Z is for Zombie.

I have been home alone in the evenings this week, which might explain my recent viewing habits. After watching the delightful The Descent on Monday evening (a film for the whole family set in the idyllic scenery of the Appalachean Mountains with an extremely sympathetic cast) I rented The Outpost last night. Hitting UK cinemas this week it seems to have gone straight to DVD here.

It is a film about Nazi zombies.

'Nuff said.

Teaser trailer here.

Deep down there.

*Spoilers in both links*

I watched The Descent last night. Which, for a recovering claustrophobe, was a bit scary. Over on the Internet Movie Database there rightfully is a discussion about the ending. This ending could be interpreted in two ways, but I cannot help but feel this room for interpretation completely fudges the story that preceded it. UK movie critic Mark Kermode calls it a 'splendidly downbeat finale' in the review linked. I think the discussion on IMDb makes clear that it's more an excruciatingly frustrating one after all the shocks you go through in the space of the narrative. There is no sense of completion, however bleak as in Saw for example (thanks B. for subjecting me to that last October), just a feeling of 'Eh? The film ain't finished yet, then?'.

Ah.

A trailer for those who are curious what I'm on about:



You get the picture.

Going on and on.

We are staying at the parents-in-law this weekend. It's a tiny village with a carp pond and a creaky but refurbished wooden church. Just off the A9, the motorway that Hitler built in the mid-30s, it's near the former border between East and West Germany.

The road behind the girlfriend's grandparents' farm was in fact the last stretch of land civilians were allowed to go without a special permit in those days. Back then, the yard was a patch of mud, where the collectively owned pigs would pass on the way to fields and the chickens would strut, only to be disturbed when the huffing and puffing tractor returned from ploughing the acres. As Opa tells me, before they acquired the tractor at the end of the 60s they would plough by hand. Until the Wall fell in 1989 this tractor toiled, broke down, was mended, toiled, broke down, was mended for twenty years. It was dung-brown and its unfiltered exhaust stank to high heaven.

The daughter races around the cobbled yard on a bright-red bobby-car. The farm itself forms a circle connecting the quarters of the grandparents, their eldest son and his wife, the garages, the barn and the animal pens. The wooden gate was installed a couple of years ago. A shiny light-brown colour, it's almost always open during the day. Bobby, the aging dog, likes to roam in the surrounding pine woods and return as he pleases. Elderly villagers stop by, especially if one of the great-grandchildren is there.

The conversation moves on to the war. It tends to do so more often since Opa turned 80. He has written it all down. His eldest daughter has a copy. He was sixteen, seventeen when he was listed in the winter of 1945. The last boy in the village. After a brief training he and a boy from the class above joined a company near Cologne. During a skirmish they were cut off from their battalion. With Allied soldiers, tanks and jeeps swarming everywhere, they decided to walk. To walk home.

They walked at night. The advancing Allies about 10 or 20 kilometres behind them. Wehrmacht and SS vehicles sometimes crawled, sometimes sped along the roads. Deserters were to be shot on sight. Most of their gun fights were with silhouettes in SS-uniforms. One morning they were so exhausted they dropped onto a cushiony bush. Snug and sheltered they slept, until the bush came alive in an explosion of bites and itches. Lice. He is unsure what stung more by the end: the blisters on his feet or the swollen spots the insects left behind.

The daughter is rolling her bobby car into the garage. She squeezes it into the narrow space between the wheels and the brick wall. Last summer Opa replaced the beige Mercedes he bought on his retirement with a bordeaux Ford. Ein Automatic. Oma walks up to the bench we're sitting. Short and slightly emaciated - the doctors haven't been able to detect the cause for her sudden weight loss - she speaks in a thick Thuringian accent. Her words are potatoey, muddy the way the yard used to be.

'Wer ist denn da?' she claps her hands at the sight of The Daughter, who runs to hide behind the car bonnet. Oma's sharp, blue eyes sparkle.

'Stop complaining,' she hisses at her husband. 'You had it good,'

Opa rubs his magpie nose and gets up, stretching his back. His blue workcoat swells up with his belly.



PS. This post ended up a bit of a ramble. I'm not trying to make a deliberate point here. I basically had a nice and close conversation with The Daughter's great-grandfather today. That's all.

Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Nope.

Nothing to blog about. And I am not going to either until something takes my fancy.

Although, meanwhile, the great news around this neck of the woods is that this blog is exactly one year old tomorrow.

Like, who gives a fuck?

But according to Wikio (you know: wikio) this blog has crept up to number 670 on their rankings.

Yes. I know.

Here's a song instead:

Something against the monotony.

Via.

Unreal #2

Talking of the unreal, infinite thought references The Waste Land and religious imagery mesmerisingly in her latest post. Run softly Thames, indeed.

Unreal

How does the real get into the made-up?
Ask me an easier one.

Writes Seamus Heaney in Known World from his collection Electric Light. Via Deutschlandradio Kultur I learn that the Belgian film Ben X actually attempts to answer that question. Mixing the real-life experiences of the autistic 16-year-old Ben with his video-game fantasy world the film - as the German reviews so far indicate - successfully shows how thin this line between the real and the unreal can be.

The film [wiki] is launched this week in Germany. The trailer certainly looks fascinating: chilling and heart-rending.



Conclusion: Saw it last Thursday evening. It was certainly worth the €7.50 and 90 minutes of my time. Unfortunately there is no way to talk about this film without giving away the plot. But let it be said that this is a rare, sensitive and intelligent film that - in my eyes at least - handles the social commentary within it with a deft and light touch.

Sunny times

The weather is just lovely, isn't it? It calls for some more zoo pictures (hey, I am going to milk these zoo visits for all they are worth until The Daughter decides she is a grown up and the zoo is naff):

These birds are penguins.

This, according to Dr Wood, is a pelican. Here the pelican is trying to nick the fish from the seals. Pelicans are rather shifty birds.

These are elephants in a post-Apocalyptic urban setting. They are just elephing around.

This a tiger. They lie a lot. When they are not lying they walk around in circles a lot.

Now be off with you outside. The sun is shining, Spring is here. Why you still reading?

"That's just the way the world works."

Depopulation.

A while back Ashok linked to a post here about East Germany's shrinking population. For those further interested in Germany's negative population growth there is a decent English Spiegel article that sums up the problem and the current policy solutions relatively well.

That's all I have time and energy for this evening, but feel free to pick up on points in the article or in the debate. I will be off tomorrow to one of East Germany's more blighted areas to teach English at a drainpipe factory: it is essentially the last remnant of a plant that used to employ thousands in the GDR and now has a mere 60 employees. But having been bought by an international company recently it is growing again.