Solo Sunny review – a rueful East German gem of ambition, loneliness and faded dreams

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Konrad Wolf’s 1980 drama follows a singer trying to escape the drab compromises of GDR life, capturing the melancholy of thwarted ambition with warmth and wit The terrible sadness, tattiness and poisoned idealism of the old GDR is preserved as if in a time capsule in this East German film from 1980; it could be a kind of B-side to Bob Fosse’s Cabaret. The heroine, would-be solo pop singer Sunny, is told by her ungallant MC that she is no Liza Minnelli; Cabaret fans might well incidentally recognise here the brusque German word “bumsen”. Solo Sunny is the work of Konrad “Koni” Wolf, a director with an impressive and strange pedigree: he was a garlanded state-sanctioned artist in East Germany, much admired at the Berlin film festival, whose older brother Markus happened to be one of the highest-ranking officials in the Stasi. It makes Wolf the second most politically compromised German film-maker in history. (The disillusioned communist East German character in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Ka...
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The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse! review – brilliantly weird Estonian stop-motion

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This animated combination of cynicism and grotesquerie has as much energy as Aardman and double the WTF quotient

The only fitting comparison for this deranged Estonian stop-motion animation is if Shaun the Sheep had somehow been infected with a terminal case of BSE. The human characters are ugly lumpen golems, all the better to suggest rural backwardness; milk enjoys the same almost-ontological status here as Malkovichness in Being John Malkovich; the film has an unhealthy anal fixation that at one point expresses itself in a giant bear, irritated by a heavy-metal guitarist in his colon, who farts out an entire forestful of animals. In short, it’s brilliant.

City brats Priidik (voiced by co-director Mikk Mägi), Aino (co-director Oskar Lehemaa) and Mart (Mägi) are sent to stay with their grandfather (Mägi), who to their scorn is always doing “barn things”. The old fella prides himself on his way with an udder; he starts to rid them of their urban prissiness with a few squirts of yoghurty lactate. But when his prize cow escapes, one-time milking champion Old Milker (Jan Uuspõld) turns up to alert them of the danger: relieve that udder within 24 hours, or risk unleashing “lactopalypse”.

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