Germans, 11/23.

"German cinema breaks new ground in January with its first comedy about Hitler," reports David Crossland for Spiegel Online. "Jewish director Dani Levy is following in the footsteps of Charlie Chaplin, maker of The Great Dictator, with a decidedly unsympathetic portrayal of Hitler as a bed-wetting drug addict who is making the world suffer for his beatings as a child." The film is Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler) and, though it sounds silly, considering those involved - Levy, Helge Schneider, Ulrich Mühe, X-Filme - it's probably... well, silly. But potentially in a good way.

Tom Tykwer has taken his Perfume to San Francisco, where Michael Guillén's met him and taken notes during a post-screening Q&A.

Updated, 11/24.

Emily Schultz for the Walrus: "Song for Herzog and the Dancing Chicken."

"A mock-doc in format, but a film that actually finds its strangest epiphanies in genuine non-fiction footage, [The Wild Blue Yonder] is science fiction, and not all that different from Herzog's apocalyptic tone poem Fata Morgana filmed 35 years earlier," writes Michael Atkinson, who also reviews "[a]nother German sine qua non," Pandora's Box. More on that one from Audra Schroeder in the Austin Chronicle.

Wally Hammond writes up an excellent preview of the UK's German Film Festival (through Sunday) for Time Out.

Cineuropa's new "Film Focus": Requiem. Also, Thilo Wydra asks Dagmar Hirtz about the state of German cinema.

A brief note to close this entry. To the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. If you're going to be that backasswardly stupid as to go to court to try to put a stop to free PR and branding, just shut down your new media departments. So what if Perlentaucher earns a euro or two promoting you at their expense and not yours? Just get off the web right now and save yourselves the time, trouble and money. You never got it, you still don't and you never will. Get off. And good luck with your paper papers.

Update, 11/24: Roberta Smith on Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 19: "Organized by Sabine Rewald, curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, this exhibition creates an indelible, psychologically charged picture of Weimar Germany as it teetered between World Wars I and II. In a larger sense it is a humane hall of mirrors whose representation of individuals and types, of the quick and the deluded, the knowing and the devouring, has a sharpness that still cuts."

In the accompanying slide show, which is well worth clicking through, the first painting labeled "Count St Genois d'Anneaucourt (1927) by Christian Schad" is actually An die Schönheit (Hommage to Beauty) by Otto Dix. It's the final slide in the show that's correctly labeled.

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2006 3:07 PM