DVD recommendation and then some

It's called Berlin Alexanderplatz and it is one of the great movies of all time, and one you haven't seen. Reason? The fucking thing is actually a TV series from Germany and it's (shudder) fifteen fucking hours long. However it's now restored and on DVD and you can buy the set for cheap ($90) on the Amazon used list. The director/writer/producer (forty, count them 40, movies before his death at thirty four) is the justly famous Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a real honest to God genius who couldn't possibly live with his gigantic talent and his twisted personal life (link is to a review of him and all his movies). There are some video stores that have it in VHS also and you can rent it by the single episode piece just to see if you love it enough to actually shell out the dinero. I rented it in LA at Rocket Video on LaBrea many years back. You gotta see some episodes because a talent like Fassbinder only comes along once in a generation, and looking at this "movie" you can see why German Cinema might have beaten out Hollywood as the "Film Capitol of the World" had Hitler not shown up; and by the way, this movie is about what Hitler showing up meant to the guy on the street who never is in control of his life. An absolutely terrific experience and clearly one of the great movies of all time. As an aside here, Fassbinder always wrote about real stuff, real deep stuff, but this true "artist" always told a story, like in story; meaning that priority one in all his movies was to tell a tale. He was also a guy who made movies, like four per year. Fassbinder was able to complete pictures with astonishing rapidity, and to come in under budget. All that and real stories too. Quite a guy.

BTW the link to Rocket Video is to a site under construction. Rocket Video will do as a movie museum until there is a real library somewhere. The largest inventory I know about, kept current because someone over there takes all the old stuff home and tapes it for the store. You will find that the store is basically a labor of love should you ever get over there. They have TV shows and series you flat cannot find, including the Brit TV sensation called Smiley's People from the John LeCarre's novel of the same name. However this is now available in most places on CD. A really really good movie with an actual story believe it or not. And while all of LeCarre's novels were about betrayal (both by governments and corporations) never, as in fucking never, does that word even appear in his work. An artist writes about what is important to him and uses a story to get his views out.