The Magic of Movies

Best fucking review of 2010 (s0 far) by Robert Edwin Haines in the Amoeba 'zine Spring/Summer 2010:

Wings of Desire (Criterion Collection Blu-ray)

"When I was 16 years old. I went to the only (at that time) art house theater in San Jose called the Camera One to see a film called Wings of Desire. I had seen a previous film by the same director called Paris, Texas on VHS, which I only checked out because I had a massive crush on Nastassja Kinski, but I ended up finding the film heartbreakingly sad and beautiful. I was just starting to make the connection that directors and not actors were the real driving force behind films and even though I had heard that this film was in German with English subtitles and I knew no one wanted to go see it with me, I decided to feign illness, cut school and take the bus from my shitty duplex neighborhood to downtown by myself to check it out. A little over two hours later, I was crying like a newborn fucking baby at how impossibly strange, beautiful, and spiritual this work of art was/is (and I'm about as atheistic a degenerate as you are gonna find). Assholes throw around terms like "life changing" and "magical" at mediocre creations all the time. Seeing this film made me a different person, a kinder person, a more thoughtful person, a more patient person and--most importantly--a less angry person. It made me feel like after a lifetime of being alone that there were people in the world who understood, who didn't scoff at beauty, who didn't look at the world with blinkers on, who weren't afraid to listen. This re-issue Blu-ray has a bunch of cool extra documentaries and ephemera, but ultimately it has the treasure that is this film. And after over 20 years, that's still more than enough for me."

I love the review because I think Wings of Desire is one of the greatest films ever and the thing that stays with me after experiencing a work of art is not so much the details of the art, but rather the interior life that it stirred. In fact, I may have first seen this with some of you (at the DIA perhaps?) but I truly don't remember.