Word: germanic
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Among Hollywood's money men, German film producer Bernd Eichinger is known as the guy who signs the checks for big budget crowd-pleasers like Resident Evil and The Fantastic Four. In Germany, he's better known for his reputation as a maverick, a troublemaker known for partying and the occasional barroom brawl. A tall rail of a man with graying hair and a raspy smoker's voice, Eichinger stunned moviegoers everywhere with Downfall, the 2004 Oscar nominee that focused in shocking detail on the final days of Hitler and his cohorts in the tight quarters...
...Told in a staccato beat of bombings, shootings and car chases, it's the story of a time when the young West German democracy, some 30 years after the death of Hitler, was shaken to its core. It was a high drama game of cat and mouse: The terrorists would act and the state would react with laws that many Germans felt curbed civil liberties, helping lift the Baader-Meinhof members to mythical status. It's a uniquely German story, but in the age of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, many of the themes also resonate with American audiences...
...This obsessive research is all part of Eichinger's technique: to fill in the blanks of events that have entered Germany's collective consciousness, but that few people have witnessed up close. Baader Meinhof is laced with exact replicas of iconic photographs that appeared in German newspapers at the time. But these are the after-the-fact images of dead bodies and devastated buildings. Eichinger provides the missing frames, reconstructing the violence leading up to those images to expose its brutality...
...problem with the Little Ice Age Theory," he says, "is that the same wood was available to French, German and other violin makers in Europe, but only instruments made in Cremona were any good. I believe that's because of the special, preservative varnish used there...
...Chávez is attempting to delay the painful but inevitable hard choices in the sphere of Venezuelan political economy until after the referendum. Much like the German parliamentary elections of 1933, this referendum is a high-stakes gamble for absolute political hegemony. With his grip on state power, it would be very hard to remove him democratically once indefinite re-election is constitutionally allowed. So nothing less than Venezuela’s democratic institutions are on the line. But, if Venezuelans manage to reject Chavez’s delusions of autocracy once more, there will most likely...