Word: angellic
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...Bring back the old stars and add a big new one. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander are back as Damiel and Cassiel, the angels come to Earth. Peter Falk returns as an ex-angel, and Solveig Dommartin as the trapeze artist who'll meet any heavenly body halfway. But here's a casting coup: Mikhail Gorbachev as himself. He sits at a desk, pondering the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. "I'm sure that a secure world can't be built on blood, only on harmony," opines the former Soviet leader, now available for smaller roles...
...elaborate on the original film's story; instead, remake it. Rocky < always fought a guy; Indiana Jones saved yet another buried treasure; the Lethal Weapon lads kept blowing stuff up. Here Cassiel, the second angel, follows Damiel's lead and becomes human, a brand-new Candide. But Wenders actually has a new idea, courtesy of recent history. In Wings of Desire, two angels hovered over divided Berlin, invisibly consoling its citizens. In the sequel, written by Wenders, Ulrich Zieger and Richard Reitinger, angels patrol a Berlin that is politically united but even more fractious -- a city of gangsters...
What is the same in both Wenders films is the notion of angels as bestowers of grace on a secular landscape. Wenders' view is traditional and strangely powerful. He sees angels as invisible consolers, gentle kibitzers in the monologues that run endlessly through our mind. They are the eternal observers, God's night watchmen, holy voyeurs. Wenders would probably say they are moviegoers, eavesdropping for a few privileged hours on a world more perilous and beautiful than our own. In a lovely scene, Cassiel comforts an old chauffeur (Heinz Ruhmann, a German movie star since 1926) with memories...
...Cover: Angel by Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1889, from the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C./Art Resource...
Sympathy for the Devil: Lest it be forgotten, Satan was once an angel, the most exalted...