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Strong and Moving!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

"Faustrecht der Freiheit" or "Fox and His Friends" is a West German German-language film from 1975, so this one had its 40th anniversary last year. The writer and director is German filmmaking infant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder and he was roughly at the age of 30 when he made this 120-minute film back in the 1970s. And I already wrote that I think it may be Fassbinder's most personal film. There seem a lot of parallels to the filmmaker's real life in here and it shows that he put all his heart in it, for example that he was not even scared of full frontal nudity to make Biberkopf/Fox look authentic. This one here came out 5 years before Fassbinder made his successful mini-series "Berlin Alexanderplatz", which is of course also known for its main character Franz Biberkopf, so the name in here is certainly no coincidence. But the thing that hits closest to home is of course the ending because (apart from the location) we see exactly the way the real Fassbinder died. Unfortunately, despite this emotional impact, I never managed to create a lot of interest in the story. I guess this may have to do with me not being the greatest Fassbinder fan, but also with the script, which never seemed really interesting or even edge-of-seat level to me. Fassbinder is nonetheless fun to watch and I still believe he is at least as good of an actor as of a filmmaker, if not better. So with another lead actor than RMF (who lost some weight for his role here), this may have dragged even more. Nonetheless, my verdict overall is thumbs-down. I do not recommend the watch. I guess Fassbinder is just superior with female main characters.

From director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, Fear Eats the Soul, The Marriage of Maria Braun) (also playing the title role), when I watched this film, listed as one of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, from the book, I didn't know what to expect, which made it all the more watchable. Basically Franz 'Fox' Bieberkopf (Fassbinder) is a working class homosexual carnival worker, and when he finds himself out of work and his boyfriend, the owner Klaus (Karl Scheydt), arrested for tax fraud, he is in need of money. He uses some tricks to get him a little bit of cash in order to buy a lottery ticket, convinced that because it is a lucky day he will win the jackpot, and with the help of sophisticated antique art dealer Max (Karlheinz Böhm) he does get one before the newsagents close. A month passes, and Fox did indeed win the lottery, a fortune of 500,000 marks, and he is trying to fit in the more upper class society as Max introduces him to his friends. This includes low on money Eugen Thiess (Peter Chatel) who dumps his boyfriend Philip (Harry Baer) to make his move and try and take advantage of him and his fortune. Max suggests to Fox that good things could happen if he invests in Phillip's company, so he does give him 100,000 marks, and then he ends up paying high amounts for apartment stuff and clothes, and then when he hears about Klaus being released he gives him 30,000 marks, so he really is being taken advantage of. After returning from a holiday to Marrakech, Morocco, they find out that the company is going bankrupt, and all Fox can do while trying to sort these problems is drink in bars, proposition other men, including some American soldiers, until the point where has a small heart attack. He eventually sees sense to break up with Eugen, and after some arguing with him and his sister Hedwig (Christiane Maybach), the only way he can make some of the money back that he has lost is to sell his car for 8,000 marks. In the end Fox sees no real reason to keep going, so he overdoses on his pills until collapsing and dying on the floor of the underground, and two young boys come along to steal his things, until interrupted by Max and Klaus walking past, but they carry on walking knowing he is dead and not wanting to get involved, and the two young boys continue stealing his money, golden watch and clothing. Also starring Adrian Hoven as Wolf Thiess - Eugen's father and Ulla Jacobsson as Eugen's mother. Fassbinder does a good job of directing, but he mostly excels playing the leading role of the ordinary gay man being propelled into high society and unsure of how to handle it, the film is full of the eerie stuff with all the homosexual material and the rich people's sleazy activities, and there is the prominent despair as well, but overall it is interesting drama. Good!

Thus far I have seen 4 Fassbinder films: Fear Eats the Soul, Effi Briest, Muther Kusters, and FoxAfter seeing Fear Eats the Soul I jumped to the conclusion Fassbinder was a genius and started to work my way through more of his films. It is with regret however, that I have to say I have been continually unimpressed.Fassbinder is an interesting director and I enjoyed much of how Fox was directed. What ruined it for me was the uniformly terrible acting and the most repetitive, banal and juvenile screenplay!El Hedi ben Salem's performance is so poor I actually sniggered at one point during the film. While Fassbinder is interesting to watch (maybe just as a curiosity), he gives a terrible performance in this film, acting like he is in a completely different movie. Regardless of the acting though, it is the screenplay that ruins this film. No character development, exposition through dialogue and the overall point is just way too heavy handed. Yes I get it, Fox is being used for his money. But it goes on and on, forever reiterating the point. Fox is the dumbest character on earth!Well I can't slate such a well respected film maker such as Fassbinder without good reason so I am obliged to detail some of the flaws that made this film so disappointing to me:One annoyance with this film is that a lot of things happen off screen. For example, Fox wins the lottery but it isn't clear when, so for a while I wasn't sure if he'd won the lottery before the film started or during it. A second example of this is when Fox is telling his boyfriend that he is really ill, verging on a breakdown and this has caused him to suffer black outs and chest pains. The thing is, we never got to see any of this. When did it happen?? A quality writer would show a character slowly disintegrating over time. Fassbinder just does it in one scene via dialogue. At no point do we feel he is suffering a breakdown or anything of a sort!Character development is non-existent in this film. When we are introduced to Fox he is shown to be a mysterious, rebellious character. But then he falls in love with a man he's just met and turns in to wimpy, clingy dork in the next scene, without ANY transitional period. It really is as quick as that. They meet in one scene, then are in love the next. And Fox has a complete personality change between the two scenes. To me, that is just bad writing. The characters just chopped and changed to suit what ever was needed to be stated in the heavy-handed storyline.There were other problems. Like, for example, Fox loans money to his partner's business and is paid back in monthly installments. Seems pretty clear, right? Well...then Fox starts working at the company like a regular employee. I assumed he was just helping out because he had a financial interest in the business. Then near the end, Fox's boyfriend tells him he doesn't have to work there and that he can come & go as he pleases. Fox says "I don't understand" and his partner says "I've always told you that". Well, I didn't understand either because at no point was it made clear to the audience that Fox thought he was a regular employee, and at no point had his boyfriend told him he could come & go as he pleased. So I wondered...why had that random piece of information been placed there so late in the film? Well, a couple of scenes later I got my answer, when Fox and his boyfriend have split up and Fox comes to get his loan back. His ex boyfriend then tells Fox that they already paid him back every month over 2 years. So for all this time Fox had apparently thought that the money he was getting each month was his wages?? Which means he thought he was an employee when he wasn't?? Is this really believable???? It was during these scenes that I found out the story had been going on for 2 years. My God, there was no indication of this what-so-ever, I thought it had been taking place over a number of weeks, maybe months at the most! Since there is no proper character development and the scenes are so repetitive, I could not empathise or feel connected to any character, so I didn't care at all for Fox, whom obviously we were meant to care deeply about as he is portrayed in such an OTT sympathetic manner. After the film finished my first thought was "what was the point of that?" It was kinda silly, kinda childish and had characters with no depth. I have to say that if the screenplay for Fox was critiqued properly it would be ripped to shreds!

In "Fox and His Friends" (1975) which Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote and directed, he played a main character, Franz Bieberkopf alias "Fox", a lower class, uneducated circus worker who loses his job when his lover, the circus owner is arrested and sent to prison for tax fraud. Fox believes in his luck and strikes it rich by winning 500,000 marks in the lottery and very soon attracts the attention of an elegant, posh, and sophisticated Eugen who knows very well how to make Fox pay for his expensive habits and how to make him invest a lot of money in his father business that is not very successful to say the least. What fascinated me the most - how convincingly Fassbinder - one man production company who came up with the idea, wrote the screenplay and directed the movie- played seemingly tough but as it turned, confused and vulnerable Fox. Another interesting aspect of the movie is the way Fassbinder describes the gay community in Germany of the early 70s. He does not make any excuses and he does not make his characters complete villains or innocent victims. The story he tells could've happened in any community.