I am very happy to say that I have been awarded the Superior Scribbler Award by Wendymoon over at the Movie Viewing Girl (I would have chosen your blog for the award as well, I really love it!).

1. Name five other Superior Scribblers to receive this award.
2. Link to the author and name of the blog that gave you the award.
3. Display the award on your blog with this LINK which explains the award.
4. Click on the award at the bottom of the link and add your name to the bottom of the list.
5. Post the rules.

I read and enjoy a lot of blogs but I choose to pass on the award to Cinema Watch, Film Forager, Iconista, Film for the Soul and Cinema Coquette (although it is still very new, it has great potential!).

On the 7th of August 1974 the Frenchman Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century”: He balanced on a wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. This exhilarating documentary shows a mixture of fantastic original footage and new interviews with the participants (some friends and Philippe’s girlfriend at the time).

Philippe is completely crazy. The Twin Towers weren’t his first big project, although the one that got the most publicity. He had already walked between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris and on a bridge in Australia. But the Twin Towers had been his dream, his obsession.

Getting into the WTC wasn’t an easy task. The group of people who wanted to help had to plan the whole thing in detail. This documentary really shows everything, from how Phillippe got the idea in the first place to plotting the “crime” and then finally going through with it. It is a really interesting film to watch and is extremely well made. It is an incredibly moving story about a man who has a dangerous, illegal, crazy dream and just has to go through with it. Beautiful!!!

Philippe Petit and Man on Wire deserve a MovieCat award for sheer craziness.

This is a very sweet documentary by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, a feature length version of the TV series Planet Earth. Starting at the North Pole with newly born polar bears and heading south, the film shows all kinds of life on earth. The animals, plants, mountains and oceans are filmed in a stunningly beautiful way.

I could have watched the animals for hours. There is not much for me to say other then rent it on DVD and watch it, it’s worth it!

I remember when all Sienna Miller was known for was her relationship with Jude Law. And how annoying it was to see her in magazines and newspapers just for her style. Jealousy runs deep

She had a few small roles in Layer Cake, Alfie (I really don’t wanna go into how gorgeous she looks in this film…) and according to IMDB she appeared in some TV shows and films I have never heard of. Then came Casanova, where she was the female lead alongside Heath Ledger. The film, directed by Lasse Hallström in 2005, was incredibly bad (who would have thought after he directed the beautiful Chocolat?). The story was told in a sort of falling-asleep-boring way and Sienna’s acting was dreadful. The make-up and hair made her look plain (I didn’t think it was possible!) so there is really no reason to watch that film at all.

She really developed in the 2006 Factory Girl. Here she plays Edie Sedgwick to Guy Pearce’s Andy Warhol. The film is debatably bad (although I personally quite enjoyed it), but Sienna is great in it. She is the perfect actress to play the skinny, confused Edie. Here Sienna really gets to show what she can do. Her character is very emotional and irrational, she is taking drugs, crying, laughing and getting the attention of entire rooms full of people. Sienna does it well. She is equally good in Interview, playing the soap actress Katya. This film, directed by Steve Buscemi (who plays the other lead role) is marvellous. Sienna appears to be playing herself (which of course she denies in interviews), being a young actress, living in the most beautiful warehouse apartment in Manhattan (I read that Sienna herself moved into a similar house in London), but is therefore great in the role. In the 2007 film Stardust she has a fairly small and bitchy role, nothing worth writing about. Although the film itself is quite sweet.

What I think is quite interesting is the clothes label twenty8twelve she launched in 2007 together with her sister Savannah (who studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins in London). Sienna has always been known for her unique style (which has been copied a lot). Oddly enough the story is quite similar to Edie Sedgwick, whose style was also iconic and who got the chance to have her own label (but did not have too much interest in it). Sienna also chose her outfit for Interview. Personally I quite like the twenty8twelve style (although, unfortunately, I can’t afford it). Their flagship store is a very small but sweet shop in Westbourne Grove (Notting Hill, London). I think it is a great opportunity for Savannah to use her sister’s fame for her own career.

As for acting, apparently Sienna Miller did a three months’ course at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City. This seems to be all the actors’ training she got, so I guess she had enough connections and endurance to get into the business. Although born in NYC, she grew up in London. She has an English accent but does the American accent really well in a few of her films.

She is stunningly beautiful, has great style, strange taste in men (what was the relationship with Rhys Ifans all about?), seems to be a really fun sort of girl and has turned out to be a good actress. I think this deserves a MovieCat Award. (I think I deserve a MovieCat Award for saying such nice things about her while I’m green with envy )

Last week I participated in a video journalism seminar. This is the film that my group made (I am not going to write a review on it…):

This film is in German, sorry…;)

1971. An evening with Klaus Kinski. He is performing a monologue on Jesus Christ that he wrote himself. I have to say, this man was weird, no…crazy, no… maybe completely insane. Even though the monologue itself wasn’t that interesting to me, I was very impressed by the performance. Kinski certainly had presence and I was almost glad that he was only on screen and not live. Scary, scary man! Some of the audience members were trying to have their say on the speech which did not impress Kinski one bit. He kept shouting at people in the audience and left the stage several times in a complete rage. The show is well worth watching.

The director Peter Geyer was at the cinema for a Q&A after the film. He was almost as strange as Kinski himself. He had a lot of anecdotes about Kinski, his family and life itself and was happy to talk for hours. Apparently he randomly got the old film reels at an auction and spent the last nine years of his life editing it (among doing lots of other things).

It’s good fun to watch some interviews with Kinski on youtube. They are hilarious. A talk masters nightmare!

Very funny and well made documentary about the film rating system in America. It’s a bit long for its theme.

Everyone knows that the rating system is different in the US then it is here in Europe. Americans seem to be more tolerant towards showing war and violence on screen but any sort of nudity or sex scenes seem highly inappropriate to them.

What I didn’t know before watching the film is that the names of the censors who rate films in the US are kept secret. So basically a secret society is deciding what kids can watch and what they cannot. How odd!

It’s worth watching if you’ve got some spare time and are interested in the American movie business but it’s not a masterpiece.

It’s a google video. You can watch it here.

(Photo: Director Kirby Dick, atp_tyreseus/flickr)

(Sieben Mulden und eine Leiche)

Be warned: Messy, messy, messy.

The official website says it all: messiemother.com. The film is funny, interesting and disturbing. A documentary made by two brothers (Thomas and Erik Haemmerli) of their mothers remains. Literally, remains of her body on the floor where she died and lay for several days. And the remains of her life. Bruna Haemmerli had left a whole flat of stuff behind. Her sons now have the task to get rid off it.

Definitely entertaining, in some places too graphic and too private. Worth watching.

(Photos: www.messiemother.com)