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German Workers




Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Thursday, August 5, 2021
Never Gonna Snow Again: Consumerism, Communism, And The Weather
"There definitely needs to be a balance struck between the financial sector and scientists. Because the way it's affecting certainly climate change and just generally, I think people's lives - everything is becoming, I feel with the consumerist culture, people are losing control, and losing connection." ~ Alec Utgoff
Actor Alec Utgoff masterfully weaves his way through the lives inhabiting a humorless Polish community, as an inadvertently seductive masseur - the ethnic Russian Ukrainian immigrant Zhenia on an elusive psychological or even political mission.
Perhaps cynically equating all longings for a better world with magical thinking, whether political, emotional, obsessive consumerism or the fleeting frustration of a massage, the film teases then seems to settle on a fateful dystopia in store for the human race. But in any case, a combo playful and sobering prophetic perspective on the way things are, or progressively will be.
As for Zhenia, his rare revelation in the evasive narrative proceedings regarding his favored sports players back home as the Donetsk team - that ethnically Russian breakaway self-declared communist republic currently at war with Ukraine - may indicate a surprising clue to the entire preceding mystery at work. Or considering everything else that has transpired, maybe not.
Written and directed with subversive nihilistic glee by Małgorzata Szumowska.
Here's Alec Utgoff, phoning in from London in a decidedly enigmatic conversation about the film.
Prairie Miller
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Painkiller: Not Simply Another Vigilante Thriller, Though That Too
"The main premise is that there's a conspiracy by the big pharmaceutical companies. And that's what motivates the character, is that it's not just one person - so he goes after the whole idea - the whole concept of government sanctioned drug dealing." ~ Michael Pare
Michael Pare, best known for his starring role in Eddie And The Cruisers and its sequel, is on a very different dramatic detour these days, as he delves into his current film targeting those legal drug peddlers profiting off the other pandemic, that has unleashed deaths from prescription drug overdoses across the country. That is, those pharmaceutical corporations and doctors reaping the profits off popular misery precipitated by late stage capitalism. And not simply another vigilante revenge thriller, though that too.
Starring horror vet Bill Oberst Jr. as a combo podcaster prophet of doom and the masked medication avenger in question, Painkiller has much more on its mind beneath the sensationalistic surface. Namely, that lawyer turned screenwriter and co-star Tom Parnell has dedicated this film and its narrative emotionally and politically to his own young son in real life - a victim of prescription drug addiction. And that brewing tension as Parnell's character confronts Pare's evil doctor, is an undercurrent simmering under the surface of this reality fueled film.
A Cinedigm Release May 4th.
Friday, March 26, 2021
Six Minutes To Midnight: Nazi Intrigue - Intentional And Otherwise
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor visit Hitler in 1937
A British spy thriller based on the actual pre-WW II existence of a Nazi Germany finishing school located, in of all places, on the British coast, Six Minutes To Midnight may be said to harbor as much mystery as what the vintage noir setting does and doesn't explore.
Starring and co-written by Eddie Izzard who has cast himself as the targeted undercover espionage agent Miller at the actual Bexhill-on-Sea Augusta-Victoria-College finishing school for female children of Nazi Germany's military and economic elite back then, the narrative is fueled by a second covert German operation to airlift the students out of Britain as WII looms - to prevent their arrest and detention.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Willy's Wonderland: Battling The Demons Beneath US Consumer Paradise
Turning up just in time as anarchistic antidote to the artificially soothing sappy Oscar bait like Nomadland and Minari, Willy's Wonderland brashly sabotages American Dream consumer paradise tall tale antics while let's just say, irreverently subverting its own intentions as well. Not to mention seemingly hitching a ride on the current wave of red state versus blue state pandemonium in progress finding its way from this crisis ridden country to the screen.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Flinch: Cathy Moriarty Return Match Comes Out Swinging
A more offbeat window into women saving themselves, while shaking up the seemingly forever set in stone macho mob genre - Cathy Moriarty unconventionally rules in Flinch as a senior citizen gunslinger protecting her shabby downscale turf, along with her reluctant hitman son, Joey. Costa Rican born actor Daniel Zavatto who'd rather be communing with his pet goldfish - sulks his way through when not staging hits as the reluctant mobster, and apparently as a debt owed by his incarcerated dad to a West Coast crime syndicate.