost choked myself laughing. But now, the film:
Still Life With Führer
I hate to say it, but as a born nitpicker, I’m not really sure that Hitler experienced life-after-death in the film. Technically, in the opening scenes we see Hitler emerge from a space-time anomaly 70 years after his supposed suicide in a bunker in 1945. Somehow, it would appear, the Nazi scientists figured out how to completely break the laws of physics to send Hitler to an uncertain future (which, clearly, would have been a better option than to let him die in the hands of the Allies in the present). Never mind that these same scientists who figured out time travel completely failed in the attempt to manufacture a nuclear weapon, but I suppose that we can suspend a bit of disbelief if what we really want to know is how Hitler would get along in modern society.
We violate human rights! It’s what we do! Duh!
Well, the answer to that, obviously, is that Hitler takes a bit of time to adjust to modern Germany. Of course, at first he doesn’t even understand that he’s been sent to the future, but once he comes to grips with the situation, he takes things in stride and starts taking steps towards being, let’s say, the Platonic ideal of Hitler, because that’s what he is.
Don’t you know, old chap, I was head of Gestapo for ten years. Five years! No, no, nein, I was not head of Gestapo at all…I make joke.
Through an amazing coincidence, Hitler “emerged” in the future in camera shot of a soon-to-be-fired freelance documentary filmmaker doing some boring not-career-saving doc on inner-city Berlin kids playing soccer or something. But once he’s fired, he has the bright idea of tracking down the weird Hitler-dressed guy that wandered through his shot and, well, they make some history.
It’s my spirit animal at the U.N.
Of course, there are some bumps along the way. For instance, during a cross-country tour with Hitler (reality TV at it’s best, let’s be honest) der Führer shoots a dog that is harassing him – on camera, no less. I guess he’s still a bit of a bad guy.
Who Wants To Lead The Third Reich?
Nonetheless, Hitler does eventually make his way onto TV, where the German audience, believing that he’s simply a man playing Hitler, falls head over heels for him and his calls for racial purity (which are not exactly taken seriously). To make a funny story short (because am I really going to recapitulate all the jokes in the film?) Hitler has a rise, and then a fall related to the leak of the film of him shooting the dog. But, persistent, he rises again, only to have the documentary filmmaker who “discovered” him realize from looking carefully at some of his shots that Hitler really did arise from a space-time anomaly – hence it’s really the REAL Hitler. But he is unbelieved and thrown into the loony bin while Hitler decides that the contemporary anti-immigrant stance in Germany is something he can work with. The end (or IS it?!?!)
Look Who’s Back is an entertaining film, but one that takes two approaches. The majority of the film is played for laughs, and it works pretty darn well. But at the same time, the film also goes for the current politics angle, which falls flat on a few counts for me. The first, and most obvious, is that in satirizing the current German political parties, I have to admit I’m a bit in the dark. And while the film is admittedly a combination of scripted scenes and “man-on-the-street” shots where the actor playing Hitler interacts with unwitting German civilians, there is a bit of difficulty in determining which is which. To be fair, there are a few scenes where the “black-barred eyes” is used, ostensibly to hide the identities of individuals who did not consent to appear in the film, but where I can hardly imagine that the main (un-barred) persons would actually consent to have their actions/words appear on the big screen – leading me to wonder if the entire scene was staged with actors and then “dressed up” to make it look like a “man-on-the-street” scene. Let’s just say that as a normally-skeptical person, I wonder if the political motivations of the filmmaker (I mean, seriously, who ISN’T anti-Hitler?!?) got a bit in the way from time to time. But – funny movie.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 