Avantasia: Angel of Babylon (2010)

Avantasia is a rock opera super-group concept by heavy metal musician Tobias Sammett. It is a pretty simple concept: every few years he assembles a group of musicians from other European metal bands and gets them to perform a bunch of songs. The completed albums usually follow themes or narratives of one kind or another, but they also work as pretty great straight-up power metal CDs as well.

Angel of Babylon was released back in 2010 and was the third volume in a loose trilogy of releases. It was released side-by-side with The Wicked Symphony. Here Sammett used a core band including Sascha Paeth, Eric Singer (KISS) and Michael Rodenberg (aka Miro), and a group of musical guests including Jens Johansson (Stratovarius), Felix Bohnke (Edguy), Bruce Kulick (KISS, Grand Funk Railroad), Henjo Richter (Gamma Ray), and Jørn Lande (Masterplan).

Nostalgia Time 15 January 2015: Floating Clouds, Benny Hill, The Golem

Welcome to Nostalgia Time, a deliberately excessive observation of pop culture anniversaries. Today sees three anniversaries you might want to observe and share.

First up, today is the 60th anniversary of Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds. It's probably the director's most widely acclaimed film; in 1995 a survey of Japanese film critics saw it named the third-best Japanese film of all time. It follows two lovers reunited after an affair in French Indochina, now unable to continue their romance because one of them is married. It's beautifully paced and shot, and stands up wonderfully well today. A lot of people experience classic Japanese film by watching Kurosawa, Ozu or Mizoguchi, but if you haven't seen any Naruse you're missing a trick.

Pompeii (2014)

Pompeii, from writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil, Event Horizon) is the sort of well-intended, amiable B-movie where criticising it too harshly would feel like kicking a puppy. It does what it does, it means well, and it doesn't actively trip over itself in the attempt. Is it historically accurate? Not really. Is it scientifically accurate? Well, no, but if it was then it would have made for one fabulously abrupt climax. It is what it is: a competently directed and immensely derivative riff on Ridley Scott's Gladiator using cheaper actors, significantly less pretense and a bucket-load of naive enthusiasm. Despite looking like a mid-budget Hollywood blockbuster it's actually a German-Canadian co-production. I'm not sure what that demonstrates: that everyone can make generic and dumb disaster movies?

Celtic slave Milo (Kit Harington from Game of Thrones) is transported from Londinium to Pompeii to be a gladiator in that growing city's games. He meets and falls in love with  Cassia (Emily Browning from Suckerpunch), the daughter of the city's ruler (a slumming Jared Harris) who is also the romantic target of the cruel Roman senator Corvus (Keifer Sutherland, also slumming it). As this romantic triangle threatens to reach a climax the nearby volcano Vesuvius erupts, putting everyone in danger.

In the Dust of the Stars (1976)

Let’s talk about In the Dust of the Stars, aka Im Staub der Sterne. It was produced in 1976, it’s many things: it’s odd, it’s camp, it’s hilariously dressed in vinyl and pleather. It has an unusual interpretive dance sequence. It’s in German, and it’s communist propaganda. The film was produced by DEFA, a state-owned production studio in East Germany, and a little knowledge about DEFA will go a long way to explaining the sort of environment in which In the Dust of the Stars was made.

DEFA (Deutshce Film AG) was a production company licensed by the Soviet Allies in May 1946. As part of East Germany’s new system of government, DEFA was a wholly government-owned production company, charged with producing feature films, television programs, documentaries and animation. It was initially part-owned by East Germany and partly by the Soviet Union, but in 1953 the USSR handed over its stake allowing it to be a 100% German endeavour.

At its height the company was producing about 15 feature films, 100 short and documentary films and about 55 animated shorts and television cartoons. The company’s films accounted for about 12% of all films screened in East Germany between 1946 and 1990. It was the largest East German film company, and by the mid-1960s the country’s largest distributor as well – both domestically and overseas.

Emil and the Detectives (1931)

Here's an odd change of pace: I've been watching a lot of independent American horror movies of late, so it was quite a break to watch a 1931 German childrens film instead. A German boy named Emil Tischbein gets onto a train for Berlin with 140 marks in his pocket to give to his aunt. By the time he arrives, the 140 marks in missing - stolen by a creepy man in a bowler hat - and Emil must team up with a gang of Berliner child detectives to recover the money. It's all wonderfully cheerful fun, based on the 1929 novel by Erich Kästner. This is the first adaptation of the novel, but there have been at least five others since, including a 1935 English remake and a Walt Disney version in 1964.

Of the six films, this is the one with the greatest cultural cache. Its screenplay was written by Billy Wilder, later to become arguably the greatest-ever writer and director of American film comedy. That screenplay was then rewritten by Emeric Pressburger, who would subsequently move to England and write and produce a string of legendary films including The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus. It even received uncredited assistance from Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis, et al).

Of course looking into what the makers of Emil and the Detectives did next is a fairly depressing exercise. Within a decade its author had been banned from German bookstores, its Jewish screenwriters had fled the country, and much of the talented cast of youngsters had been killed in action in World War II.