entertain

As the laws of nature dictate, any film in German featuring an overweight retired miner and his accordion is either very bad or very artistic. Schultze Gets the Blues is very artistic. It’s one of those films where every edit is over ten seconds long and composed as if it were a photograph, the actors just happening to walk into the frame as the photographer adjusts his exposure time. It’s the sort of thing that would get rather dull after the first half hour if there weren’t some intricate and momentous plot, and the plot, in all it’s intricacies and momentousness can be recounted thus: Schultze retires, Schultze’s taste in accordion music changes, Schultze goes to Louisiana. Considering this apparently compelling empirical evidence that I shouldn’t enjoy the film, I initially found it rather strange that I enjoyed it very much.

Just what it is about watching an awkward German man’s misadventures that appeals so profoundly to the human soul is a mystery, but you can rest assured that if the documentation of awkward German men were an age old art, Schultze Gets the Blues would be a revolutionary breakthrough, and perhaps even necessitate some sort of modernizing prefix to be appended to the phrase, like Documentation of Awkward German Men Nouveau, or Neo-Documentation of Awkward German Men. Regardless of the specifics of the nomenclature, the filmmakers were obviously masters in this obscure field, and one only hopes that their trend will be continued in such a way as to honor them as they deserve.

It is inevitable, unfortunately, that there are those to whom the prospect of watching an hour and twenty minutes of excruciating artiness isn’t appealing. To those people I say: Shame on you. It’s the likes of you that brings about all evil in the world, and you would do well to submit yourself to the appropriate indoctrination, which can be rented, for a small fee, at your local video store. Make haste, however, for the revolution has not the convenience of pity.

"There is not enough context here for me to guess what this says."

—Some Greatmind