Word: ripploh
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...Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders have earned reputations as world-class film makers. These and other directors who restored German film to artistic prominence after 40 years in the Nazi and postwar wilderness are winning dates in U.S. art theaters traditionally receptive only to French movies. Since October, Frank Ripploh's Taxi zum Klo, a sweet-souled, hard-core slice of homosexual life made for $50,000, has tallied $500,000 in only four U.S. cities...
...Ripploh is not the only young German film maker to veer sharply from the baroquely stylized work of Fassbinder and Herzog. Four of the five new German films in the U.S. are rooted in headline reality. Christiane F. is based on interviews with a 15-year-old Berlin prostitute and heroin addict that appeared in the newsmagazine Stern. It is a tale to blanch the parental conscience, for here are children barely in their teens who whore, steal, shoot up and, too often, drop dead. Chic-pretty, lipsticked and long-haired, dressed in Annie Hall punk, negotiating puberty on stork...
TAXI ZUM KLO Directed and Written by Frank Ripploh...
Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the John) answers most of the objections to filmed sex precisely by seeing sex as one facet, however crucial, of its protagonist's life. This lightly fictionalized autobiography is Writer-Director-Star Frank Ripploh's first feature film, and it is as ostensibly artless as a home movie. In the film, Frank is a well-liked teacher in a Berlin secondary school, a fond son, an amateur film maker and an energetic participant in the city's homosexual night life. His lover Bernd (Bernd Broaderup, who took the same role in Frank...
...People say the film is porno," Ripploh notes, "but that's not the movie. It's 92 minutes long, and only three minutes and 20 seconds show direct body sex." Those 200 seconds will be enough to attract some people to Taxi and repel others, all for the wrong reasons. The right reasons are these: the film is witty, charming, rigorously unsentimental and fair to all its characters. Though none of the principals are professional actors, the performances are acute and convincing. The film, made in 16-mm for about $50,000, is handsomely photographed and edited with...
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