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Soc Shots

It is hard to ignore, now, that the sunshine of last summer is all but gone, replaced by those gloomy dark clouds that can mean only one thing: winter is here. Just as the seasons are changing, this week’s selection of movies from Oxford film societies reflect the theme of change.The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the largestchanges Eeurope has seen. It is also the topic of Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin! (2003), shown by St Aantony’s Eeuropean Film Society. Ddaniel Brühl stars as Aalex, whose mother was a fervent supporter of the Eeast German regime before she collapsed in a coma for several months. When she wakes up, Berlin is no longer seperate from the West, but Aalex and his sister maintainthe illusion that it is, to save her from any potentially dangerous shocks. Such an amusing concept naturally produces much comedy, yet there is a permeating sentimentalityto the film that is rather irksome.Worse still, it is not just the characters but the political backdrop that is made somewhat saccharine.If Goodbye, Lenin! is too full of sugar, then Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), screened by the Oxford University Film Foundation, is up to its eyeballswith rather more dangerously mind-altering substances. Aan adaptationof Hunter S Thompson’s hilarious piece of autobiographical “Gonzo journalism”, the film followsThompson (played with intoxicatinginsanity by Jonny Ddepp) and his attorney on a drug-fuelled trip to Las Vegas in 1971. Perpetually high on mescaline, ether, hash, barbiturates,acid, cocaine and andrenochrome(extracted from the human adrenaline gland), the two parade around town in a haze of confusion and hallucination. Their disillusionmenthighlights the central theme of the change that happened to Aamericaafter the sixties ended, when the dream, or at least the hippies’Aamerican dream, died. Shot with a twisted surrealism that only Gilliam could conjure up, watching this movie is about as close to eating a hallucinogenic cactus as you’ll ever get without actually heading down to Mexico to pick some peyote.achanging Aamerica is again the theme of John Ford’s classic western,The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance (1962), to be seen in the Magdalen Film Society. This time, though, the transition examined is from the gun-toting justice of John Wayne’s character, Tom Ddoniphon, to the lawyer’s justice of Rronsom Stoddard (James Stewart). When Stoddard arrives in the small town of Shinbone in the ‘wild’ West, his morals are outraged by the bandit Liberty Vallance (Lee Marvin) almostas much as his senses are titillatedby the heart-throb Hallie (Vera Miles). Stewart and Wayne play off each other excellently as the two contrasting models of the Aamerican hero, just as they are themselves the two models of the Aamerican movie star. The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance changed the face of the Western. Go see it.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005

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