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American gun love has long preoccupied and puzzled foreigners. So it's appropriate that an all-fired-up allegory on the subject, Dear Wendy, should come from perennial bad boy Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier (Breaking the Waves), who wrote the film, and his protégé Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), who directed. Set in a nameless U.S. town, the movie is framed as a letter written by a pensive idealist named Dick (Jamie Bell) to the love of his life--a handgun. Dick, who abhors violence but is fascinated by the workings and personalities of firearms, has gathered...
...Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him. In his upended western plot, these nice kids are inventing villains, reacting to outside threats that don't exist. By the end, the political implications are clear: the U.S. sees itself as the lonesome marshal--Gary Cooper in High Noon--when in fact it possesses the world's biggest arsenal and is making more trouble than it's preventing. Or not. But you needn't agree with...
...Rochefort, was so plagued by calamities that the only productive thing to come out of it was the disaster-movie documentary Lost in La Mancha. So many other projects have stalled that, at 64, Gilliam has joined the ranks of such hard-luck masters as Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim. He's as famous for the movies he hasn't finished as for the ones...
...July, public television network ARD sacked two of its top sports editors who, prosecutors say, had taken fees from organizers of minor sporting events in exchange for coverage. Despite these high-profile cases, corruption watchdogs say Germany is still pretty clean. "Corruption hasn't become more frequent," says Ludolf von Wartenberg, director general of the Federation of German Industries in Berlin. "It's just that the cases have become more spectacular." Indeed, studies indicate that Germany's corporate sector, together with its public authorities and political institutions, is actually becoming less dodgy. The latest corruption index published by Transparency International...
...dedicated to Ingrid, Bergman?s fifth wife, who died in 1995; she likely inspired the film's much-mourned Anna. Bergman's relationships with his children, especially his sons, were often stormy. One child he did feel close to, as Johan does to Karin in the film, was Maria von Rosen, Ingrid's daughter by a previous marriage. Last year Bergman revealed that Maria was his own daughter, and published Three Diaries, which described Ingrid's last days from her own, her husband's and her daughter?s journals...