Adapt or Die: The Counterfeiters

Adapt or Die: The Counterfeiters

What impressed me the most when I saw the German film, “The Counterfeiters,” was someone had found a new angle on the concentration camp theme, which I didn’t think was possible after all these years. It is a fascinating tale, based on a little known fact of German history during the Second World War, untold for many years. I can now understand why it won an Oscar the Best Foreign Film for 2007.

It is the story of Jewish master forger, Solomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) better know as “Sally” in the film and to his contingent of skilled typographers, artists, paper-makers, and printers that worked with him to counterfeit some 130 million pounds sterling, passports for various countries, stamps, and Id cards for spies. They constituted a thriving industry within the framework of the Holocaust and a method of survival for approximately 140 men through the length of the Second World War. The film opens with Sally in a casino gambling and spending the night with a woman. He was a bon vivant living a criminal life as a successful counterfeiter, considered the best of his generation. But eventually he was caught by a cop named Herzog (Devid Striesow) who had been on his tail for a long time; he was sent to a death camp rather than prison because he was Jewish. His philosophy in the camp was simple, adapt or die, and he lived by that code while he continued gambling with other inmates. But then after more then a year he was transferred to another concentration camp, Sachsenhausen, Cellblock 18 and 19, which was one unit and isolated from the rest of the camp. That was the printing shop (18) and living quarters (19) it had already been running three years before Sally arrived on the scene. The commandant of the camp was none other than Herzog, his old nemesis on the outside. The two old adversaries struck a bargain, which Sally was happy to do because the inmates were treated well, with opera music while they work, clean warm beds, decent food, and recreation, like chess, card games and even ping-pong. In the previous camp Sally was quartered in some horse stables with no concern for hygiene, much less comfort or warm beds. Sachsenhausen was like going to heaven. Herzog was a reasonable man, and even admired Sally’s artistry as a forger, but he had to produce or else both could be shot. There was another lower ranked German officer who was the prototypical Nazi brute: An oaf who would off any “Jew scum” just for the hell of it. So it might have been soft duty but still, death was possible if you weren’t very careful.

But there was another form of trouble in the camp. One of the inmates, a typographer named Adolph Burger (August Diehl) defied Sally’s gospel of survival and started to sabotage the operation, arguing they were helping the German war effort, which was just plain wrong. He was willing to sacrifice all the men in Cellblock 18 for his righteous belief. This tension between the numerous survival-at-all-cost inmates and this lone maniacal idealist goes through the final hour of the film. You can imagine Burger’s attitude did not go over well with his fellow inmates. The idea behind the scheme was to adversely affect the British economy, and to do it eventually to dollars as well, as if $130 million would do anything to upset the U.S, economy. The idea strikes one as preposterous but the Sachsenhausen printing shop did exist and some of the notes were recovered in the 1950s. Not even British Banking experts were able to see the notes were counterfeit. That’s quite a tribute to the skill and artistry of Sally and his crew. It was the paper that made the difference. This was where Sally’s genius came in.

Adolph Burger managed to get a camera just after the last German soldier was gone from the death camp and took pictures of the evidence. He is the spokesman in two sections of the Special features. He is 90 years old but mentally very alert and conversant with the history and all the details of the camp. He has boards full of his pictures and examples, which were quite interesting to see and hear about, as a most curious historical footnote, a story being told for the first time. It is worth checking out after seeing the movie. The film is now available on DVD.

To show you how corrupt the Nazis could be they paid their best spies with the counterfeit money. How’s that for loyalty recognized and courage rewarded?

Obama's Convention Speech and the Barbie Doll

On Thursday night at the Democratic Convention there was an unbelievable culminating event at Mile High Stadium, where the Denver Broncos play football. The Democrats rented the stadium for $5 million for one night. At the start of the week I wasn’t sure that political conventions were any longer necessary. Well, this one turned out to be a bonus, much better than could be expected, with a half dozen great speeches and with a stagecraft I didn’t know the Democrats were capable of, which came off without a hitch or glitch. The Thursday night finale was spectacular, highlighted by Obama’s knock-em-dead speech to close the proceeding. 84,000 people were in the stadium and another 42 million watched it on television. The bounce from the convention was gratifying. Obama and McCain were tied at the beginning of the week at 45% each; at the end of the week Obama was up 49 to 41%. I haven’t seen any polls yet about Sarah Polin, McCain’s surprise choice for Vice President, and now Gustav, the hurricane heading for the gulf coast and New Orleans, threatens the Republican Convention. Bush has already cancelled his speech for tomorrow night and the rest of it is up in the air at this juncture. Bush is eager to rectify his poor reaction to Katrina, so they will undoubtedly give priority to the storm and its aftermath at this point. He’s in Texas waiting for it to land.

Obama’s Thursday night speech was rhetorically powerful and for the first time he really went after McCain. Most of Big Media agreed it was a barnburner of a speech. I watched the gang on MSNBC and they were very enthusiastic about it, even Pat Buchanan, the man who has written speeches for Republicans. He was beside himself with praise. Obama said we were better as a nation than what the past eight years revealed about us and eight years of it was enough. He said McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time and he wasn’t ready to take a chance on a 10% chance of a change. He promised to cut taxes on the middle class to initiate a windfall profits tax on Big Oil. He said by seeking other sources of energy we should be able to end our dependence on Middle East oil in ten years. He mocked the Republican philosophy of help the fat cats get fatter and good times will trickle down to the masses at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. God, I have been hearing that theory since I was in knickers in the forties. Obama said it is hard to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you don’t have any boots.

For women he said, there should be equal pay for equal work. In all he mentioned 29 items that needed improvement, things that were first on his priority list, which of course included health care, education and protection of Social Security. The crowd roared its approval. They all left the stadium ready for battle. (As a personal Note: My oldest daughter who lives in Florida was so inspired by the convention and Obama’s speech she signed up as a team leader in the Obama campaign in Melbourne, where she lives.)

Like everyone else I was flabbergasted by McCain’s choice of Sarah Polin, the 44 year old little known Governor of Alaska that McCain barely knew himself. The first thing to be said about her is she ruins McCain’s argument about the importance of experience. Secondly, to think this obscure, provincial talent, raw as raw can be, will be a heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world is rather scary, especially when you considered McCain’s age and the fact he has had four bouts with cancer. He obviously likes pretty women—Polin was years ago Miss Wasilla, the Beauty Queen of her hometown—and Polin’s youthful energy. Nonetheless, his pick doesn’t inspire confidence in his judgment. Many moderate Republicans were unhappy with his choice, as it seemed to indicate he was going back to his maverick stance as a politician. However, the base loves her, especially the evangelicals, as she is a Pentecostal religionist, pushes Creationism, and seems to be some variety of reform politician. She is also pro-life (she had a Downs Syndrome baby last April and knew it was what it is), pro-guns (she hunts and loves moose meat), pro-lowering taxes, pro-letting Big Oil exploit the natural resources of her state. Her experience is pretty thin, she ran a fishing business, was a two-term mayor of Wasilla, and she’s been Governor for 18 months She knows nothing about Foreign Affairs and National Security. She was 8 years old when Biden started his career in the senate. I will be curious to see the one debate between them. I have heard some naïve or lying Republicans say she was more experienced to be president than Obama. Now that’s a strecth! To me she looks like a nobody from nowhere, a Barbie Doll who has wandered into the public arena. It was an enormous gamble to elevate this lady to where she is today.

Hillary-Dillary Rocks!

Hillary-Dillary rocks!

The game is on the clock,

With no guile or sass,

But with plenty of class

She did the job for Obama

With good cheer and no trauma.

Hillary-Dillary rocks!

McCain is taking stock.

Tuesday night belong to Hillary, as Monday night will be remembered because, against all odds, Teddy Kennedy showed up to rally the troops, 60% of whom are there for the first time. Both came through like the troupers they are. They aren’t party stalwarts for nothing. She was more a party regular last night than a defeated candidate. She spoke with class and authority, with force and directness, and with vibrancy and the wisdom of a resilient soul. She addressed the disappointment and resentment still boiling in the hearts of some of her millions of supporters. She framed the situation this way: Did you vote for the issues or for me? The issues are primary and now Barack Obama is the Standard Bearer and chosen vehicle of our hopes and dreams. He won fair and square, so let’s move on; we have a mountain to climb.

The betting among the Media after the speech was that she probably moved the great majority of the angry women to the party’s cause. If some remain recalcitrant, well, so be it. Many will turn lemons into lemonade. We will know in November how many stayed behind and what a difference that made

McCain was on the tonight show Monday night, all in an effort to counter balance the attention the Democrats were receiving in Denver. The first question Jay Leno asked him—surprise, surprise! —was how many houses do you own? Rather than answering the question he launched into his one-note discourse about being a homeless POW for five and a half years in North Vietnam, all of which he called a “moment of seriousness,” thus trying to trivialize Leno’s question. The man will toot that horn a thousand more times before we reach Election Day. As for houses owned, some say seven, others ten. In any case it’s a large handful, a lot more than people struggling to pay the mortgage on the one house they own. He also thinks the dividing line between the rich and the middle class is at $5 million. Whoa! Obama put it at $150,000, a more reasonable estimate. What planet does McCain live on? This is also the zealot who is willing to stay in Iraq for 10 years or more, if necessary, “depending on conditions on the ground,” as he is fond of saying. Americans need a fresh wind to blow through their politics, not the stale air of the tried and failed. Moving ahead is a better option than the status quo.

Smart People

Dennis Quaid plays an English professor out of touch with his body and his best interests in “Smart People,” just out on DVD. His wife has died and her absence has undermined his perspective on life and his joie de vivre; he now drags his carcass through his teaching and family duties, as if barely aware of the outside world, except as it throws occasionally obstacles in his path, which usually calls forth various kind of nasty remarks that are also edged with black humor. He’s middle aged but he shuffles along like a round-shouldered curmudgeon, an older crouch with few redeeming qualities. He plots to avoid contact with his students who seem to keep him in a state of constant irritation; nor can he remember any of their names, which irritates them. However, he is intellectually alive enough to have a book he is trying to get published. His specialty seems to be Victorian Literature. Quaid plays him as if he is suffering from acute introversion and emotional paralysis. He is “smart” only in the bookish sense. His life otherwise is a mess.

He has a daughter named Vanessa, played by newcomer Ellen Page. (She made “Smart People” before she was in “Juno.”) She is a clone of her father and attempts to fill in for the deceased mother/wife, by cooking and doing what she can to keep the house in order, if not exactly clean. She is as bookish and cut-off as her dad; she has no friends and like her father she tends to insult everyone she has to deal with at home and away. Her opinion of her intelligence is very high, and proof of her smarts is she has just been accepted to Stanford. When she arrives there she thinks her life will begin. She has nothing to do with boys and sex is an unknown continent to her. In sum, she has a shutdown personality and tends to be a junior version of her father’s arrogant pomposity. There is also a brother, but after we meet him he fades away. Why he is even there to start with is a mystery.

Completing this family of brilliant idiots is a brother played by Thomas Haden Church, a free spirit or freeloader, depending how you want to see him. He is gruff, lazy, and unreliable on the practical level, but basically the honest person in this brainy mélange of emotionally stunted academic types, and the one with more proactive insight than the others. He takes on Vanessa as a special project, trying to get her out of the black hole she has created for herself. He is the one who is more psychologically astute and has good zingers to make his points. He’s also one of the funnier characters in the movie.

There is one other vital character, a doctor played by Sarah Jessica Parker, an ex-student of the professor who apparently has had a log-time crush on him, and while treating him for a fall and concussion lets him know she’s interested and available. But she is damaged goods and full of doubt and hesitations about the relationship. The professor has been hibernating since his wife died seven years ago, so he is a little slow on the uptake with the woman, but finally he takes the bait, hook, line, and sinker. But she still vacillates. There is much comedy in their attempt to work things out.

As you have probably guessed by now, “Smart People” is an ironic title. As a veteran of the academic world, I would vouch for the presence of such people in University life, folks who are, on the one hand, bookish and formally intelligent, but leave much to be desired on the levels of perceptive insight, existential decision-making and fire in the belly. They tend to live contrary to what they really need to do. Because they live in their heads they tend to keep feelings bottled up, as if they were vipers that can never be let loose. All things considered, the dialogue in the movie is crisp, clever, and amusing. Quaid does a decent job of portraying the rumpled professor who finally comes around to realize he has much work to do on himself, not on his lectures. Ellen Page has a style of her own already; she a real comer as an actress I think. But her diet has to improve; she is as skinny as a pencil. It made me wonder if she is anorexic. Thomas Haden Church is a unique talent, a bear of a man who acts in an understated way, using his strong, deep voice for emphasis. So taking everything into account, it is an amusing, insightful and diverting movie with a smattering of chuckles and wit that is well played by an able cast.

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My Blueberry Nights

“My Blueberry Nights” is internationally acclaimed Korean filmmaker, Wong Kar Wai, first film in English and shot entirely in the States. The film is ravishing to look at and it has its moments of drama, but in the end the script was very mediocre, too full of clichés and conventional lines, and it can’t overcome the leaden performance of Norah Jones as Lizzie, and she is the hinge figure in the story. Wai had to persuade the singer to try acting and the results show her inexperience. Her lack of ability to loosen up and show some emotional nuance detracts from the other more worthy performances, so the story plods on with a large gap between Jones and the others. The talk throughout the film is rather trite and uninspiring. It is about love lost, love destroyed, and love found where you least expected it to be. When the pain of loss is overwhelming suicidal thoughts enter the picture.

Lizzie happens to go into a small café and bakery in New York City. (We are told it is New York but we never once see a tall building.) Behind the counter is Jeremy (Jude Law), a Brit now living in America. He can tell she is in the throes of a disintegrating relationship, and she is torn up about it. He befriends her and she starts coming in on a regular basis. He feeds her blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream to cheer her up. They hang out together, talk, and some affection develops between them, meaning more to Jeremy than Lizzie. Then she decides she needs to hit the road for year, so off she goes, keeping in touch with Jeremy by phone and post cards. She works as a waitress in a bar and witnesses a ruined marriage between an alcoholic cop (David Stratharin) and his sexy estranged wife (Rachel Weisz). The tension between them explodes one night and things end badly. She’s also working in a restaurant, running herself ragged trying to save money for a car. Men seemed to have no place in her life. Finally she moves to Nevada and gets hook up with Leslie (Natalie Portman), a young, glitzy poker player who seems to be a pathological liar and a person who advises, don’t trust anybody, including her. She stakes Leslie to a poker game with her car money, but she loses it, so she travels to Las Vegas with Leslie because she has no choice. When they get there it is too late, Leslie’s father has died before she could see him. She had pretended she didn’t care, but she did. And it turns out she had lied about the poker game; she actually cleaned out the people she was playing with but wanted Lizzie’s company as they drove on to Las Vegas. Eventually, she gives Lizzie the cash for a car. She had learned more about alienation and loneliness from Leslie

So she heads back to the Diner, to Blueberry pie a la mode, and to Jeremy who she now understands is more important to her than she thought when she took off from New York. Their reunion completes the circle of going forth and coming back to a love she didn’t recognize until after she hit the road. Jeremy feels the same way: Once she was gone he wanted her. The film ends with a luscious kiss between the two in the Diner, a kiss shot from above, a bird’s eye view, which was unusual and very effective.

The America presented in this film is a neon-tinged artificial world, like a planet set apart but which is a stage for love lost and love gained, where lovers dance and kiss and whirl away to dance again with more awareness. From the beginning of the film my eyes feasted on the dynamic splashes of color used in the film; it was an extravaganza of pinks, and blues and scarlet, with emerald green and cadmium yellow, sliding about among some moving planes of dark umber and ivory black. Simple things took on a new magnificence with well-placed color accents. Other hues were electric; some burned into the dark backgrounds. It was through and through a sensuous delight. Darius Khondji was the cinematographer. But next time Wai needs to add heft to the script, so form and content aren’t so divorced

The film is now available on DVD.

The McCain Con Job

McCain was in my hometown, Racine, Wisconsin, the other day accusing Barack Obama of dropping the race card; the senator was echoing the words of his campaign manger, who earlier made that comment, and had added one other, “ the card came from the bottom of the deck.” Feeling on a roll, the McCain Campaign then came out with the already infamous ad using Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as fellow travelers in the world of notorious celebrities, cynically attempting to smear the Democratic candidate by guilt by association. In other words, Republican circles, it was business as usual. And then on Friday, August 1, to continue the game of can you top this, they juxtaposed him with, of all people, Charleston Heston, but only in his role as Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea. This is how they mock Obama’s “high-flying rhetoric” and what they suggest is his arrogant pretentiousness and tendency to self-glorify himself as a prophet leading the masses out of the Bush wilderness. I can hardly wait to see what poppycock they come up with next. The McCain campaign say they are only injecting some humor into the race for the White House, and levity never hurt anybody. To me the technique looks more like character assassination, or if that’s too extreme, they want to cut his ego down to size, rip apart his persona as an unconventional candidate, and make him eat humble pie. The aim is to damage his reputation with the American Voter, especially that critical group of white voters past 50 who are still leery about embracing Obama. I also think there is a vein of old fashioned anti-intellectualism in these attack ads, as if Obama’s education and oratorical skills are proof of his ‘elitist’ attitude, which is one of those buzz words in contemporary politics.

Obama better be careful from here on out. Things have gotten down and dirty already and none of McCain’s ads are anything but attack ads—issues be damned, they aren’t what win elections. They just want to talk Obama to tatters, until he is a mere shadow of the rousing candidate who beat Hillary Clinton for the nomination. After all, the technique has worked before and it will again. The Rove Squad will use political jujitsu (and they are experts) to turn the slightest misstep by Obama, like his amusing but unnecessary comment about not looking like presidents on our dollar bills that quickly become material they can employ to malign him. Thus the marvelous reception he received in Europe is reduced to a petty event, just another rock-star publicity stunt. One would think he took Spears and Hilton along for the ride, not Senators Chuck Hagel and Jack Reid. If the voting public falls for this crap then they will get more of the same and the country will continue to sink like the Titanic out of season.

The bottom line is, Obama is up against people who will do whatever is necessary to get their man in the White House who will be another spokesman for Big Oil and the Corporate Giants who are laughing all the way to the bank. They don’t give two hoots for the ordinary American; they just want to keep the gravy train running in their direction. They are very experienced at selling untruths (like why we needed to go to war in Iraq) and smearing their opposition (like the Swift Boat debacle with John Kerry) while singing the praises of “Country First,” using a false front to disguise their greed and lust for power.