Rimini

Richie looks through some construction mesh

Cheers aren’t what you get in an Ulrich Seidl movie but let’s give one anyway for his return to fiction after a ten-year absence, with Rimini, a glisteningly dark, drily amusing character study of a man who’d be funny if he wasn’t so pitiful. Actually, he’s quite funny too. Looking not a million miles away from Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, and sharing a few of his character traits, Michael Thomas plays Richie Bravo, a former pop singer in Austria who now lives in Rimini, where a shadowy vestige of his old life still plays out, albeit largely in Richie’s head. As Seidl’s film opens Richie is back home in Austria and re-connecting … Read more

Import/Export

Party hats on for the finale of Import/Export

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 February Maastricht Treaty signed, 1992 On this day in 1992, the Treaty on European Union, aka the Maastricht Treaty, was signed by members of the European Community, in Maastricht, Netherlands. Its purpose, as its name suggests, was to create a union of Europe. It proposed and established three pillars of the Treaty –the European Community, a common foreign and security policy and a similar arrangement for justice and home affairs. In effect it formalised arrangements that had already existed, but it also extended them – the European Community was the continuation of the European Economic Community, with the “Economic” being … Read more